Frontiers of Psychotherapist Development

At the Bleeding Edge of Development, Reaping Benefit for Our Clients.

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Clinical Supervision / Deliberate Practice / Feedback Informed Treatment / First Principles / Personalised Learning / Reimagining Education in Psychotherapy (REP)

The Clock of Learning Across Disciplines (CLAD)

The Reimagining Education in Psychotherapy (REP) Series, Part 5. In the previous article (REP part 4), I made the case to be playful and tolerance for mediocrity as part of the learning journey. To...

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Personalised Learning / Reimagining Education in Psychotherapy (REP)

Teach the 3 Types of Knowledge and Not Just 1

I propose that in order for us to reimagine education in psychotherapy (REP), these 3 types of knowledge—content, process, and conditional—can serve as a primary conceptual framework.
Competence in content knowledge can create a false confidence of ability. Meanwhile, analogous to a good music not necessarily needing music theory to make good music, it also begs the question if content knowledge needs to serve as a basis for process and conditional knowledge. Perhaps if schools treat these 3 domains ecologically, and not hierarchical; learners might experience the critical interplay early in their higher education.

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Personalised Learning / Podcast / Reimagining Education in Psychotherapy (REP)

Kindling the Flame

There are two different ways to think about how we educate psychotherapists. The first is a banking model. Traditionally, in a banking model, we teach the theory, research, fill it in the learner’s minds, attempting to download and fill the learner’s mind with knowledge, and about 4 years later, we then send them off for practicum and begin the real work.

The second way is a kindling model. In this approach, we flip the banking model on its head, and start with the action, igniting a deep interest while continuously fanning the flame, and then learn to synthesise, join the dots and form new conscious knowledge—after the fact.

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Deliberate Practice / First Sessions / Personalised Learning

4 Lessons from 20 Weeks of Very Bad Therapy

Ben and Carrie got me on their show for one of their episodes. (Listen to Episode 11, regarding the problem with an intake model. More about this in the book, The First Kiss). What they are doing is so underrated. I asked them in passing, “Wouldn’t it be super interesting to hear what you both learned after doing the first 20 episodes, so that we can learn too?”

I was surprised that they took up the invitation.

This is a guest post by Ben Fineman and Caroline Wiita.

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First Sessions / Self-care

9 Distinctions of Burn Out

Despite our sophisticated understanding of various psychological mechanisms that lead to stress, anxiety, and depression in our clients, we have a tendency to conflate the signal for the fire. The alarm bells tell us that something’s burning. Unless it’s a false alarm, the sirens aren’t the problem.
The experience of burnout is symptomatic of a compounded problem. What we need to gain clarity of is what cumulated to the emotional exhaustion.

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Personalised Learning

Think Like an Oak Tree

In an attempt to design safer and more resilient structures, architects and engineers are starting to think like a tree.[1] When hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, only 4 out of 700 trees...