Image: Graphic for Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide podcast, Episode 450. Text reads, “When Therapy Goes Vibe-Forward: The Cost of Losing Clinical Depth.” Includes a landscape background and a headshot of guest TJ Walsh, LPC.
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When Therapy Goes Vibe-Forward: The Cost of Losing Clinical Depth, An Interview with TJ Walsh, LPC

Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy sit down with TJ Walsh, LPC to explore a growing concern in the mental health field: when therapy prioritizes relatability, branding, and validation at the expense of clinical depth. TJ reflects on what gets lost when therapists rush to prove their value, over-disclose, or try to solve problems too quickly and why neutrality, containment, supervision, and doing one’s own work remain essential to effective therapy.

Transcript

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(Show notes provided in collaboration with Otter.ai and ChatGPT.)

About Our Guest: TJ Walsh, BFA, MA, LPC, NCC, CCTP

Image: headshot of TJ WalshTJ Walsh, BFA, MA, LPC, NCC, CCTP is an innovative painter, badass Clini-Coach®, and dynamic psychotherapist, educator, brand strategist, and higher education administrator based in Philadelphia.

He writes and speaks on the topics of art, culture, faith, and mental health, and his work is exhibited and published internationally.

TJ has worked at the colorful intersection of creativity, art, therapy, and education for over 20 years and is an expert in creativity, relationships, fear, and procrastination.

He received his BFA in Graphic Design from The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and his MA in Clinical Counseling Psychology from Eastern University, Saint Davids, PA. He is trained psychodynamically, is a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, and has extensive advanced training in Emotionally Focused Therapy.

Prior to his work in mental health and higher education administration, TJ served as a Creative Director, Art Director, and Director of Communications for several national and international nonprofit organizations in New York City and Philadelphia, specializing in brand development, corporate communications, nonprofit marketing, social media engagement, fundraising communications, project management, and strategic planning.

He believes every human being is inherently creative, particularly when they access their authentic selves, and is passionate about helping people understand who they are and what their vision, mission, and purpose is as a creative. He is also a mega fan of connecting people through his expansive network.

TJ serves as Board Chair for InLiquid, a nonprofit arts organization serving artists across the country, and the Philadelphia Center for Emotionally Focused Therapy (PCEFT). He also serves on the Government Relations Committee of the Pennsylvania Counseling Association.

He currently lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two sons, a dog and cat, 65 houseplants and counting, and a growing collection of artwork from emerging artists.

In this podcast episode: Therapy trends, social media influence, neutrality, containment, and clinical depth

In this episode, Curt and Katie are joined by TJ Walsh, LPC to discuss concerns raised in a Substack post written by TJ examining what he sees as a troubling trend in therapy culture. The conversation explores how therapists may feel pressure to be immediately helpful, relatable, or validating, often at the expense of containment, neutrality, and long-term therapeutic process.

Together, they unpack how social media and public-facing therapy content shape client expectations, why validation alone is not treatment, and how therapists can better orient clients to the slower, relational work that supports meaningful and lasting change.

Key Takeaways for Therapists: Avoiding vibe-forward therapy, maintaining neutrality, and preserving clinical depth

“I see a trend of therapists trying to build a brand on relatability, on aesthetic, on their social media vibe… and then therapy becomes reduced to validation and personality rather than grounded clinical depth.”
— TJ Walsh, LPC

  • Therapy that prioritizes comfort and relatability without containment risks becoming supportive but ineffective
  • Social media branding can unintentionally create unrealistic expectations about what therapy should provide
  • Validation is an important clinical tool, but it is not synonymous with treatment or change
  • Neutrality helps preserve the therapeutic frame and allows deeper work to emerge
  • Doing one’s own depth-oriented work helps therapists recognize transference and countertransference when it arises
  • Supervision should be an ongoing professional practice, not something that ends with licensure
  • Even short-term or solution-focused work requires strong self-awareness and clinical grounding

“Neutrality, for me, is about containment. It’s about how we hold the space, manage transference and countertransference, and decide when and how to disclose.”
— TJ Walsh, LPC

Resources on Therapy Culture, Neutrality, and Clinical Depth

We’ve pulled together resources mentioned in this episode and additional ways to learn more about TJ’s work.

