Series: Notes for New Therapists — Part 2
A beginning therapist recently asked, essentially:
How do I stop being a coping-skills-and-psychoeducation kind of clinician? How do I stop being basic?
First, there's nothing wrong with sharing effective tools.
There's nothing wrong with psychoeducation either.
Clients sometimes need to understand what is happening to them. Sometimes they need something concrete they can do at three AM when they're overwhelmed.
The problem isn't having those tools.
The problem is when the tools become the therapy.
Early clinical work can feel remarkably procedural.
Assess.
Validate.
Teach.
Practice a skill.
Assign something to try during the week.
Repeat.
Part of this is inevitable. You're learning an extraordinarily complex profession, and complexity has to be broken into manageable pieces before it can be integrated.
It's a little like learning to cook.
At first, you follow the recipe.
Eventually, if you become a good cook, something changes.
You still know the recipe. You still understand why ingredients behave the way they do. You don't become less knowledgeable or less precise.
But you're no longer standing over the stove checking the instructions every thirty seconds.
You've begun to understand cooking.
Therapy develops this way too.
A therapeutic model shouldn't remain something you occasionally pull from a mental filing cabinet.
Client has anxiety. What intervention does my model say to use for anxiety?
That's useful while you're learning.
But eventually, a model can become something much richer: a coherent way of understanding human beings, suffering, relationships, and change.
What does your model believe people are?
How does it understand symptoms?
What creates change?
What role does relationship play?
What does health look like?
What does it believe about emotion? Thought? Behavior? The body? Development? Family? Culture? Meaning?
And where do you agree with it?
Where don't you?
Those questions matter.
The goal isn't to become a perfect representative of somebody else's theory.
It's to understand your model deeply enough that you can begin thinking with it.
This doesn't mean making therapy about you.
It means that you are one of the instruments through which therapy occurs.
Your attention matters.
Your curiosity matters.
Your capacity to tolerate uncertainty matters.
Your ability to recognize your own reactions matters.
Your humor may matter.
Your willingness to be affected by another human being—and remain grounded while that happens—matters.
Psychotherapy research has repeatedly found that therapists themselves account for some of the differences in psychotherapy outcomes.
That's worth taking seriously.
You aren't simply the delivery mechanism for an intervention.
So preparation for a session isn't only:
What skill could I teach?
It might also include:
What am I noticing about this person?
What happens between us?
Where do I become uncertain?
Where am I tempted to work too hard?
What am I avoiding?
What seems alive when this person enters the room?
What does my model help me understand—and what am I still not understanding?
Now you're preparing yourself, not merely preparing material.
There's a predictable danger here.
Once a newer therapist discovers experiential or relational work, ordinary interventions can suddenly seem embarrassingly unsophisticated.
Don't do that either.
Sometimes excellent therapy includes saying:
“Would it help if I explained what's happening here?”
Sometimes a breathing technique is exactly what somebody needs.
Sometimes behavioral activation changes a life.
Sometimes a client needs information.
Depth isn't determined by how mysterious the intervention sounds.
A sophisticated therapist can use a very simple intervention because it fits the client, the moment, and the larger therapy.
A less developed therapist can use an extraordinarily sophisticated intervention because they want to feel sophisticated.
The client can usually feel the difference.
Virginia Satir's work profoundly influences how I understand therapy.
But the goal of studying Satir isn't to become Virginia Satir.
That job is taken.
The same is true whether you're studying psychodynamic therapy, ACT, EFT, DBT, DBR, CBT, IFS, existential therapy, or something else entirely.
Study excellent clinicians.
Watch them.
Read them.
Train with them when you can.
Understand why they do what they do.
Then notice what happens when those ideas encounter you.
Your temperament.
Your experiences.
Your limitations.
Your values.
Your clinical population.
Your way of forming relationships.
Your way of noticing.
Over time, good training becomes less visible because it has been metabolized.
