Given that mental health professionals lead lives outside the therapy room, they are not invulnerable to the impact of psychosocial life stressors. In addition, working with distressed patients is a complex and demanding task that requires the service provider’s devoted mental resources. Graduate student trainees in applied psychology programs are arguably prone to even greater […]
Supervision will be introduced to students in many graduate cohorts as an aspect of their training they will both enjoy and endure. Framing it this way inherently leads students to start to question what they want in a supervisor. Some will think of the worst and ponder what it would be like to have a […]
Psychology predoctoral interns face many challenges, as difficult roles and competing expectations may lead to burnout. Edelwich (1980) defined burnout as “a progressive loss of idealism, energy, and purpose by people in the helping professions as a result of the conditions of their work” (p. 14). Common factors contributing to burnout include difficult cases, feeling […]
It was the night before one of my doctoral interviews and the current students of my program had organized a welcome event for us interviewees. Some of the advanced students talked about anxiously awaiting to hear whether they matched for internship the next morning. Doctoral interviews are always scheduled on the same Friday as internship […]
Have you ever seen anyone else doing supervision—except your own? Whenever I am giving a workshop on clinical supervision to psychotherapy supervisors, I ask if any of them have every seen another psychologist supervising a trainee, let along watched a master supervisor doing so. On every occasion, only a few hands go up. Although clinical […]
My first session with a real, live psychotherapy patient[1] was at a university counseling center in New England. I was in my second year of graduate school. My only previous experience that even resembled doing therapy was limited to interviewing my classmates as pretend patients. In those role-plays, everyone was agreeable and talkative. They gave […]
The landscape of higher education is definitely shifting (e.g., higher tuition costs, increase reliance on adjuncts for teaching). Along with these shifts, we have seen the rise and influence of accrediting bodies in the execution of mental health graduate programs. Indeed, there are a number of professions training graduate students to conduct psychotherapy, such as […]
In an era when many in our field are preoccupied with defining the nature of empirically supported psychotherapies (e.g., American Psychological Association, 2006) and empirically supported therapy relationships (e.g., Norcross, 2011), it was only a matter of time until those responsible for training therapists began to ask whether there are yet any empirically supported methods […]
On an unremarkable day, I walked out to the waiting room to meet a new client for an intake session. Right away, I saw that Eileen was pretty much a carbon copy of me. Same height, hair color, eye color, and even body type. During our interview, I realized that beyond our physical similarities, Eileen and […]
In my supervision practice, I work with doctoral students at the beginning of their work as therapists. These students have either had no therapeutic experience or limited experience. As Chessick (1971) indicated, three critical issues often confront therapists in their shift from classroom to clinic: (a) learning to manage anxiety early on during the treatment […]