TJ Walsh, LPC

Relevant Episodes of Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide

Meet the Hosts: Curt Widhalm & Katie Vernoy

Picture of Curt Widhalm, LMFT, co-host of the Modern Therapist's Survival Guide podcast; a nice young man with a glorious beard.Curt Widhalm, LMFT

Curt Widhalm is in private practice in the Los Angeles area. He is the cofounder of the Therapy Reimagined conference, an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University and CSUN, a former Subject Matter Expert for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, former CFO of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and a loving husband and father. He is 1/2 great person, 1/2 provocateur, and 1/2 geek, in that order. He dabbles in the dark art of making “dad jokes” and usually has a half-empty cup of coffee somewhere nearby. Learn more at: http://www.curtwidhalm.com

Picture of Katie Vernoy, LMFT, co-host of the Modern Therapist's Survival Guide podcastKatie Vernoy, LMFT

Katie Vernoy is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, coach, and consultant supporting leaders, visionaries, executives, and helping professionals to create sustainable careers. Katie, with Curt, has developed workshops and a conference, Therapy Reimagined, to support therapists navigating through the modern challenges of this profession. Katie is also a former President of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. In her spare time, Katie is secretly siphoning off Curt’s youthful energy, so that she can take over the world. Learn more at: http://www.katievernoy.com

A Quick Note:

Our opinions are our own. We are only speaking for ourselves – except when we speak for each other, or over each other. We’re working on it.

Our guests are also only speaking for themselves and have their own opinions. We aren’t trying to take their voice, and no one speaks for us either. Mostly because they don’t want to, but hey.

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Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide Creative Credits:

Voice Over by DW McCann https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/

Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano https://groomsymusic.com/

 

Transcript for this episode of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide podcast (Autogenerated):

Transcripts do not include advertisements just a reference to the advertising break (as such timing does not account for advertisements)

… 0:00
(Opening Advertisement)

Announcer 0:00
You’re listening to the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide, where therapists live, breathe and practice as human beings. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, here are your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy.

Curt Widhalm 0:13
Welcome back, modern therapists. This is the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide. I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy, and this is the podcast for therapists about the things that go on in our practice, the trends that happen in our professions. And sometimes it’s us looking at things that we’ve encouraged over the past. And then there’s almost kind of a spiritual bypass, I think, feeling in this episode that’s coming up, but doesn’t have anything to do with spirituality, so we have been good friends with TJ Walsh. He’s an LPC out in the Philadelphia area. We met him through a lot of our Therapy Reimagined work back when we were doing conference, and he’s been a long time listener of the podcast, and he has a very wonderful sub stack where he puts down some ideas. And there was one that caught my eye here somewhat recently that just kind of talking about therapists, especially earlier in their career, some of the maybe wisdom that seems to be getting bypassed, that he was noticing. And I said, Katie, we should get TJ on he’s never been on the podcast. Let’s have him talk about this. And so I’m very excited for today’s episode. Thanks for coming on, TJ.

TJ Walsh 1:00
Hey, I am really excited to be here. It has been a dream of mine to be with Curt and Katie. No, it’s, it’s really, it’s really exciting for me to be here to talk about this stuff.

Katie Vernoy 1:41
We’re excited to have you here and to talk with you, and it’s good to see you after a while. But before we get into the whole big conversation, we’ll ask you the question we ask all of our guests, which is, who are you and what are you putting out into the world?

TJ Walsh 1:54
Oh, my goodness, people ask me that in different ways all the time, because I’m very confusing, but what I’m putting out into the world is a mix of therapy, creativity, leadership. I’m an artist first and foremost, and a creative entrepreneur. I do all different kinds of things, but what I really like to do is integrate authenticity, vulnerability and self expression into my life and my work, but really encourage people to do all of those things in whatever way means to them in their life, in their work.

Curt Widhalm 2:33
So the article that I had read, it’s titled, ‘Too Much, Too Soon: What New Therapists Are Getting Wrong.’ And you lay out the main points of this article.

