What I have learned after 10ish years as a therapist

Today it is 11 years exactly since my graduation. It is also 13 years since my first client, nearly 9 years since I started private practice. It is 17 years since I first started my counselling training journey on a skills course. Many marking points and none exactly a decade, and yet the decade vibes are still around for me.

A question that often gets asked more qualified counsellors is what you would tell a recently qualified counsellor. My answer to that is ‘don’t put off private practice if that is the only paid option (the alternative is too often unpaid exploitation) and get a good supervisor’. But beyond that, since our journeys are so personal I don’t often go in for general advice. But what I can do is write a bit about what I have learned in the intervening decade+. Maybe some of it is useful or interesting for others. It is definitely not advice though. Just my experience.

How to advocate for my own way of working without bashing others.

I emerged from my training as some of us do a staunch believer in my approach, and while I still am, I have gotten better at sharing professional space with others who feel very differently. Some people who I have debated with may disagree with how well I do this - I'm not saying I'm never critical of other approaches (or indeed my own) especially around inclusion and harmful dynamics. But I don't need to run down others to value how I practice. I am often to be found advocating for the path less travelled around common therapy questions, but I try to do it in a way that also makes space for others to feel different to me. I am likely to push back on other people making blanket statements about what therapy is or should be, especially if in doing so they are erasing my experience, but the more I have learned about myself, the more I realise that my preferences in therapy are very rooted in my own personality and neurodivergent needs and that other people want and need very different things to me and that is ok. We can both have our own experience without erasing each other’s.

There are some approaches I really dislike…sometimes because I can see how they are harmful to people like me, but sometimes it is just personal preference and not a value judgment. I do appreciate the concept of pluralism in therapy for making more space for clients to need, and counsellors to offer, quite different paths.

I am more connected

I had a long period after I qualified of being quite isolated – ill health, a career break field, lack of any steer on what to do after qualifying, followed by an isolated rural private practice. Those were in hindsight wilderness years. I moved online during the pandemic then moved to a city and now I have as much professonal connection as I want to both online and IRL. There are people I look forward to getting to know better, some have become friends and it's lovely to meet people at conferences and online and build professional connections.

I know my own boundaries better:

I initially wrote I have better boundaries, but that implies hierarchy and in fact what I have discovered through trial an error where my own personal and professional boundaries sit.

Boundaries show up everywhere. With clients, when I was less busy I used to fit people in when they wanted or move things around. Now I still have a very accommodating 24-hour cancellation policy but if I don't have a slot that works I don't put myself out to fit someone in, and I do charge for late cancellations, regardless of the reason.

Another boundary has been not working with any organisations (EAPs, insurance, agencies). Often we find boundaries only after they are crossed – this decision was reached after several poor experiences, the ridiculous amount of unpaid admin some organisations required, the exploitative pay and the realisation that being forced to use other people’s badly designed systems and platforms meant I couldn’t offer the client the level of care I wanted to which made me very stressed.

A lot of my boundaries are with myself – not working on weekends, taking enough holiday to prevent burnout. Saying no to things, a lot of things as it happens - even ones I would like - if my capacity can’t handle it.

I'm really picky about CPD

The field is awash with CPD courses, (continued professional development) from the terrible to the excellent and everything in between. I've done my fair share, and I'm starting to get bored of much of what I see. Many of these are great for the early career therapist just starting out and wanting to get a broad knowledge base about a lot of different things. I certainly wish there has been good ones on neurodiversity when I was newly qualified but once you have done that for a bit it becomes both repetitive and lacking in depth. I wish it was easier to tell what level a course is pitched at before paying for it. I also wish it was easier to tell which ones have not addressed ablism, heteronormativity, transphobia, racism or fatphobia or other harmful biases, or who won’t meet reasonable adjustments.

I tend to go for longer CPDs now as they offer more depth and only ones that have been recommended by people with similar access needs and values to my own. I also realised that if there is a book by the same person, it often covers much more than a day workshop, costs much less and I absorb information better that way.

I'm much more selective about what marketing I do

In the early days, like many newly qualified folk I thought I should do it all. I designed and put up posters. I had a social media account and tried to post regularly. I once got up at 5am to go to a breakfast networking event. I tried public speaking. I did many things I really didn't enjoy. At some point I just stopped. I had a list of 50 things that counsellors do to market themselves and went down it crossing off all the ones I don’t like. I think there were about 6-10 things that I found remotely bearable. I focused on giving a good service and only doing the marketing activities I felt comfortable with - my logic was that now I was working for myself why was I making myself do things I really didn’t like? There are enough downsides to being self-employed without doing that. I like to think I'm good at what I do, but there's also been a degree of luck/timing and being in much needed niche at the right time that has kept me full enough to be able to put down the things I don't enjoy and focus on what I do.

