The Business End of Therapy and Clinical Supervision
We hear it time and time again. ‘In all of the years I studied to be a therapist, why did no one ever mention basic business skills?’
If you peruse the offerings at any masters level therapy program you will see countless mentions of trauma-informed, CBT, DBT, solution-focused, etc. but you will never hear the words budget, payroll or marketing. So, why is that?
It seems that therapist training continues the way it always has been, because that’s how it has always been. There is no rhyme or reason why basic business skills are not taught to masters level clinicians, but here we are. By the time you graduate you are likely able to help people sort through their problems, can identify maladaptive coping skills and can assess which clients will benefit from what treatment. But filing your first year of taxes after opening your small business? Good luck with that!
Why Does Clinical Supervision Give Me Anxiety?
In fact, anxiety is the most recognized emotion for both supervisors and supervisees (Kuo et al., 2016). One of the many theories for why anxiety is so prevalent in clinical supervision is the many roles that a supervisee might take on a daily basis. They could be a student, a parent, a partner, a therapist and a supervisee all in one day. These dual roles of the student and trainee at the same time can lead to role conflict. The roles of student and the role of therapist are quite different, yet we expect supervisees to effortlessly sway back and forth between the two roles. The two roles are behaviourally-distinctive from one another (Holloway, 1995) so having to switch between the two can be anxiety-provoking.