TJ Walsh 2:44
Sure. So you know, I hate to be well, maybe I don’t hate to be the old guy in the room. But I…

Curt Widhalm 2:51
I really was wondering about introducing this episode is, are we at the point where we’re just old therapists like shaking our fists at the new generation here.

Katie Vernoy 3:01
I the working title right now is Get off of my Lawn.

TJ Walsh 3:04
Okay, yeah, I can see that I’ve really tried to not be that, that person, and try to take a step back and kind of try and understand what, what everybody or what folks are doing out there, especially people who are newer to the, newer to the field, trying to start their practices and things like that. But there are some things that I notice, not just with new therapists, younger therapists, but also for those of us who are, you know, not afraid to be a little more visible. I do think and what I was writing in that article or that post is that therapists, new ones, more visible ones, seem to feel pressure to prove their value really, really quickly, often like rushing to, you know, express interventions or provide a lot of reassurance or push into validation, which, by the way, you know, validation is a really, really important part of our work.

Curt Widhalm 4:08
But yes it, yes it is, validation.

Katie Vernoy 4:11
Absolutely. Good job TJ, really, good job.

TJ Walsh 4:15
Thank you. But how do we validate? And what are we validating? And when we when we do that, I see a tendency to bypass patients or clients real process. Sometimes we’re missing the transference that is, that is out there that’s showing up, and at the end of the day, we’re not really building a lot of real depth with our clients and our work. And so I like to go back to my perspective, which is, therapy is about tolerating. And I think I said this in the article, in some way, therapy is about tolerating the slow work of relationship and not pushing for instant solutions. And so that is kind of what I was talking about. It was the article was a response to something that I saw on social media, got grumpy about and then fired this thing off.

Katie Vernoy 5:17
Oh, now I’m super curious, what is the thing that you were responding to?

TJ Walsh 5:21
Well, I mean, that might be a little bit more further down in our conversation, but it was something about neutrality, and can or should therapists be neutral in their work, and they go off into this direction of, you know, therapy is inherently political conversation that, how do we challenge people? We can’t we shouldn’t really just allow them to do whatever it is we think is, you know, wrong or bad based on our own perspective. But that’s not really what neutrality is in in the clinical space. And so when I see this stuff get pontificated online by by folks. It really kind of pulls me back, because it’s getting away from the, at least, how I was taught the main purpose, or the main focus of what of what that premise in psychotherapy is, and not what it means colloquially or popularly in the modern conversation.

Katie Vernoy 6:25
It seems like therapy in the popular conversation is and we’ve done a lot of episodes on this. I’ll link to those in the show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com but it seems like there is almost a requirement. Even folks who don’t need therapy, quote, unquote, need therapy. Clinicians are very relatable. They’re…

TJ Walsh 6:46
Yeah.

Katie Vernoy 6:47
…there’s a focus on lived experience. There’s a focus on feeling validated like you were talking about by your therapist. But also, if your therapist is politically different from you, then that’s a problem. There’s, there’s a lot going on with how folks are viewing therapy and how it’s being presented in kind of the Tiktok space or social media. And one of the things that you said, that I thought was really interesting, is that therapy is becoming vibe forward and clinically hollow. And so when I think about that, I try to sort through kind of relationship building and helping folks come into a space that maybe doesn’t feel comfortable for them, or maybe, you know, culturally or identity wise, they’ve not been welcomed into the space and maybe what should be different. But before I make assumptions, what do you mean by vibe forward and clinically hollow.

