Providing Therapy for Therapists

Extract

It is widely recognised that health professionals whose work involves psychotherapy or counselling need emotional support themselves to sustain them and to avoid the emotional exhaustion known as professional burn-out. In addition most dynamic psychotherapists recognise the need for such professionals to have therapy themselves to reduce the risk of counter-transferential distortions in their work. There appears, therefore, to be a need for counsellors and therapists to engage in therapy themselves, both to achieve fitness to practise and subsequently to maintain that fitness. In both instances it seems legitimate to regard such therapy as necessary training; the need for continuing training to preserve fitness is clear in other fields such as athletics and the performing arts.