2022 Webinar Series: Of Beams and Specks: Therapist-Focused Consultation

Description: 
Traditionally in mental health fields, consultants have focused on the inner life and dynamics of the clients of their therapist consultees. Consultee therapists present cases, discuss their diagnostic assessments and case conceptualizations and formulate treatment plans based on the understanding of the client’s internal world. Consultees and consultants also address client “resistance,” transferences, and impasses in therapy primarily by focusing on the client’s contributions to the client-therapist dyad and by reflecting on how the client needs to change. Consistent with Internal Family Systems and some aspects of Person-Centered approaches to consultation and supervision, I argue that almost all therapists (even very experienced ones) contribute much more that they realize to impasses and to client “resistance” in therapy. In consultation, consultee therapists often benefit most from understanding how their own internal systems -- the parts of themselves are contributing to the difficulties and challenges they faced with their clients. A therapist-centered approach to consultation reveals important blind spots, blocks, disconnects, and other internal hindrances to the therapist’s understanding himself or herself more completely, especially how his or her internal dynamics contribute to the resistance, conflicts, impasses, and other difficulties in his or her therapy with “challenging” clients. In this webinar, I introduce and define my approach, called Therapist-Focused Consultation (TFC), I review how TFC’s premises are radically different than those in traditional consultation, discuss the benefits of a therapist-focused approach to consultation, review the limitations of such an approach and through recorded demonstrations of my consultation work, illustrate what TFC actually looks like in real practice. Live, experiential guided exercises will help the audience members get in touch with their own contribution to their difficulties with “challenging” clients. We will also have time for questions and discussion.

Learning Objectives: 

• Compare traditional consultation/supervision models’ focus on the client with TFC’s primary focus on the clinician. 
• Describe what a tor-mentor is and explain why clients who are tor-mentors are such gifts to their therapists. 
• Identify the five primary benefits of TFC approaches to consultation for the consultee therapist and the four major benefits of TFC approaches to the consultee therapist’s clients. 
• Explain how TFC differs from the consultee’s own personal therapy, delineate the scope of each TFC vs. the consultee’s personal therapy as well as their areas of overlap. Evaluate how to introduce TFC concepts into their own consultation and supervision work, both as consultants and as consultees.

This program is not eligible for APA Credits
This program is not eligible for NBCC credits