TRANSCRIPT FOR EDGE OF THE COUCH
Episode: When you disagree with your school
Alison:
This podcast is not training or supervision. This is an invitation to delve into these really big topics. When we are talking about clients, please know it is not you. It is a weaving together of stories that come up over and over again.
Jordan:
With Edge of the couch, we are here to create a space to delve into the topics that were either shied away from or dismissed because they were too big, too nuanced, too risky, or too uncomfortable to discuss in school or even supervision. We are two passionate therapists sharing our personal opinions about the therapeutic process.
Jordan:
Hey everyone. Welcome back to Edge of the couch. I'm Jordan Pickell.
Alison:
and I'm Alison McCleary.
Jordan:
and today we're going to talk about when you disagree with your school. I think that we're unique in some ways, at least in our program, in that we had quite a few critiques. Maybe I'm doing the whole we're cool therapists. We're not like normal therapists thing.
Alison:
We're different.
Jordan:
And maybe that everyone who goes through graduate school has critiques. If you're listening to this, you probably have critiques.
Alison:
What were the places where you felt the need to kind of push back or at least go, wow, I really don't agree with this? I'm not okay with this?
Jordan:
You want to go through a list? Should I go through a list?
Alison:
Yes, sure.
Jordan:
Well, okay. The idea of CBT as the ultimate end- all- be- all- you- need- to- know- what- you- need- to- use- it. I do think it's a really important thing, knowing the history of psychotherapy, but the idea that it has to be a base in your work, to me, is just so interesting how that was seen as essential, but then trauma-informed understanding is not seen as essential.
Alison:
Totally.
Jordan:
So that is, I think still reigning in a lot of programs that CBT, in fact, I've talked to a few colleagues who went to different schools who said that in order to pass your comprehensive exam, which I guess was for us too CBT is one of the only things that they're taught.
Alison:
Yes, at the doctoral level, we learn more. I mean, I've been introduced to DBT and psychodynamic and more comprehensive understanding of humanistic existential, but you do have to, for your qualifying exam, pick an evidence-based approach.
Jordan:
And maybe we need a whole episode unpacking what "evidence-based" even means in the eyes of a lot of schools. CBT is, and the offshoots like DVT are the one and only evidence-based. EMDR also has lots of "evidence", but you also weren't taught that. So it's really just CBT is the one that was taught.
Alison:
From her interview, the interview with Chloe Powell, she said a really great thing. She said, CBT is the gold standard, but it's not my gold standard. Yes. That's how I feel. I like CBT stuff. I use it from time to time and it's infused into my work, but the idea that it is the best therapy is just one that I can't get behind.
Jordan:
Yes. Some of the other things, if I'm going through my list that came up over and over again is objectification of clients. The idea that clients are different. They're a different population than the people that are in the room that we can talk about mental health and or mental illness in that they are those people and just the way that it was talked about and the power and privilege and the way that, okay, this is us and this is them. The idea that we're helping people versus working with and alongside people.
Alison:
Yes.
Jordan:
There's also the stereotyping tokenization. Stereotyping, I think was the biggest piece. There was also racial and cultural erasure, but the stereotyping around, oh, this is how Asian clients work or here's how black, I mean, I think, yes, usually it was talked about around Asian clients and the stereotyping around that and how do we speak back? Do we speak back?
Alison:
Yes. How do we know when to speak up and push back against a professor or a class or a teacher? When do we allow ourselves to let it filter through? I mean, we don't want discrimination to filter through and just not notice, but when I was 23 and in the program, I pushed back a lot and I said, I don't think that's right and so on and the older I've gotten, now that I've been a student for like 900 years, the more I've gotten to a place of just when someone brings up something that I don't agree with, I don't necessarily feel the same desire to have to push back immediately. I can kind of just let it filter in and go like, no that's garbage. I don't agree with that. I just like, let it float by. But when it comes to something like discrimination or not naming race, when it feels like we should, those are harder moments to just go, I'm not going to say anything. So I think what I've really gotten to a lot of the time is I might not always say it to my teachers depending on the situation, but I often try to name it to my cohort to at least say hey, I noticed this thing. How are people feeling about that because that felt really messed up to me, or supervisors, right? I don't agree with what the supervisor is saying. I don't feel that I have the space to tell him that necessarily because he has power over me and so on, but we should talk about it at least. You know, because a lot of my classmates, this is our very first experience with therapy. They don't have the same filter that I have necessarily of saying, well, that's garbage. I don't believe that. Maybe it's not garbage, but I have the clinical experience to say that's not what it's like when you're really with clients.
