The Other Chair: Portability and Translation From Personal Therapy to Clinical Practice

This study sought to explore a more “answerable” question: what it is, specifically, about personal therapy that clinicians find useful? What are the concrete strategies and behaviors that clinical social workers—who provide more therapy than any other group of helping professionals—emulate or avoid when moving from the “client chair” to the “therapist chair?” Individual interviews with thirty clinical social workers were analyzed thematically using hyperResearch for data management and retrieval. Findings fall into six thematic clusters, including skillful and unskillful means, control, time, money, use of space, and giving/giving back. Overall, the impact of personal therapy may lie in lessons learned, through “partial emulation” and internalization of the dyadic relationship, about the capacity to be imperfect yet helpful. Implications are offered for social work practice, policy, and education.
Source: Clinical Social Work Journal - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research