TJ Walsh 7:43
A couple things. So, you know, I see a trend of therapists trying to build a brand on relatability, on esthetic, on their social media vibe. So what they’re putting out there to try and lure in people who might be a good fit for them in their practice, right? Trying to attract the right fit clients. I think that that’s a good thing, right? We want to work with people that we’re able to help, or that where that fit our, our niche, or whatever it is, right? And so there is a, there is a purpose for all of that. But then I see a lot of folks pushing into that really, really hard. In so far as when they get those people into, into their consultation room, their therapy space, they continue to really like present in this, in this way that they’ve built an expectation for the client around, right? And so they’re going to be super, you know, maybe they’re going to be super relatable. Maybe they’re going to act as though they’re friends with the with the client, and present that kind of thing. Maybe they’re going to be super opinionated and offer a lot of, a lot of their own anecdotes and things like that, like they do on social media. And I think that that becomes problematic. It creates a challenge clinically, then to set the frame, to maintain containment of the space, to really do the work of therapy. And then what I see when, when that happens, is therapy becomes reduced to validation. It becomes reduced to, you know, personality, and it’s not really grounded in, like, the clinical depth that, you know, and guys like this is, this is from my own personal, personal, like perspective, right? So I think we have to hold that in, into a hold that line, but like it’s not grounded in the clinical depth that I really like to see clinicians providing and holding to what we know works for people, in terms of their change long term and their growth as human beings. So this createsfor me a challenge, because clients might start to feel like, oh my gosh, like, I’m really comfortable in this space. I can maybe feel more like myself for the moment. My symptoms start to, start to get reduced in the moment, but they’re not really experiencing the real transformation that can be cultivated in a way that a long term therapeutic, well contained, well grounded space could could offer them. So it’s like, almost like designing this, like, really nice house and bringing somebody in, but there’s, like, no foundation underneath it. It looks great from the street. It looks, it’s comfortable inside, but underneath there’s, you know, a lot of stress and a lot of erosion happening.

… 10:56
(Advertisement Break)

Curt Widhalm 10:59
I can imagine some listeners being like, but you just don’t get how it works, man, and

TJ Walsh 11:03
Probably. That’s okay. I’m used to it.

Curt Widhalm 11:08
Really, what I’m hearing you talk about is that it has to be an authentic having done your own work as a therapist on yourself, in order to actually be the thing not just project out this vibe and to kind of use the buzz words and to portray an act of expertise that some of the underneath work has to actually be there, to have it be a continuous authenticity, rather than kind of a work face or a fancy office or a fancy zoom background if you’re an online therapist or something like that, that makes it kind of a consistent top to bottom presentation.

TJ Walsh 11:53
Yeah, consistent top to bottom presentation. I’m like less. I don’t really care if people want to have, like, really shiny looking image and stuff, and, you know, present as you know, like, show your show your stuff, be, be out there with your with your image, however you want. I’m more concerned really with knowing who you are as a person and as a clinician, and having a really solid understanding of how to work with individuals and work with people beyond just just giving them what they want to hear, right, or, you know, something, just to be relatable, just to hold them in the room.

Curt Widhalm 12:41
And I know that you teach and supervise and interact with a lot of people entering into this profession. I have as well. And I’m reflecting back on being at that point in my career. And if I’m hearing us talk saying like, Ah, you got to know who you really are. And a younger version of me would be like, Yes, I know exactly who I am, and yeah, I would be I would be wrong at that point. There definitely be some growth things. So what is it that you’re suggesting, as far as some of the reflection points that people should be having to make sure that this is not just vibe forward and hollow, but to be able to actually get to some of that authenticity.

TJ Walsh 13:28
Yeah, I just go back to, like, the basics of, you know, having done your own work, you know, however that looks for for people. But I am always a big, giant fan of having done some kind of depth oriented work, of participating, being being a client or a patient on a couch. I’m really a big proponent of that. And then ongoing supervision. Supervision, for me, is not just a means to obtain your piece of paper or your license number, like sure, we all have to get supervised in that capacity so that we can actually become independently licensed. But supervision, for me, is an ongoing experience that should travel with a person all the way throughout their career, and if you’re not getting supervision, you know, from my perspective, that’s a dangerous thing, right? Because you’re not getting, oftentimes called on your stuff, or you’re not getting, you’re not able to work through some of those challenging transferential or counter transferential issues that that show up in your work, and have somebody bounce them off and be like, Have you thought about, have you thought about this? They’re not, you know, and the supervision for for me, when I try to encourage people to get supervision again, it’s not necessarily like I have this crisis client in the moment that I need to get consultation around, right? It’s I’m going and I’m doing my own therapy work through the lens of my clinical work. So it’s having done your own work. Have you been on the couch? Right? And, by the way, you don’t have to be on the couch. But what I’m saying is, like, not necessarily going and working on, like, you know, some specific issue where you’re undergoing CBT or something like that, but you’re actually, like, doing insight depth, really getting to know yourself and to know where your stuff is hiding, so that when it pops out at you in the space with a client, you’re prepared for it and you know how to navigate it. So therapy, supervision and then also developing yourself creatively is really important to maintain flexibility, to maintain the ability to think quickly on your feet, abstractly, critically, and all of that good stuff.

