One Day In The Life Of A Private Psychotherapist

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

If you want to understand if your work is yours, immerse yourself in it for at least one day. But not abstractly, not idealized, but as concrete as possible, with immersion. And you will understand if this is your business. Today I propose to make a similar immersion in the profession of a psychotherapist. I will clarify right away that this is just one of the possible options for reality, which does not claim to be universal. In general, let's go.

You wake up, do your morning routine of washing, showering, and what-are-you-still-doing, and you start.

Clear skype … Here, as usual, the vinaigrette. In support groups, people can write 400 - 500 messages per night. Plus, there are always some kind of intragroup conflicts, someone's emotions go off scale, someone goes into deaf unconsciousness. The main thing here is to organize the space and assistants. They can be read quickly by paying more attention to those messages that are addressed to you personally. We answer in the style of “fewer clichés and more lively sincere communication”. Then it is important to reply to private messages in private chats. After all, they are trying to ask technical questions, sign up for an initial consultation, edit the schedule. The usual things you need. Yes, it makes sense to repeat this ritual 2-3 times a day. So that chaos would not be born later.

While everyone is sleeping … Morning time is ideal for recording videos. Minimum noise, everyone is asleep and no one distracts. Therefore, we take a specific topic, for example, from ready-made past publications, prepare a microphone, adjust the recording volume and reflect on a given topic. The main thing is to have time to complete the recording itself before everyone wakes up! And then you can cut the tracks, clean up the sound, stitch the tracks together, create a splash screen for the video, upload the video to YouTube, put hashtags, make a description, an end screen saver, tips and share to all social networks.

Paid text consultations … As a rule, those who open them experience severe anxiety, and therefore they often write before the night (or right at night). It is important for such people to answer early in the morning so that this very anxiety does not wind up.

Advertising and others like it … Any psychotherapist in private practice deals with his own advertising. Even if it delegates it to someone. Control remains with oneself. Therefore, it is important to check the work of companies in directorate and google adwords, applications that came from their website, whatsapp, viber sweat. After all, they write (and call) everywhere. Someone is interested in detail, someone is abstract, someone already wants to sign up, while everyone lives in different time zones, they often doubt a lot. The main rule here is not to make a fuss and have an electronic schedule available (so that you can drop a link to it). True, it is also important to keep track of him in a timely manner.

Demo consultation … These consultations clearly show how you think, how you interact with a client, how you work. Therefore, they should be held in order for people to recognize you. Their difficulty lies only in remembering the essence of each client. It is unrealistic to keep this in your head, therefore it makes sense to keep a short resume in electronic form so that it is always at hand.

Publications … This is a good way to talk about yourself, your working methods, your emotional state and your thinking. This is a way to digest your own acquired experience, to structure it. Plus, it is always convenient for those situations when you can give the client a certain material to read without retelling it yourself. The main thing is to take into account the readability, liveliness of publications, the volume of characters, choose a convenient time for reading the publication, make illustrations and the necessary highlights in the text. Well, and timely (or at least regularly) respond to comments.

Personal growth … Nothing turns work into hard labor like monotony. Therefore, it is important during the day (well, or during the period when it is your head that works optimally in terms of biorhythms) to study those materials that allow you to better understand your clients and your own personal growth. Books, videos, articles - something that is better to enter your head right now.

Meetings with clients … It is important to be fully prepared before meetings. Anger, anxiety, doubts and other disappointments are of little help in the work of a psychotherapist. They should not be sent to the devil (otherwise they will fly in like a boomerang), but loading them with clients … is somehow wrong … Here the key is recycling …

One regular visiting day … Let's say that we have today. 1 SHTP (schizotypal disorder), 1 depression with the possibility of suicide, one GAD (generalized anxiety disorder), one PRA (panic disorder and agoraphobia), one neurotic relationship. Normal spread.

We start consultations, accept payment, knock out a check, send it to the mail or skype (if the consultation is online). And we concentrate on the essence. When there are many clients, it is important to remember who has what diagnosis, what symptoms, where we are going, the goal for the current meeting. That is, it is important to keep consistent records, structuring the intricate world of the human psyche as interactively as possible, without losing emotional contact. Well, and, of course, individual characteristics. For example, with STP, it is important to check how the side effects of psychotropic drugs are doing, what phobias and oddities of behavior are pouring into at the moment, how much you can adapt in everyday life. With suicidal thoughts - check the presence and resistance of such thoughts, the level of motivation for life … not to be too cheerful, but rather consistent and engaging. In case of anxiety neuroses, it is important to broadcast the safety of the client's state as consistently as possible and focus on constant change in behavior, and not on immersion in the world of thoughts and hypotheses. In a neurotic relationship, it is important to stimulate solutions that are feasible. And in no case should you fall into attempts to treat the client in a formulaic way. You will lose the individual characteristics of the client and the mind - a functional impasse in solving the task is guaranteed to you.

The control … Yes, at meetings it is also important to control the time so that the client leaves in a state not worse than he came. I once knew a psychologist who said (sort of as a joke, but who knows): "If the client did not experience catharsis and did not burst into tears, then I did not work well." But if you are such an extreme, then it is worth weighing what you are doing with the state in which the client may seem at the end of the meeting.

Between meetings … Yes, clients call during the day. On vatsap, phone. Everything is simple - there is an answering machine. But between meetings with your clients, it's important to answer new callers. After all, persistence and anxiety have not been canceled. We clarify the request (and then suddenly I won't take them), offer a short initial short meeting, or write down (if the client is completely ready and he urgently needs to solve everything yesterday) for an in-person meeting. If the client is on full-time therapy, clarify the free time in the rented center, finally agree on the time with the client. And we float on.

After meeting it makes sense to make notes about your own therapy or supervision if the cases are emotionally difficult and / or difficult. Plus, it's also helpful to jot down ideas for articles and blogs so that later you don't have to reinvent the wheel from scratch.

Floating Schedule … You know, in films about psychotherapists, everything is beautifully scheduled by the hour, and it happens gradually and measuredly. In practice, if you do not yet have your own administrator, everything happens as you like, but not measuredly. Cancellations, transfers, requests to move the schedule, confusion with time zones (if you work on Skype) will always be. Even if you are a hyper controller. The main thing here is to treat such things philosophically.

That's all. Everything is as usual, work as work. It's not for you to unload the wagons. And not on the street in the cold to sell something …

Yes, I suggest a little game. Suppose, based on the text, how much real life time the described text takes, assuming that one consultation with a client lasts 55 minutes?