Should therapists in training be required to be in therapy?

I received a link today to an online poll being conducted by a therapy practice in Alaska, which asked the respondents to give their opinion on the question of whether licensing boards should require that therapists have gone through their own therapy as part of their training. I gave my response (which I’ll explain a little later) and was surprised to see that over 70 percent of the respondents said they favored such a requirement, and only about 20 percent said “no.” In reading the comments, it seemed that some of the therapists who answered felt that it had been helpful to them, while others thought that someone could not effectively do therapy without knowing themselves as only being in therapy can allow.

Taking a possible selection bias into account (in other words, allowing for the possibility that people who agreed with the position would be more likely to take the trouble to respond), I find the responses a little bit odd. For one thing, I don’t believe it is the job of licensing boards to be the ones to mandate this requirement. Credentialing is not the same as training. As a Director of Training for a Master’s program that leads to licensure, I see it as the school’s job to make sure that someone who graduates has the skills, ethical values, and self-awareness to function effectively as a counselor. Then, they are required (at least in Illinois) to work for two years under the supervision of a licensed counselor or other mental health professional. This “residency” is where they get the practice that allows them to function effectively as a beginning therapist.

I am not opposed to the idea of a therapist-in-training receiving therapy services. In fact, I encourage my students to do so; and many of them have done it and found it valuable. But being in therapy is not like driver education. It is a personal growth process that some people need more than others, and some people can make better use of than others. Making it mandatory for all would not do anything to make sure that people are good therapists. It may very well help them to become better therapists, but it should be their choice.

I was required to go through personal therapy in my degree program at what was then Alfred Adler Institute. The rationale at the time was that we needed to learn to be Adlerian therapists, and seeing an Adlerian therapist was a necessary part of that process. Most psychoanalytic schools (following Sigmund Feud’s mandate) do the same. Unfortunately, most of the Adlerian therapists in Chicago were also on the faculty of the school – making for some obvious dual relationship problems. Nevertheless, I went to a psychiatrist with whom I also worked at the hospital. We spent three sessions going over my Adlerian Life Style Inventory results, and I found it to be very helpful in knowing my personality as well as the ways I tend to react to situations (if I am not careful). It’s been extremely valuable in giving me a good awareness of the “equipment” I’m working with when I see people in therapy.

There have been students I’ve worked with who had problems on their clinical practicum placements, and in the process of advising them on how to remediate their performance at practicum, I almost always suggest getting therapy themselves. However, we don’t mandate it.

Maybe my reluctance to do so stems from my years as an employee assistance counselor. We always trained supervisors who made referrals to the EAP to look at the employee’s work performance rather than whether they went to the EAP, in deciding what consequences (if any) to impose. We always wanted to have supervisors avoid making the referral “mandatory,” because that carried the assumption that the EAP counselor could “automagically” make them into a better employee by providing them counseling. Instead, we wanted the supervisor to suggest that if personal problems were interfering with the employee’s ability to perform well on the job, counseling through the EAP could be one tool that the employee could use to work on resolving the problems. But “the proof is always in the pudding.” The employee is responsible for doing well  – whether or not he or she uses the counseling offered.

I’ve carried that mindset into my work as a counselor educator and director of training. I still feel that counseling can be tremendously valuable in the personal growth of a counselor in training. That should be obvious – I train counselors, and I wouldn’t do that if I didn’t believe it was a powerful process for positive change. But I’m very reluctant to make counseling or therapy a “hoop” that must be jumped through as a requirement to become licensed.

I’d be curious to see what other mental health professionals’ experiences and ideas regarding this topic might be. Your thoughts?

Should therapists in training be required to be in therapy? by Fitzgerald Counseling is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.