Jordan:
When you're new to therapy and you're excited to learn, I can imagine being in the classroom and taking in what's coming and taking it as, okay, so this is true. If you're a white student and the white professor is talking about their experiences, working with clients of color and not having those life experiences, taking those things at face value and being like, oh, okay. In general, this is how this group of clients of color show up in the therapy room, which obviously is like a larger piece about doing work around anti-racism. When you name power and privilege, I think that's a big thing we need to talk about. What are the things we name to ourselves only to ourselves? What are the things that we name to our classmates and what are the things that we need to speak back to the professor directly, whether it's in the moment or in an email or in a conversation later? To me, it's key that people who have the power and privilege and wherewithal in the moment to speak back when you're talking about erasure or tokenization, I'm thinking about marginalization of queer families and queer people in general. Being in the dominant group, being able to speak back so that it doesn't put the onus on marginalized people, racialized people and that there is to me, obligation to speak back in situations like that because other classmates may not be aware of it one or that the professor really does need to be corrected in their thinking, or at least is met with some form of resistance because it's not just the people in the classroom. Going forward, they're teaching other classrooms. Maybe they've been teaching this class for years; clients and unfortunately, when I was in school, I remember having to be someone, a student of color speaking to some of these things, looking around to my classmates going, okay, well I guess no one's going to speak to that. For me, having the wherewithal and a certain level of privilege where I felt that it was safe enough to say those thing and just to say right now that there people in the classroom that when the onus is put on students of color, that sometimes it is not safe to actually speak back. Sometimes we just can't. There are other ways that we can resist and that we do resist and that we can honor all of those different ways that we are speaking back even if it isn't directly in the moment.
Alison:
I have that privilege, right? As a white woman, it doesn't feel as risky for me to call out my teachers. I mean, and also just my temperate personality. I am more comfortable with conflict and I'm more comfortable with getting in trouble. I don't care about getting in trouble, but I realize that's a place of privilege to be able to say, I don't care if the teacher's mad at me because my whiteness protects me to some degree in those moments. It's really been something that I've been trying to pull into awareness and be conscious about. I want to name these things if they feel important because my classmates who were people of color, shouldn't have to always be the people who name it.
Jordan:
Yes. There can be a certain level of discouragement, I think, as a student of color, especially when it's just so pervasive. If there's the pervasive idea; I think when it's really obvious forms of racism or stereotyping, it's easy to speak back but when there are certain processes coming, like the way that people talk about certain groups of people or just naming certain groups of people and then not like, oh, clients of color and really not naming whiteness. Those are some of the more subtle things, at least to a lot of people, subtle things that happen that it doesn't feel worth speaking back because there isn't anyone backing you up and going oh yes, this is messed up. Me too. So then it's just, you know what? I'm going to lean back and go, this is how it is and I just have to deal with that because we live in a white supremacist society and it's not like the classroom is the only place that people are experiencing that.
Alison:
Yes. When you look at the lack of diversity across professors, that's a huge issue and continues to be a problem. Although I think the school that we went to is getting much more diverse. It wasn't when we were doing our masters there, certainly. Most of our teachers were white. That's only one lens to learn therapy through. One that's only one.
Jordan:
Yes. Well that to me is one piece that we can be aware of when you are in class, that one you even can internally disagree and think, oh wait, my professors can be wrong. Even though they're talking from their own experiences. Just understanding that, hey, neutrality doesn't exist and so what is the standpoint? What is the standpoint of my professor? My professor is white. What else do I know about their cultural background and what kind of clients they see?
Alison:
And how does that color their work? How does it color their approach? How does it color how they learned about therapy? When I was recently seeking a new supervisor for an upcoming practicum placement and just seeing how many, what were white psychologists and BCR white to start. Then also old. My current supervisor, he has to be in his seventies.
Jordan:
There's a certain level of experience that is really helpful and I imagine that when we're in our sixties, we're going to have so much more experience and have hopefully a depth of understanding. In terms of when they were trained, so much has changed.
Alison:
Exactly! That's what I'm talking about.
Jordan:
For them, it may have even been pre-CBT.
Alison:
Yes. A hundred percent. They were like there for the Dawn of CBT as a new thing. They were probably like this new-fangled, new age stuff. That to them, maybe humanistic counseling is outdated because CBT was like a new thing.