My supervision power dynamic has changed

My current supervisor is younger than me, I don't know by how much I've not asked. When I was less experienced and somewhat isolated in private practice I appreciated having a very experienced, older, somewhat maternal and very supportive supervisor - she felt like a strong and safe pair of hands. That power dynamic was what I needed at the time and on the whole, it was held really well. Now I appreciate the different dynamic of having supervisor from a younger generation. Energy wise it feels much more equal.

I also have a really developed and nuanced ‘inner supervisor’ modelled from all the supervision I have had at this point. They combine the wisdom of all the good supervision, and indeed therapy I have had over the years, which at this point is a lot.

I'm allowing myself to own the skill that comes with experience

It's a cliche in person centred circles that therapist are not experts, but I do actually think we are skilled - perhaps indeed expert - not on the client’s experience but in what we bring to the table - the skill of offering and developing a particular kind of relationship and space for growth with a wide range of people. We are skilled facilitators of others process. I don’t think putting a figure on the time it takes to make someone good at something can be applied universally - we are all so different - but I can compare myself now to when I was first practising and there is a different quality. I am less fearful of getting it wrong (whilst remaining alert to the reality that I still can) and that frees me up to be more congruent, more relaxed. There is an inherent contradiction in the early days of learning especially as a person centred therapist where we are (hopefully) developing congruence but also holding the bits that it is not helpful for the client to know. For example, it is unlikely to the client to know you are nervous, or you worry you don’t know what you are doing. Not having to hold that contradiction nearly as much means I have a lot more processing power. The shadow side of that is that I have to think more about my own professional power as it grows and how to hold that in accordance with my values - with peers, clients, and importantly now with supervisees.

I have had let go of some earlier dreams

Discovering I was autistic and ADHD and going through a life-altering burnout and acquiring a few chronic health conditions post qualification meant seriously changing my ambitions. In addition to client work had seen myself either teaching in the person centred approach and/or running a counselling service but as I learn more about my own limitations and also the demands of those roles and realising how difficult I found it to work within an organisation and still follow my own ethical inclinations I realised that those dreams just had to go. Most workplaces that employ counsellors are also inaccessible to me these days due to my combined access needs. I have a beautifully crafted CV, which I look at wistfully because I really don’t need it for anything anymore. I can’t see myself every being in employment again.

I had dreamed of more academic study, and though that is hopefully still on the cards, even the dreams I do have to be carefully paced. I need big breaks between studying, I can’t study full time and I have to balance it with the combined financial and energy constraints of living as a disabled person in a sole income household. I have to limit the things I do that don’t bring in an income. This can have an impact as those are often the things that are more visible and help build a brand in this field (presenting, writing, going on podcasts, etc). Much as I love the career and having a ‘successful’ private practice, it has been through necessity as much as choice, with most other options not open to me at this point.

I'm starting to deeply consider what else I want to do

Many of us spend a long time focused on building our businesses, earning a living and gaining skills and knowledge, but once that is achieved we often look up and wonder what else is out there. Given all the things I can’t do, or don’t want to it has taken me perhaps longer than many to begin to see what career and future looks like for me in addition to my client work. A lot of the things therapists do these days do not appeal to me. Being really uncomfortable with both public speaking, and didactic forms of interaction rules out a lot - teaching, talks, CPD. I am bad at marketing and dislike hustle culture so social media, memberships and a lot of the brand building stuff just isn’t for me either. My struggles with energy admin and organisation dynamics rule out business expansion or starting CICs, for example. Many things are very stressful, and now with a nervous system that is in many ways allergic to stress, I am very wary of going over capacity.

Given all that it has taken me a long time to see a way forward, and picture how to make it accessible for me. My recent training in supervision reminded me that I can study, under the right conditions and that I do really love writing about therapy. I have long considered further study with a view to doing more qualitative research. I am interested in exploring person centred community and advocating for changes to how we train and work, particularly around inclusivity and challenging old norms. For all the doors that feel closed to me, some very interesting ones are open, and what I can see though now feels rich and exiting. All being well I will report back in another decade-ish on what I find.