Therapist Spotlight: Tempering Your Enthusiasm as a Young Therapist with Kevan Walker
This Therapist Spotlight is a part of our interview series with experienced Mental Health Practitioners, where therapists share their experiences in Private Practice Therapy.
“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know where it will end”
(Interview, 25 Oct 1982).
Most states in the U.S. require that you start out in an agency setting where there’s guaranteed supervision of the green therapist, but that same agency setting has been indoctrinated often in the great panopticon of mental health & can easily put the light out in our eyes. My advice would be to keep that youthful vision, but also to be aware that the Culture of Money, the Culture of Hubris, the Culture of Insurance, the Culture of the DSM, & others, are all influencing the thinking & doing in an agency. From individual to organization, all have limited agency & possible responses to such cultural influences, which for me, after a time, also fostered compassion for some that I saw making questionable ethical decisions.You will have to temper your enthusiasm for activism, with wisdom well-earned over time. Attempt change where you can, be tactful, but stand your ground in behalf of the people you consult with. As I said earlier, have compassion for those who may hold a position of authority over you, & may use their power to keep you in line through threats of termination or other censure to keep you walking the party line- if you look closely, you’ll find admirable things about them that contradict the story of abuse of power, which if cultivated in your conversations, might influence their decisions to keep truer to their better selves.If by through your efforts as a change agent you find yourself more in despair & the light going out in your eyes, start looking for options in private practice or better yet a group practice with like-minded & like-hearted therapists. As you exit the agency towards a higher calling, look back on what went well in that first experience. Your recognition of supervisors & others who did some good, but found their homage to the “gods of this is the way it’s always been” to strong, will go a long way as you say your sweet-sour goodbyes in favor of your preferred way of being professionally.
For me this comes down to two hallmarks in both large & small organizations in the U.S., as a heritage of the mental health culture: Hubris & Pathologizing. This was best pointed out by a teenage friend of mine that remarked of his long relationship with mental health organizations that “they trade kids like trading cards”, & further saying “I’d rather see the baseball bat coming”. Having spent many years in varying tiers of the house of mental health I’ve felt the invitations & even well played along with in hierarchy above those we’ve termed as “clients”, “consumers”, or “patients”. Being invited to be an “expert” in position over people seeking our services can be intoxicating & feed the hubris; again, this I can attest to from personal experience.
From my experience within the position of expert, I’ve seen folks in & outside that culture pathologized when they fit criteria in the Bible of this culture, the DSM. I’ve also seen people equally pathologized for questioning the culture. This Pathologizing as far as I can tell, acts in service to the mental health hubris, the adage “if you are less, I am more” seeming to hold sway.
One way in which I’ve actively opposed the hubris & Pathologizing, & encouraged co-expertise in relationship with the folks I work with, has been through the use of documentation. I noticed early on in my career, long before becoming a therapist how documentation was used as a means of perpetuating the practices of hubris & pathologizing. After years of reviewing assessments, treatment plans, professional notes, discharge summaries, court documents, & the like, I was introduced to the Narrative tradition of critiquing such paperwork & writing counter-documents. Narrative practitioner Steven Madsen aptly summarized such practices by asking “who has the storytelling rights to the story being told?” (Vancouver Narrative Training, 2011).
Increasingly I’ve authored & co-authored counter-documents to assist in dissolving iatrogenic practices & enliven the expertise of people I consult with. Most often this comes in the form of the process notes I keep. I start from the first session by asking the person or persons permission to take notes, painting myself as a Therapeutic Biographer, who takes their words down & not my own interpretation, & together we as Co-investigators “warning the [problem]: ‘Put on your nut-cup, we’re going to ask some tough questions!’ ” (Reporter David Carr, NPR interview). I then inform them that at any time they can tell me to “hand it over”, as it’s their property rightly, & I’ll do so. I will at the end of the sessions hand off the said notes to the rightful owner to keep & continue. I also treasure the position of persons through Narrative Letter-Writing, wherein I summarize our conversations from my position as guest, forward some points I find admirable in my opinion, & pose some questions that, as narrative poet David Epston puts it, “takes both the person asking the question & the person being asking the question just beyond were the busses run” (original time & place unknown, but confirmed to me personally by David).
These and other collaborative practices, I’ve found, equalizes the balance of power & turns on all the lights in the panopticon, Reversing the Gaze.
The MFT program at ANE has a Social Justice focus, with very small class sizes (10 in my cohort), & starts students in the second semester in internships to get real-world experience. Probably the two hallmarks of my experience that I’ve brought forward into my relational practice were In-Home Therapy & Narrative Therapy. My internship, which lasted virtually both years, was out of a county-run in-home therapy program. Through it I gained valuable insight with the people who sought services. I also took a Postmodern Therapies course as part of the curriculum, of which most was in Narrative Therapy. That introduction to Narrative practice by my continued friend & mentor Ken Potter, was like coming home again. I’ve continued to immerse myself more & more over the years in Narrative practice, using that as my GPS while tweaking some of the modernist tools I’ve collected along the way.
My private practice, Golden Heart Family Therapy LLC (GHFT), is unique in three distinct ways: 1) it is foremost Brief-Narrative in practice, 2) it’s in the client’s home, & 3) it’s insurance-free. As mentioned already I consider myself a Narrative Therapist, & I’ve detailed already some of the ways I practice that, but over time I’ve seen practitioners of the Narrative & other traditions find that change can happen in a very short time. I limit our sessions to 10 & more often I notice that people feel they don’t need that many. I eventually look to start a day of the week where I only see walk-in clients. I really loved the experience of seeing folks in their homes, I find people enjoy the convenience, & I just can’t afford the overhead of renting office space at Fairbanks prices right now. I meet with people in the evenings in their homes after my full-time job as a subcontracting counselor with the military, as well as in outlying communities like Delta Junction, Salcha, Nenana, & Denali on Saturdays. Lastly, with all the recent revelations with the NSA’s big brother tactics, along with a number of year’s dealings with insurance sticking its nose into folks’ treatment, I decided to start out insurance-free in my practice. About ¼ pay out of pocket (some getting reimbursed later by their insurance) & the rest come through Fast Offering Funds of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS Church) to which I belong, as well as most of my clients. All these practices have been much more confidential than previous dealings.
As mentioned I deal with a lot of LDS people & being one of that crowd I tend to at least understand the culture & speak the language. I deal with couples more often than not & am really enjoying it. I’m a certified facilitator with the Prepare/ Enrich program for engaged couples, as well as healthy couples that want to enrich their marriage- this fits well with my focus on Brief Therapy. I’ve also over the years, due to my family heritage, as well as by circumstance, worked with a lot of teens, & therefore become very interested in what our profession terms oppositional-defiant behavior. I knew as a lover of the Narrative arts, that there had to be another side, & there was. The result is a growing project I’ve called with others Dignified Defiance. I’m also enamored with bullying & intimidation from the work of Marie Nathalie-Beaudoin & Jodee Blanco. Lastly, I’m looking into Narrative Mediation & in the near future want to market that through GHFT.
If you’re interested in learning more about GHFT & what folks & I explore together, check out one (or all) of the resources below:
www.goldenheartfamilytherapy.com
narrativewalker.blogspot.com (my blog/ vlog The Thick of Thin Things)
Facebook page- Golden Heart Family Therapy LLC
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