Why Consultation:

So much about the work of therapy is unusual. Therapists work by themselves, in intense situations and relationships, with people who are struggling inside of themselves in ways they do and don’t understand. The work is demanding and requires a lot of support to sustain, and to develop competency. It takes many years to feel reasonably well-equipped for most therapists, and those years include countless hours of trainings, supervision, and consultation. Once there is competency with skills, then comes the unfolding of the therapist in the challenge of unwinding personal patterns that prevent deepening of the work.

Within all of those years, something that happens for many therapists is oscillating waves of burnout and serious review of career path. The seeds of this kind of painful discontent are planted early in life, often as the experience of the parentified child. The child the therapist was learned to feel emotionally responsible for the adults in the room; for survival, psychological balance in the home, to co-regulate, and to manage inconsistencies in care. Fast forward to adulthood, and this child is now a therapist, struggling with overwhelm and burnout. There aren’t enough trainings in the world that can ever address this problem. The roots are much deeper.

Other issues that therapists sometimes don’t realize are related to enactments and can be transformed in consultation are feelings of boredom, stuckness, avoiding sessions, boundary problems with clients, resenting clients, disproportionate reactions to clients, issues of disclosure, and reluctance in participating in the therapy relationship.

The kind of consultation I offer includes more standard kinds of consultation (skills, case consultation, etc from a cognitive point of view) and exploring these deeper issues from a somatic framework. I use somatic tools to work with specific experiences of enactment the therapist experiences in session. This kind of exploration, resourcing, and support can profoundly transform your experience as a therapist and human, and greatly reduce the chances of burnout.