Alison:
Right? I've gone twice. Have you gone twice? The evolution is like a therapy, once? Everybody there that's presenting, they've all known each other since like the seventies. They've all been doing research and it's the same. I mean, it's a great event if you've never gone and you're a new therapist, I really recommend it. It's cool place, but you couldn't get like one person in their thirties to do something like, who's just a little edgier?
Jordan:
It's called the evolution of psychotherapy. So you think it would be about....
Alison:
all the things that have changed in the last four years?
Jordan:
I loved it as a student therapist. I was so excited to see, like we saw the Gottman speak and Sue Johnson and.
Alison:
Irvin Yellows,
Jordan:
yes, Francine Shapiro, Peter Levine, Professor Van Der Kolk who was not nice to me.
Alison:
Oh yeah. I know. Some of them are not nice. "Celebrity Therapists," I'm doing air quotes. These people who've written all these books. Bessel van der Kolk was there at the birth of calling it post-traumatic stress disorder. That's kind of cool.
Jordan:
Four years later, I'm saying, oh, I want to go again. I looked at the slate of what was going to be talked about and who was there and it was almost the same presentation.
Alison
Identical.
Jordan:
Not even just the same people, but they were presenting the same work.
Alison:
Yes, yes they were. I went both times. The thing that was cool about going a second time was I went to all the things that I missed the first time. Things are scheduled at the same time, so you can't go but it was the same people doing the same presentations. Yes. A hundred percent. Give me the evolution...
Jordan:
That our field is moving quickly around neuroscience.
Alison:
Oh my attachment...
Jordan:
trauma...
Alison:
technology. We know so much more.
Jordan:
All of those things, we need trainings around and there are trainings that you can get, but when you're talking about getting supervision from a psychologist in their sixties or seventies; you don't necessarily have a learners mind.
Alison:
If you're a 70 year old man, maybe you also don't have a lot of people around you calling you out, holding you accountable for your words. In private practice, you're supervising students, but you're probably not reaching out to colleagues on a regular basis to say, hey, let's talk about the new things that you're up to. You're just floating on an island, doing your own thing. This is where students can swoop in, to say, maybe somebody should have called you out on this thing like a decade ago when it became inappropriate. The language that you're using or the way that you're talking about clients in this flippant way is so uncomfortable. No one has told you to stop because you're just entitled to all this power for all these different reasons and it's very interesting.
Jordan:
People have a hard time speaking back to someone who has that authority.
Alison:
And they really do. Supervisors have power over what happens to you. We know people who, by pushing back the tiniest bit at sites when we were in a masters class, got kicked out of those sites.
Jordan:
Right!
Alison:
There is actual threat of like, if you don't toe the line, you're out of here, that's scary.
Jordan:
You get to suss out and decide, when can I speak back? How do I speak back? I would encourage if you're a white person, if you're a straight person, if you're a CIS person, and on and on and on to be able to speak to those pieces when you see them happen and that there is a level of discernment that needs to happen about, am I going to get kicked out of school. Unfortunately, that's limiting.
Alison:
There are potential consequences to the system that is maybe going to protect the teacher, over protecting you. How can I know my teacher's an asshole? Know that what they're saying is not fully the truth? Do I have safe people in my world that I can debrief with? Are there safe people at the school I can go to if I can't just call out this person?
Jordan:
I saw this meme the other day. Every graduate program has that one teacher who makes everyone cry, right? And people were laughing. Ha ha.
Alison:
Yes. That's not okay. It was supposed to be light and I'm making it not light in this moment, but how bizarre that we're all just like LOL. My teacher is harassing me and I'm crying. That's so funny, but it is part of this system of universities; systems of higher education.
Jordan:
Yes. So then it's something that we have to be aware of and continue to work with and to seek out diversity if you have the money. To be able to get the information from people who have different standpoints, that isn't just your white man professor or your white woman professor; who doesn't have that new understanding of neuroscience, take trainings and to continuously take trainings.
Alison:
Yes. Sometimes you're in a supervision placement that is teaching you about how you don't want to show up. And that's okay. That can be your takeaways. For example, oh my gosh, when I am an independent therapist or something, this is not how I want to engage with clients; it's not how I want to engage with students.
