Therapist? Then You Need A Therapist…

Counter-transference, secondary trauma, boundary issues, etc. Issues such as these can build up and ‘burn out’ a clinician if not addressed over a period of time. When I am teaching a new group of addiction counseling students at UMASS-Boston this is one of the first topics I discuss with them.

The need to obtain a therapist for themselves.

Why, what is the big deal if I am already getting supervision? While supervision can be beneficial it will not necessarily address the underlying issues in depth. Time constraints, vulnerability, and the issue of not wanting to appear ‘unable’ to perform one’s duties can play into the limitations of supervision only.

I can recall instances over my years in field when I was extremely grateful to have my own therapist.

One time I was performing an intake with a 26 year old female recently to the U.S. from a Latin American country. When I got to the section of the intake asking about family and after asking her a question about her father her face became expressionless, her voice dropped an octave and she stared straight ahead and said ‘When I was seven years old men banged down the front door of our house and started beating my father up…I was hiding in a closet, the type that has slants in the door and I could see everything they were doing…they knocked him to the ground before they killed him…’ In the back of my mind I was screaming ‘are you f@#king kidding me!’ Toward the client I expressed appropriate empathy and spoke of wanting to line up clinicians that specialize in trauma issues.

For the rest of the day I was useless. I could not get her story out of my mind. When the day was over I was still thinking about it…walking to my truck, still thinking about, start my truck up, still thinking about. I turned my truck off, grabbed my cell phone and called my therapist. ‘Hey, do you have some time to see me this afternoon? I really need to talk about a situation that happened today. What, you have a full schedule? Well, I’m coming by anyway.’ (He found time for me).

Without dialogue with my therapist I probably would have taken this ‘situation’ home where directly or indirectly it would have affected my family – not to mention increasing distress to myself.

I always try to leave work at work.

Another time I had picked up a new client that had recently been released from prison after serving a term for vehicular manslaughter. I asked him how it felt to be out and he said he didn’t care if he had ever gotten out. He had been drunk driving and the passenger in his car had been killed in the accident. After more dialogue I learned that the passenger had been his twelve year old son he had been driving to a hockey game.


Another phone call to my therapist…




Willy is an educator at UMASS-Boston & Cambridge College where he teaches Substance Abuse & Co-Occurring Disorders as his principle course. He presents from a clinical, academic, and personal perspective. Recently he has started guest lecturing nationally at Universities, Colleges, and to Professional Organizations. His style is high energy, entertaining, and informative due in part to his previous life as a comedian and comedy writer.