Katie Vernoy 16:13
So there’s a lot of places I want to go. So I’m going to go to one. I’ve got one comment, and then also question, and it’s kind of challenging a little bit, so I’ll just put that up front. There’s oftentimes, and that’s why I joke that this the title is, get off your Get off my lawn or whatever. But there’s oftentimes, and I think Curt and I do this sometimes too, where we see the Tiktok therapist, we see folks talking about therapy from a client perspective and the things they like or don’t like from their therapists. And it feels like there’s assumptions being made, that folks who are out there vibe forward may be clinically hollow when they come back to their offices. And I’m wanting to see where, where is the data on that, where, what do we what? Who are we actually talking about? Are we talking about, kind of, what we worry is happening with the next generation, or are we actually seeing these things? So that’s the first part of it. And then I’m also thinking about some of these recommendations are coming from, I feel like, kind of like a specific clinical orientation, a specific definition of what therapy is. And I know that I’m not a short term 10 session CBT therapist. I can be solution focused in the moment, but I really like that clinical depth. So I’m with you, kind of my own topically, but I know that there are therapists and there are people who need to be in more of that, let’s get down and solve a problem in five or 10 sessions. And so I’m trying to get, I guess, to nuance here. Who are you talking about? How do you know they’re actually doing these things, and what does it look like for the whole profession? Because I think there’s some of us that want to get into that deep, wonderful, rich work, and there’s some folks that are here and saying, We don’t have time for it. People don’t. You know, it’s very privileged to stay in therapy for a long time and have those deep relationships. Does your advice actually apply to everyone?

TJ Walsh 18:13
Yeah, well, I don’t think that advice really, any advice ever applies to everyone.

Katie Vernoy 18:19
Fair.

TJ Walsh 18:22
So you know, and I agree with you that that, yeah, there are, there are situations. There are times, there are people that have a very specific thing they need help with. They need to get from point A to point B, right? And there are approaches out there that that do that really well, and that they’re, they’re, they’re needed. I don’t, I don’t disagree with with that. And then also, I will say that, yeah, like it comes from some of what I’m saying, maybe some where a lot of my tone is privileged, right? So I will say, you know, like, I’m a bald, white guy, right? And I know that you know what I say comes from my own personal experiences and all of that. So, you know, I do want to recognize that as well. To your point, about, like, where is their data or anything like that? You know, like I’m speaking from what I have seen in my supervision practice and in my in my work, bouncing around different programs and how they’re teaching students, and also, again, anecdotally, what I see on social media, which is probably the weakest, the weakest point there, right? It’s

Katie Vernoy 19:44
Sure.

TJ Walsh 19:45
And yeah, you’re right. Like, I don’t know if you know Susie Q therapist is going to be, you know, going back to their office and not doing good work. I don’t know that, unless I’m in the room, right, or unless I’m supervising them, but it’s I’m thinking about when I see this stuff on social media, how the public, how the consumer of therapy, is going to see that, respond to it, apply it, and then have some kind of expectation for what they what they’re going to get when they go into the therapy space. I also think to go in another, in another direction about, you know, short term versus long term. I don’t think that it necessarily has to be about, you know, the client, staying in long term therapy or or anything like that, but it’s more for the the clinician to know themselves really well and to understand what’s happening in the room for them, even if they are conducting a short term therapy, even if they are more solutions focused or more protocol driven or whatever, because, you know, we’re still having stuff come up inside of us all the time, and it can dictate or inform, you know, the the moves we make on the chess board, so to speak with with a client that I’m that I’m more concerned about and how they go about getting and gaining that insight and that experience about themselves may look like laying on a couch and doing therapy with a therapist for a long time, or it could be some other mode that is helpful in gaining in gaining that that experience.