Jordan:
We also get to resist objectification of clients or this idea that, okay, we have six sessions and we're only going to do CBT. If you can, it is okay to resist those things and say, okay, I'm going to prioritize the relationship. Even though I'm going to do these things that I need to do to meet the requirements of my practicum.
Alison:
checkboxes...
Jordan:
What are the ways in which I can push back so that I feel like I'm in alignment with my own values?
Alison:
Yes and sometimes the pushback is just mental. It's you in your mind saying, I reject that. I'm not going to do that with my client. I don't know. Yes. There's a balance. We want to be open to learning, but we don't want to be open to learning the things that we just know is not right.
Jordan:
Yes and being able to hold those things, even if your professors or your practicum supervisors have different values, being able to discern what are my values? What are theirs, if I can notice? Then that gives us a lens through which we can decide what is in alignment with these values. So it's not oh, whatever; I'm just going to do what feels good and what is easiest and do these things in secret versus I'm resisting these ways in which the systems are pushing against my own values. So that there is some accountability, some rhyme or reason as to why I'm making the decisions that I'm making, especially when we're not being held accountable by our supervisors. So also how are we talking to colleagues? How are we witnessed in some way?
Alison:
Yes.
Jordan:
Because we also can do harm and we might think, oh, here I am, enacting my values but again, we're new therapists or you're a new therapist and you are learning.
Alison:
Yes, you're going to make mistakes too.
Jordan:
One of my values starting out was listening to stories as a value in itself. So I would go too long. I wouldn't interrupt. I would let people go into trauma stories because that was a value that I had. Now having much more experience realizing that, okay, sometimes when people are telling trauma stories, they're reliving it and we do need to end on time because that is a good boundary for them and for me. We need to be able to have the time to do the work. So for me to just let them storytell, it's that sometimes the storytelling is to avoid the actual work. So it's really important that I'm able to interrupt, even though one of my values is collaboration. There's also this power difference and to be aware of that.
Alison:
This is where peers, classmates, your cohort can be huge because if you can't go to your teacher with it because they have whatever going on and they have power over you, you can't go to your supervisor because that person may also have power over you, naming those tricky things to your classmates, like, hey, when our teacher said X, I really didn't agree with it. It made me think so and so, or when our teacher was saying that like all Asian people, blah, blah, blah, which has happened to me, if we can't name it to our teacher in the moment for whatever the reason is, naming it to other people feels really important for us to debrief, but also to say hey, let's share the critical mind here and have an honest conversation about what that's like to hear or to be learning. This may be as infantilizing and I don't mean it to be, but a number of my classmates, are currently in their first therapy experience. Many of them are maybe not getting the supervision that they deserve for XYZ reason. I have this sense of wanting to say, you don't have to believe that - what they just said to you. You don't have to agree with that. You don't have to believe that, which is not necessarily my job to do, but I feel a sense of wanting to say that's not it. I don't know, wanting to save them the heartache of realizing that their teachers were not right about everything and once you're out seeing clients, some of that shit they said, is just garbage.
Jordan:
Hopefully you learn that along the way because I think about our colleagues sometimes that we went to school with, and again, this was only...
Alison:
Seven years ago we graduated, but a lot has changed in seven years.
Jordan:
Yes. Our classmates that went to school at the same time and did not have that trauma-informed understanding at all and are now in the field doing their work and thinking, wow, you never got that. For me, I got it in my practicum. So I worked at a practicum site where I got all this trauma training and then since then going to a bunch of different trainings, but having colleagues that never got that because they didn't get that in their Master's. So we can talk about speaking back and when you don't agree, but I also want to name that this is on the systems to be having curriculums and having professors up to date, meeting the demands of what's happening in the field. I know Mimi in the interview with Mimi Cole talked about how we learned the theories of psychotherapy in the Master's programs, but she's not learning the newer things like DBT, the things that clinicians actually use in the field right now. Yes. Lots of outdated counseling, theoretical orientations. We had to choose our orientation for our qualifying exam. A lot of the classmates end up coming into the field and then discarding it, which is what you have to do to meet the demands of each client. In my opinion, it's helpful to have a value system and to have some theoretical framework, just to be able to conceptualize what's happening.
