I tell this story to illustrate how easily I got hooked as a new, beginning therapist by the father’s anger issues with his son when I had not healed my own similar issues. You see the thing was that the university program where I trained to become a licensed psychotherapist and family therapist did not require that I engage in doing any of my own personal therapy healing work; this is common practice for almost all such university mental health practitioner training programs. It is a very serious flaw in training and licensing psychotherapists, family therapists, social workers, and mental health workers of any stripe.
This flaw is right up there with the flaw of training such helping professionals using the medical model, and in fact is part of the medical model training; it assumes that psychotherapists and other mental health workers are like medical practitioners who are not required to have had the disease they are treating in order to successfully cure it. However, this assumption is dead wrong because if psychotherapists and mental health workers have not healed their own trauma issues, they can easily get triggered by their unhealed trauma and thus make unsound interventions with their clients. It is a huge mistake in their training. In my view, the medical model with its reliance on therapists doing diagnostic-prescriptive interventions with their clients without having done their own personal trauma healing work needs to be replaced with programs that require therapist to do their own intensive psychotherapy before being licensed.
Fortunately during my Bioenergetic Training, I was required to do at least 60 hours of individual Bioenergetic Therapy with a very experienced certified Bioenergetic Therapist. However, I started doing Energetic Therapy with clients shortly after entering the Bioenergetic Training Program because I was already a licensed psychotherapist. However, it would take me many more than 60 hours of individual Bioenergetic Therapy to become healed enough to not become easily triggered by my clients because of my own unhealed personal issues.
Even if therapists have done their own personal trauma healing work, the medical model, diagnostic-prescriptive approach to psychotherapy is still much less effective than the client in charge model of psychotherapy in terms of therapy outcomes as Duncan, Miller & Sparks [2004] prove in The Heroic Client with their review of medical model psychotherapy outcomes versus the client-in-charge model psychotherapy outcomes [2004]. Their conclusion that the client-in-charge model of psychotherapy (or what they call client-directed, outcome informed therapy) is the only way to go matches my own negative experience with Bioenergetic therapy. Unfortunately Bioenergetics even today uses the medical model of diagnoses & prescription, and although I credit it with helping to heal my childhood trauma and my adult depression, I hated the way I was treated as a client by my Bioenergetic therapists and trainers. They diagnosed me without my input, acted on me in a prescriptive way using their favorite Bioenergetics interventions to help me heal without telling why they were using these interventions. They simply left me in the dark about what they were trying to achieve and how they were doing it. Consequently, I felt like an object being manipulated rather than an empowered person who was involved in my own healing.
I spent many hours reading all of the books and articles on Bioenergetics that I could find trying to figure out what my character structure was and how my therapists were going about freeing me from its limiting grip on my life. Their medical model approach of not involving me in my own trauma healing set my therapy back many times because I felt used and exploited by them just as my parents had used and exploited me as a child. I finally realized that they were trying to heal my character structure using dark ages methods of diagnosis & prescription. However, they were actually traumatizing me in a similar way to the way my parents had traumatized me as a boy which had caused me to adopt my character structure as a defense against my parents’ negative care taking of me and now needing to use my character structure as a defense against my therapists’ treatment of me as a client. This was crazy! But then, the medical model of psychotherapy is crazy! I finally decided to take charge of my own healing by attending personal growth workshop and doing Energetic Therapy in my own way by following my intuition. My Bioenergetic trainers did not like it, but it worked for me.