Curt Widhalm 21:47
I think what I’m hearing, and to take this out of just kind of pearl clutching concern about the younger folks kind of thing is, I agree with you, we’re not in the room with these other therapists, but we are in the room with the clients who are consuming this social media, and they’re coming in with some of these expectations, and we’re correcting them about therapy isn’t this one size fits all thing. And that’s really maybe more of kind of this emphasis that it’s what is therapy like with me that can be out there, and it’s being able to actually follow through and walk the walk and show that even within our own practices, we’re not doing, you know, the same exact thing with every single client. It’s not a cookie cutter approach. It’s not just kind of come in and I’m going to validate you in the way that your friends are. And that is hard to explain, and it doesn’t make for great 30 seconds, Tiktok, you know, pointing at post it notes and various editing sorts of things.

TJ Walsh 22:59
Right.

Curt Widhalm 23:00
And therefore it doesn’t gain a lot of social media traction, because it is a deeper following of ourselves, and it’s being able to understand that, and that’s really what I’m trying to say, as far as moving this conversation forward, is, that’s what that work is, is it’s being able to convey not everything is just going to be how I show up on videos and be prepared for that to be explained when you get into the office or get into the therapy session.

TJ Walsh 23:36
Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. Like, I mean, if I were to, like, put the way I do. I mean, I’m, I mean, I’m hilarious in sessions, and I’m all these things right with with my clients when it’s when it’s warranted, and stuff like that. But, you know, in general, if I were to, like, give somebody on, somebody looking at a social media feed, like, access to, you know, being a fly on on my office, it’s probably going to be pretty boring, pretty boring content, right? Like you’re saying. So yeah, how we show up, on on on on social media, on video, or whatever, is probably going to be pretty different. I think it comes down to really like, how are we orienting the client to the therapy when, when they do, when they do arrive, you know? So the more like, animated or or social, forward stuff shouldn’t be that different from who you are as a real person, as the real person in the room with with the client, right? So they shouldn’t be like, super surprised when they show up to your office, or show up into your into your Zoom Room, and you’re completely different. They shouldn’t be surprised, you know by that. But how are we orienting them to the work? Right? I I saw something before I came on here, and I didn’t spend too much time looking at it, but there was a post by somebody who was trying to figure out, what do you do when a client comes in to you and they have this really massive issue that they expect you to solve for them in 50 minutes, and when they don’t get it solved in 50 minutes, they see what you provided as a disservice to them, and they’re really upset about that. And this therapist that I that had posted this, I really loved that, that they were asking this question, because then they said, You know what, I really need to I’m looking for feedback because I know I’m aware that I have set my clients up with this expectation and I want to learn how to not set them up with that false expectation that we’re going to be able to solve these pretty big issues in 45 or 50 minutes, right? And how do I, how do I then orient, orient them to what the process of therapy is, which is not that much, slower, much more exploratory, especially for these bigger core issues.

… 26:18
(Advertisement Break)

Katie Vernoy 26:19
I think that’s not very sexy, right? And it’s certainly not great marketing to say you’re going to come in, I’m going to be pretty boring, and this is going to take a long time.

TJ Walsh 26:28
Yeah.

Katie Vernoy 26:30
I think, I think that’s the challenge that we face, is that we’re potentially squaring off and trying to compete with coaches and self help apps and potentially AI therapists and all of these things. And many of us are charging a premium to sit with us for a very long time, to move very slowly through this stuff. And so I feel like the challenge here is both expectation that is completely unreasonable, marketing, which, if we market what therapy truly is, sometimes that’s going to potentially repel a lot of people who would get a lot of benefit from therapy and then, and one of the things that you talked about in your article is that there’s therapists who want to solve problems and they want to be helpful and fix things for their clients, and it feels like that’s a very human need, and all of those things. And so maybe we’ve been kind of dancing around it. Maybe you can describe what you think like your definition of what therapy is, and how maybe we should be talking about it more in public spaces.