The model hasn't disappeared.
It has become part of how you practice.
There's a reality worth naming for newer therapists.
As you develop a stronger clinical identity, you may sometimes experience friction with supervisors, managers, agencies, or systems.
An organization may have a preferred model.
A supervisor may conceptualize a client differently.
Productivity requirements may influence what is possible.
Documentation requirements may reward interventions that are easy to name.
A manager may want greater standardization than you eventually find clinically useful.
That doesn't automatically mean they're wrong.
And it certainly doesn't mean every disagreement is evidence that you've become an enlightened therapist trapped inside a backward institution.
Sometimes your supervisor sees something you don't.
Sometimes the requirement exists for a very good reason.
Sometimes you're simply inexperienced.
But sometimes development creates friction.
Learning how to think clinically while remaining open to correction is part of becoming a professional.
Early supervision often contains a lot of:
“What do I do?”
That's appropriate.
You need answers.
But over time, try bringing different questions.
“Here's what I think is happening. What am I missing?”
“I noticed I became unusually directive with this client.”
“I understand why the manual recommends this intervention, but something about the timing feels wrong.”
“I keep losing contact with this client when we get here.”
“I think I'm working harder than they are.”
Now supervision isn't merely supplying interventions.
It's helping you develop clinical judgment.
That development matters because years of experience alone do not necessarily make therapists more effective.
Simply accumulating sessions isn't the same thing as becoming more skillful.
Something else happens when you stop thinking of yourself primarily as a provider of generic therapy.
You begin to discover:
These are the people I work especially well with.
This is the kind of work that interests me.
These are the questions I can't stop thinking about.
This is where I want more training.
This is the environment in which I do my best work.
Those discoveries influence the next training you choose.
The supervisors you seek.
The jobs you accept.
The jobs you leave.
Perhaps eventually the practice you build.
Your clinical development and your career development aren't separate processes.
You're gradually discovering what kind of therapist you are becoming.
There is no prize for having the most elaborate conceptualization in the room.
And clients don't need you to perform sophistication.
They need you to become increasingly capable of understanding them as whole human beings.
So keep the coping skills.
Keep the psychoeducation.
Keep learning techniques.
But place them inside something larger.
Develop a model deeply enough that it organizes your thinking without imprisoning it.
Bring yourself—not your personal needs, but your attention, humanity, judgment, curiosity, and developing clinical self—into the work.
And give yourself time.
You're not trying to stop being basic.
You're becoming integrated.
Part 1: How Do I Evoke Emotional Processing in a Therapy Session?
Part 2: How Do I Stop Being a “Coping Skills and Psychoeducation” Therapist?
Anne Lindyberg, LMHC (Iowa), LCPC (Illinois), integrates the transformational therapy of Virginia Satir with Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) and the Alexander Technique. She specializes in helping adults with complex and developmental trauma create lasting emotional change through therapy.
This work is created on the traditional and unceded lands of Indigenous peoples; a fuller acknowledgment of the land, its history, and its peoples is available on this website.
Norcross, J. C., & Wampold, B. E. (Eds.). (2024). APA handbook of psychotherapy: Theory, research, and practice. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/apa-handbook-psychotherapy
Goldberg, S. B., Rousmaniere, T., Miller, S. D., Whipple, J., Nielsen, S. L., Hoyt, W. T., & Wampold, B. E. (2016). Do psychotherapists improve with time and experience? A longitudinal analysis of outcomes in a clinical setting. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 63(1), 1–11. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26751152/
This article is intended to support professional reflection and learning. It does not constitute clinical supervision, formal training, or individualized professional guidance. Clinicians remain responsible for practicing within their competence, scope of practice, and applicable professional and licensing requirements.
This article and other informational content on this website are provided for educational purposes only. They are not a substitute for individualized professional care, do not constitute advice specific to your circumstances, and do not establish a therapist-client relationship.
Midwest Center for Transformational Change PLC