The unanalysed therapist

Being in personal therapy is an important pillar of being a good psychotherapist. Psychotherapists registered with the UKCP and BPC, or attached to credible training institutes, are required to be in personal therapy with a senior professional for the duration of their training. Face to face, once weekly, at a minimum, for at least four years. Some institutes require students to be in personal therapy for at least a year before they even join. But unfortunately, many stop their therapy once that requirement is met, and in my view, at great professional and personal cost.

The work we do is supposed to go deep. Psychotherapy, as I understand it, means change at the structural level of the personality. I don’t think everyone grasps that. People do their training, stop their own personal work, and then can’t offer clients what they actually came for. Change at the root, so patterns don’t keep repeating.

Not everyone is cut out to work at depth. Some will meet their limits and leave training, or complete it and find a different route, or complete it and offer something closer to emotional support or counselling rather than psychotherapy. Whilst it serves some people, the truth is that it is limited. Not every client wants depth work or is ready for it. But in my experience of nearly twenty years, many come hungry for something more than emotional support. For those people, we have to be ready. After all, we can only take people to where we have been ourselves.

Why therapists stop

Now, I can understand why therapists stop their own work when training ends. Psychotherapy training is long, demanding, and expensive. There can be a real exhaustion after years of living and breathing psychotherapy, often alongside an already busy and demanding life. Some have genuinely struggled to find the right person to work with. Some are in real financial difficulty. These are genuine concerns, but ones which also need to be overcome.

I have heard colleagues say therapy is something they dip in and out of. That they don’t feel the need. That training was enough. That they haven’t found anyone good enough to work with. That they don’t have the money right now. On the question of finding the right person, I also get that. What’s on offer out there can be mediocre, and finding someone who genuinely works at depth, who really gets it, takes time and effort and sometimes a lot of false starts. This is also how many of our clients feel, by the way. But it is also a reason to keep looking. Sometimes “not finding the right person” is simply a sophisticated defence against facing oneself.

Most, if not all, therapists enter this profession with deep emotional wounds and with the unconscious hope that helping others will help to heal them. This hope is, at best, naive and, at worst, dangerous. Offering therapy makes us accountable to those we help. Beyond CPD and supervision, this also means to keep working on our personal stuff – we have a responsibility to do this.

What depth work actually requires

Depth work takes time, will, emotional resource, and financial resource. Psychotherapists working in this field should have all four. If we don’t, there is a problem. We can’t ask clients to make this commitment, if we are not prepared to do it ourselves.

Having been in personal therapy for most of my career, I cannot imagine doing this work without it. If you haven’t done the work, and the work is never done, especially not for us, then you can’t offer it either. If you have not been in psychotherapy or analysis long enough to understand your unconscious patterns at depth – your repetition compulsions, your shadows, the uncomfortable feelings you run away from, the ways you harm yourself emotionally, the ways you hold yourself back, what keeps you in your family system, your depression, aggression, envy and rage, your innermost desires – then how are you asking clients to go there?

Your clients already know

The question I would leave with any colleague who has stopped their own work is not whether you have the time or money right now. It’s whether you and your clients are hitting a ceiling. Whether the work keeps getting stuck at the same place. Whether there are feelings in the room you find uncomfortable and therefore avoid. Supervision is helpful to a point, but not enough because you bring yourself to this work, and your supervisor isn’t your therapist.

They know, even when they don’t know they know. To psychotherapists, I say this. Stop working on yourselves after training at your own peril, but also at the peril of your clients. Because once they have felt your limitations, they will hopefully move on to someone else. Or sadly, they will stay stuck. Just as you are.