I'd Like to Collaborate with a Therapist

A curious therapist, open to innovation

I don’t know anything about being a therapist.

My experience of therapy is narrow, only a few years old, and one sided. My knowledge of the practice of therapy isn’t much bigger. It’s skewed by the environment and culture in which I’ve observed “therapy”. Given that TV and the Internet were my distribution channels, my knowledge isn’t that deep or broad either.

But this outsider has had a taste of the good stuff!

At first, therapy was clumsy and challenging. It didn’t feel very productive. It takes soooo much time and persistence. A truly unacceptable amount of time for someone with as little patience as I had. It challenged muscles I didn’t even know existed. But after enough reps — hitting new personal highs and lows — those muscles have grown a bit.

I can sit with situations more uncomfortable than I could even speak about. I remember to remind myself that no feeling is final, saving myself from abject spiraling. And doggarn it, people like me.

I’m hungry to learn more.

A Curious Trinity

I’ve built Breakpoint as one part experimentation platform, one part conduit to package up helpful techniques. It’s a convenient delivery mechanism for protocols and approaches that might help folks in therapy. A shared tool, for therapist and client, to enhance the work they’re doing together. I’m keen to improve it through collaboration.

I’d like to engage with therapists.

I’d like to include their clients.

I’d like to collaborate with curious therapists and their clients open to innovation.

Folks who understand that innovation means genuinely investigating unproven approaches, with open acknowledgment that a lot (most!) are going to fail. We’re going to give it the old college try. It’s going to be rewarding. The result should be better therapy for my collaborators, and a path to share our successes with others.

If you fall into one of these categories, I’d love to connect with you! Please, send me an email, or drop in to the comments below.

So Many Questions

Do therapists have hopes or fears about their clients for the next session? How often do therapists think about their clients between sessions? Is it difficult to get into the zone before a session? Do they do a review to load up the context on a client before session? What do they write down after session? What are they writing down during my session? Would they help twice as many clients if they could handle the load? How would they utilize a free intern before/during/after session? How do they feel about technology interacting with the personal nature of therapy? What are their biggest challenges with clients? What are their biggest challenges with the business side of their work?

How many clients are nerds like me… asking for homework between sessions? doing pre-session prep? keeping notes to bring to session? recording sessions to free up their minds, and later reviewing those conversations?

What are the biggest delights of clients? Complaints? Do they feel like they’re getting a good value for their money? How do they measure that? What stops folks from starting therapy? Continuing therapy? Ending therapy?