Written By: Harry J. Aponte, PhD (h.c.), MSW, LCSW, LMFT
How can therapists be formally trained through their personal resonance with clients and through their personal vulnerabilities to walk in their clients’ shoes – perceiving their clients’ pains and struggles, feeling them, and being able to more actively and therapeutically relate to them and their struggles?
So, what is distinctive about the training of therapists in the Person-of-the-Therapist (POTT) Model of Training? In all talking therapies we must consider how to train personal self-awareness when in the therapeutic relationship, and train active and purposeful use of that self in the therapeutic process.
This means bringing all of our “selves” to that encounter – our culture, our race, our familial and personal life experiences, our successes and failures, our strengths and our weaknesses. Yes, our own brokenness and vulnerabilities that will help us empathize and resonate with that of our clients – looking especially for what in relation to our clients are common elements from our own human experiences that may resonate with those of our clients whatever their particular cultures, races, families, social locations, traumas, current life struggles, etc., so that we may be able to perceive and respect our differences, while also being able to resonate with our sameness.
Our personal issues can be triggered by those of our clients as we engage them, and we can use what is triggered to intuit what is going on within our clients. And/or we may need to consciously reach back into our life experiences to help us find something within ourselves that can resonate with our clients’ struggles. This means we must be able to be open and vulnerable to ourselves in those moments of meaningful connection with our clients and their issues, so that we are able to feel and intuit their experiences at greater depth and understanding. But that means having the strength to be vulnerable at any given moment – so we can resonate with their pain through ours without being overwhelmed by our own pain and struggles. Therapists have to be trained to resonate intimately with clients and their issues, while simultaneously standing outside that intimate engagement as professionals who can see what is going on, understand what the experience means, and then determine what to do about it. We must be trained to identify with clients while also being professionally differentiated from them so that we can sense them even as we take whatever action is professionally indicated.
In this training (on January 27, 2023), rather than giving primary emphasis to therapists healing their emotional wounds, the primary emphasis of the POTT perspective has to do with mastering the therapeutically active use of self with the client(s), whatever their gender and cultural and racial roots, with a particular attunement to our own “emotional vulnerabilities” in the “now moment” of the therapeutic engagement with them. And we need to be able to do so, so as to potentiate our technical skills in the three basic aspects of therapy:
- Forming a therapeutic relationship with clients
- Facilitating a more comprehensive assessment
- And implementing more effective interventions.
We are using our own personhood to make our therapy richer, deeper and more effective. This approach reflects a view that highlights what therapists purposefully bring to the therapeutic encounter of their trained personal selves by adding a personal depth and resonance to their technical training in the therapeutic process.
The training of this use of self has to be conceptualized and formalized in a way that can be put into action in a deeply human way while also being professionally disciplined and directed.
