It’s something of a cliché that being a therapist comes with the obligation to do your own work. 

And it happens to be a cliché I agree with. And if you’re listening to this podcast, I’m guessing you do too.

But what happens when the institutions and systems that train us, employ us, and regulate us act as barriers to actually doing that self-work?

Today I’m talking with psychotherapist and certified leadership coach, Rebecca Ching. In addition to therapy and coaching, Rebecca also has extensive experience with supervision, teaching, and advocacy in the mental health field and we’re going to dig into dysfunctional mental health workplace culture, how we got here, and why it’s so hard to change it.

Rebecca Ching is a psychotherapist, leadership developer, writer, speaker, and host of The Unburdened Leader podcast, where she goes deep with leaders on how the burdens they carry inspire their life’s work, how they still threaten to take them out, and how they rise from them.

Unburdened Leadership™ is the work Rebecca has honed to take leaders and entrepreneurs through so that they can have greater impact and legacy.

She is also the CEO and founder of Potentia Family Therapy, Inc. and is a Certified Daring Way™ Facilitator and Consultant and Certified Internal Family Systems Therapist and IFS Approved Supervisor.
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Rebecca also leads, Rebecca Ching Leadership Coaching and Consulting, and is where she develops leaders through coaching and workshop experiences.

• How grad school, licensure requirements, and low wages pave the way for early-career burnout 
• ​Why the professional culture of mental health needs to acknowledge the wounds that lead people into the field
• How the current educational and licensing systems create barriers to clinicians without financial privilege
• Why the emphasis on efficiency from leadership, funders, and the culture leads to therapists who can’t or won’t do self work

• RebeccaChing.com
  
• The Unburdened Leader
  
• Instagram: @rebeccachingmft
  
• Facebook: @rebeccachingmft

• Instagram

The “good therapist” isn't necessarily the type of therapist you want to be.

It's not the most actualized version of you as a therapist. It's not even necessarily a particularly effective therapist.

The good therapist is about being seen as good and about being able to reassure ourselves that we are good when maybe we don't feel so sure.

Maybe we bump up against the specter of the good therapist when we have difficult clients and we genuinely feel at a loss for what to do.

Maybe it's when we have something heavy going on in our personal lives and find our minds repeatedly drifting away from a client in session and back to our own problem of the week, because a good therapist wouldn't do that.

Maybe the good therapist peeks through the office window judging us when we go against established norms, like when we use self-disclosure more than other therapists might think we should, or talk more in session than we think we're supposed to, or whatever else gives us the sense that we're stepping outside of bounds.

And the specter of the good therapist has definitely been much more activated for almost all of us during the past two years of the pandemic.

The pandemic has made the gap between who we believe we should be as therapists and who we actually are much, much harder to bridge.

• How the good therapist archetype creates dishonesty in the name of professionalism
  
• Why therapists aren’t any more equipped than most people to address collective trauma
  
• Why we need to think beyond the good therapist archetype to meet the increasing uncertainty of the future
  

• Instagram

If you’re a therapist, even if you’re far from your practicum days, you can probably relate to the feeling of sitting in a session and being distracted by the thought of whether you’re living up to the standard of a good therapist.

And you’ve probably had a moment where you’re sitting with a client or group and you heard something come out of your mouth and immediately thought, “That doesn’t sound like something a good therapist would say.”

Who is this mythical good therapist? What are their qualities and where do those ideas come from? When you think about that archetypal good therapist that you compare yourself to, is that therapist a blank slate?

Does a good therapist take all the most challenging cases? Do they self-disclose? Do they diagnose and write treatment plans? Are they a quiet introvert? Do they have it all together?

Nancy Jane Smith and I are talking through some of these questions today and how uncomfortable it can be when we sense we’re going out of the “good therapist” box.
Nancy Jane Smith, MSEd., LPC is a Licensed Professional Counselor trainer, and author specializing in high-functioning anxiety. Nancy completed her postgraduate training in Gestalt Therapy at the Gestalt Institute of Central Ohio and is a Certified Daring Way™ Facilitator, based on the research of Dr. Brené Brown.

She has over 20 years of working as a counselor and coach and most recently created Self Loyalty Schoo,l an audio-based program to help quiet high-functioning anxiety.

Nancy has written 3 books with tips, lessons, and stories on reducing anxiety, most recently, The Happier Approach: Be Kind to Yourself, Feel Happier and Still Accomplish Your Goals.

​Listen to the full episode to hear:

• Why Nancy struggled to feel like a legit therapist
• How norms around self-disclosure are shifting and why Nancy is open about her own anxiety
• How different therapist subcultures influence the image of the good therapist and create new pressures
• Why Nancy regrets being too passive with early clients and why some therapists don’t talk enough
• Why the good therapist isn’t an effective therapist

​Learn more about Nancy Jane Smith:

• NancyJaneSmith.com
• The Happier Approach: Be Kind to Yourself, Feel Happier, and Still Accomplish Your Goals

Learn more about Riva Stoudt:

• Instagram

I got the idea for this podcast in late 2019.

I had been in the field for several years at that point. Long enough to work through the first wave of impostor syndrome, experience my first episode of burnout, bounce back from burnout, get high on the grandiosity when I realized I really was helping people and changing their lives, go through the second wave of impostor syndrome when I realized there were some people I really WASN’T helping, and then settle somewhere relatively comfortable between confidence and humility.

When you’ve been in a field for a while, you start to get a sense of its parameters–the things you’re allowed to say, and allowed to think, the things regarded as self-evident truths that are off-limits for questioning.

And if you’re like me, after a while, you start to feel really constricted. Because outside those parameters a lot of things are happening, but aren’t being talked about, and there are unallowable ideas and perspectives that might contain pieces of the truth.

Truths that, if we confronted them, might actually make our work better.

​Listen to the full episode to hear:

• The first time I said something a therapist can’t say
• Why therapists aren’t supposed to admit that they have unmet needs–or that their clients might meet some of them
• Why breaking down clichés and archetypes of the good therapist needs more nuance than Instagram can handle
• What’s coming up on the podcast

​Learn more about Riva Stoudt:

• ​Instagram

But there’s some other stuff isn’t there?

Probably no one told you that you might join a Facebook group for therapists and be blindsided by a gaggle of other clinicians calling you unethical in response to what you thought was an innocuous question.

You might not have expected how much you’d chafe at the same old clichés being trotted out at trainings and supervision groups and on beautifully designed squares on your Instagram feed, finding yourself wondering, am I the only one who thinks everyone might not be doing their best all the time?

And while you might have been warned against burnout and been told to stave it off with self care, you weren’t prepared for the moral injury that awaited you when you entered the mental health profession, and how no amount of meditation or strolls in the woods could erase its impact.

For a field that prides itself on helping people talk about things that nobody else talks about, there are a lot of things we don’t talk about. Things that don’t fit with the image of the good therapist that lives in our heads or in the heads of other therapists.

Well, I’m Riva Stout and I’m ready to talk about them.

On my podcast, A Therapist Can’t Say That, we’re going to be getting real about what it’s like to do this job.
We’re going to unpack the clichés you’ve assumed every other therapist believes, and speak out loud the thoughts you’ve thought no other therapist has had.

We’re going to let it get messy, complicated, and uncomfortable. And we’re going to say it’s okay for therapists to disagree, even in public, without immediately accusing each other of being unethical.

Subscribe to A Therapist Can’t Say That on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And be sure to share the show with a therapist friend you know is thinking about this stuff too.

We’re always asking our clients to get our of their comfort zones. Come get out of yours and get real with me on A Therapist Can’t Say That.

Learn more about Riva Stoudt:

• Into the Woods Counseling