Alison:
Because not all the programs teach us all the things we should know; that once you are a clinician, it is on you to fill the holes. If you don't know about trauma and a lot of your clients have trauma, you need to do some trainings. You don't have to call yourself a trauma therapist. If that isn't what you do. I'm not a trauma therapist, but my clients have trauma and I've had to go to trainings and learn how to do good work with them. If you aren't doing anti-racism work, that as a whole, you need to be working on. The system has sometimes failed us and the system should change. If the system didn't teach you what you to know, and you are now out being a clinician, it is unfortunately up to you. What are the gaps in my training? Where are the holes of things that I don't know, and to begin to engage in whatever necessary training, whether it's reading books or whatever? There are many different ways to learn that you need to fill those holes.
Jordan:
Yes. To be able to have that group of people around you, that hopefully you have that sense of safety that can call you in and say, maybe you should do training on this. We do consultations quite a bit with each other.
Alison:
It's so helpful.
Jordan:
To have people that you can call, not just in supervision, people you can call that day or the next day and talk things through and then realize, oh, I need to do some more work around this or I haven't even had this conversation with this client or asked these questions because of that gap that you're talking about. I didn't even think to ask that.
Alison:
Yes. I had this experience with you recently. I got fired by a client. I was really upset about it and I had a ton of shame swirling. It would have been very easy for me to not tell anybody that it had happened. I felt all this like, eh, and how important it is to have the people. I had you. I had some other therapists to name it so that I could be held responsible for the parts that were mine. Yes. It is important that we have people not only there to celebrate how great we're doing or not only there to talk about the ethical dilemmas, but also to say, oh, you missed something or you made X, Y Z mistake and that's okay. We all make mistakes, but don't let the shame stop you from sharing. That's where it's really important to know that the people you're talking to are safe and it might not be your supervisor or your teacher, but hopefully it's someone in your cohort, someone that you graduated with, therapists who maybe have similar values to you and can speak to those values when you talk to them.
Jordan:
Talking about it undid shame. As we were talking, I could see it.
Alison:
Exactly. Right.
Jordan:
If you are in the shame about something that happened with a client and you keep it secret, then it just gets into I'm a bad therapist or feeling just burnt out and ineffective and not knowing what to do. After we talked, I could see that the shame was unraveling and there was more action-oriented things like, hey, maybe this is how I could have addressed things differently versus ahh, like the shame spiral of, I'm a bad therapist. That is actually helpful to clients, not just to you, but to clients so that you can think about maybe what you could do differently.
Alison:
Yes. We're all going to make those mistakes.
Jordan:
Yes. Sometimes in schools it's like, as a therapists, we do everything right. Sometimes one of the values that comes up is that we do everything right. I don't know. What do you want to say to close?
Alison:
I want to say to close, I'm speaking a little bit to white students in this moment that if you're noticing things that are problematic around race or class or whatever it is that maybe you're not, it is important that we sometimes take risks and engage our professors or supervisors in those conversations so that it's not put on necessarily all of the students who are people of color, because that's such a burden for them to bear. That's not fair. Well, that comes up for me. I also think if, you know you can't speak something aloud because the risk is too great, speaking to your colleagues and cohort and naming what you thought was problematic about it, engaging that conversation is huge. If you can't do that, lastly, in your own mind, being able to say, I don't agree with this, this doesn't sit right with me. That's a pretty good place to start. You don't have to believe, align with, or soak in everything that our professors say because they're not all knowing.
Jordan:
That alone sometimes feels big - that wait a second, I can have some critique and discernment in this and on the balance that I do have something to learn because I can have a tendency to say, this person is ignorant. Therefore they have nothing to offer and I'm done with them. What can I learn? I don't know it all. I know for me, in my disagreement, in my rebelhood, I could get into...
Alison:
Agitation.
Jordan:
But I know better. On some level there's critiquing in a way that was really grounded and necessary. Then on another hand, sometimes foreclosing on learning because I know best, CBT sucks. I don't want to know anything about it. Just to conclude, I would say, know what your values are, be able to speak to it or understand it, have your critique and be there to learn from not just your professors and understanding their own values and standpoint, but to learn from a diversity of perspectives and people so that we can serve our clients well and to feel good in the work. Otherwise we're going to get burnt out.
Alison:
Yes. That's a great place to end I think. I'm Alison.
Jordan:
and I'm Jordan.
Alison:
and this has been Edge of the couch. See you next time. Thanks for listening. We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at connect@edgeofthecouch.com to tell us what you think, ask the question or let us know what type of episode you'd love to hear. You can even send us a voice note for us to play in a future episode.
Jordan
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Alison
Join us next time at the Edge of the couch.