Time2Track Blog
Real-Life Resources for Students & Early Career Professionals
Breaking Up with OCD: Avoiding Common Treatment Barriers
It takes a lot of guts for patients to make the decision to break up with obsessive-compulsive disorder. They have been living many years with tormenting thoughts and fears, dictating how they go about their days. When your patient is on board with breaking up with...
4 Ways Supervisors Can Support Trainees of Color
Multicultural supervision requires a unique skill set, and there are important factors that supervisors and training sites should take into consideration when working with trainees of color. Many trainees of color in mental health fields find themselves being the only one that looks like them in primarily white spaces.
In reading these four suggested points, I hope that existing supervisors, early career therapists, and trainees who wish to one day supervise will take note. The face of our field is forever changing, and it is time that we consider factors that can promote the success and well-being of all future clinicians.
Working with Suicidal Clients: 6 Things You Should Know
One of the scariest things therapists work with is suicidality.
Suddenly, therapy feels like, and sometimes is, a life-or-death situation, one where clinicians hold a great deal of responsibility. To make matters worse, suicide continues to be one of the leading causes of death in the U.S. [1], and many believe the prevalence rates are a gross underestimate [2].
The numbers highlight the inevitability of encountering suicidality in our line of work. Early-career psychologists and practicum students may feel overwhelmed by the intensity and risk of working with suicidal clients.
Nervous about Psychosis? A First-Timer’s Guide to Treating Clients with Psychotic Disorders
I vividly remember my first experience providing psychotherapy for a patient with psychotic symptoms. In fact, not only was this patient my first with psychosis, but they were my first individual therapy patient ever. As a practicum student at a partial hospitalization program, I was caught off-guard when my patient endorsed auditory hallucinations during an initial intake. Thoughts and doubts such as “I don’t know what I’m doing” and “Could I make my client’s symptoms worse?” flooded my mind.
Ultimately, it was a rewarding experience, and I enjoyed bearing witness to my client’s growth, impressive resilience and resolve. However, there are many things I wish I had known ahead of this first experience. Therefore, this article aims to use my experience as a reference point to provide a brief snapshot of important domains to consider when treating psychosis for the first time.
Grad School Burnout is Real – Here are the Symptoms
Burnout is believed to be coined by the psychologist Dr. Herbert Freudenberger who defined it as “failing, wearing out, or becoming exhausted through excessive demands on energy, strength, or resources” [1].
At times, graduate school seems synonymous with burnout – it is a multi-year, grueling process of hurdle after hurdle.
There is often a mentality in graduate programs that this “suffering” is a right-of-passage of sorts, an initiation that all therapists before us endured and overcame before entering into the profession.
However, the reality is that these expectations and this laissez faire attitude, when left unchecked, can produce burnout that is of detriment to not only the physical and mental health of graduate students, but also to their productivity and quality of work. Unfortunately, for many in the psychology field, this experience does not end with graduate school.
Psychodynamic Therapy 101: An Introduction
A new client recently asked me where I would be traveling for an upcoming trip as we looked at our schedules to make her next appointment. When she expressed further curiosity about the conference I would be attending, I explained that it was an annual conference of the society for psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychology. A fairly surprised look appeared on her face, and she questioned, “like Freud?”
I readily picked up on her discomfort with the thought of psychoanalysis or being psychoanalyzed. I clarified that she was not meeting with me for psychoanalysis and offered some explanation of basic psychodynamic principles and how these applied to our initial goals for therapy. She seemed to accept my explanation, but mostly just seemed glad to know she wasn’t meeting for psychoanalysis.
Psychodynamic therapy is one of several approaches to therapy used today. However, it is often misunderstood and dismissed as an outmoded approach or historical artifact. It is also often misrepresented in popular culture and sometimes seen as irrelevant to the quick-fix demands of the public and the limitations of insurance.
Why Every Therapist Needs a Website (and How to Get One)
If you don’t have your own website yet, the time has come.
Gone are the days when a new clinician could hang out a shingle, buy a Yellow Pages listing, and be assured a steady stream of clients. If you want to reach new clients today, you need an online presence. Even if clients find you through referrals or word-of-mouth, they will still want to research you online before booking their first session.
An Introduction to Philosophical Counseling
In India, mental health problems are rising at an alarming rate. This fact calls into question the efficacy of prevailing modalities of counseling. The pandemic has shifted previously abstract concerns into more concrete problems: it is now essential to rethink our...
What I Wish I Had Known Before Entering My Postgraduate Year
You’ve worked long and hard and put huge amounts of energy into your chosen profession, and now you’re entering your postgraduate year.
As you look for a great site that will utilize your skill-set, it’s also important to have a plan for making the most of this final year of training. In this article, I will share some of the things that I wish I had known prior to beginning my postgraduate year.
5 Ways to Support Your LGBQ & Gender Non-Conforming Clients in Session
As helping professionals, we share a united goal of empowering the individuals with whom we work to meet their goals. Though it remains important to address social issues on a large scale (e.g., protests, donations, advocating for policy change), a lot of what we do as helpers happens one-on-one. That is, most of us work to empower individuals interpersonally through therapy.
With this in mind, I would like to share tangible ways to support LGBTQQIA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual) and/or gender non-conforming (individuals who do not identify as cisgender, meaning they have gender identities that do not match the sex they were assigned at birth, and/or those who reject the gender binary, or do not identify as male or female) clients in session while also acknowledging the importance of social justice advocacy on a much larger scale.
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