TJ Walsh 27:32
I will say, yeah, like we are, we are screwed when it comes to, like, the the marketing of how TJ views, how TJ views therapy. Because I’m not going to promise, I’m not going to promise one thing or or another that would be, that would be, not genuine. The way I view therapy, and the way that I’ve experienced therapy, and maybe This is where it comes from, right? It’s how I it’s how I’ve experienced therapy. I’ve been really, really lucky, privileged, whatever, to experience life changing therapy that has taken 20 years to get to where I am right now. If I if I had just gone to therapy for I started going to therapy for a very specific thing. I had an eating disorder, I was anorexic, and I needed to get that taken care of, or else I would probably have, like died, right. Then, through, through getting that taken care of, to an extent where I was, where I would be able to learn more about where that stuff comes from. I moved into a different type of therapy, which was more psychodynamic, more long term, more relational, more re-parenting, more containment, more all of this stuff that I could handle. So I think there’s room for all of us in this in this game, right? Like if I didn’t have that LCSW, who was also, who was also an RN, like taking me and saying, you have two choices. One, you do this therapy and you take what I have to say seriously, or two, you go inpatient hospital right now, because there’s a your numbers are looking pretty crappy, and your heart’s going to explode, right. If I didn’t have her, my heart would probably have exploded and I wouldn’t be able to do the stuff that I’m talking about right now, which is really the relational work to get me to understand where am, where did I come from? How did I get here? Where do I want to go? And how, and then, how do I ultimately land there?

Curt Widhalm 29:47
Really, what you’re speaking to is clients might show up to therapy for the vibes, but that doesn’t necessarily elicit what the core of their issues are, and therapists who are focused just on the vibes might not be able to ever get there, and that leads to unsuccessful therapy. I look at the number of pre-licensed people in my practice that I encourage to find their voice and their niche and their preferred clients, and they end up with people who come in for seemingly right fit match sorts of things, and then session five, session six, bring up something completely out of the blue, unrelated that some of that deeper work doesn’t prepare people for. At least in my practice, with a wonderful, top notch supervisor, there’s a lot of to make the shifts and be able to catch up on some of the work, or to be able to work on some of the skill areas that need to be developed. But really, when there are people out there who are in solo, independent practice, without that supervision or ongoing consultation, that poor preparation reflects poorly on us all.

TJ Walsh 31:04
So are you speaking to about like new therapists who move directly into a private practice scenario, or…?

Curt Widhalm 31:14
The ones who have the opportunity to kind of select their caseloads, typically, that’s going to be in private practice situations that are woefully unprepared for the variety of clinical issues that are going to be presenting.

TJ Walsh 31:34
Yeah.

Curt Widhalm 31:35
And you know, my practice, we do take on higher risk clients, and I think a lot of private practices around us are. My team, you know, especially as they’re working through building out the first part of their caseload, often express surprise, oh, this level of severity in private practice. Yes, that’s our business model here. But I think that that tends to show up for any number of places you know, eating disorder clients, you bring that up earlier that might want to come in for the vibe, but don’t ever get asked kind of the harder questions to actually have to face that, right?

TJ Walsh 32:12
Oh, yeah, I this is, like a whole nother conversation, right? That I think is important to to have, which is around, how do we, how do we navigate that, that schism right of of experience and prep, when so many new therapists and even interns and stuff are going towards the private practice world versus instead of going towards more of these, more broad programs, right CMH, or whatever it is, and not seeing right up front the breadth of clinical issues that can come up. And that’s where I go back to, you know, well, not go back to, I don’t have any problem, or much problem, with people who know that they want to go into private practice or group practice, going in that direction. I think that’s great, but that’s where we need to have good supervision, good training, good good mentorship, right where they so that when they do get confronted with some kind of like volcanic eruption in their in their room with a client who was supposed to be like, you know, super just trying to work through this thing.

Katie Vernoy 33:31
Life transition.

TJ Walsh 33:32
Life transitions. They’re not totally caught off guard. So do you have a supervisor if you are even like so if you are independently licensed, and you’re in private practice, and you’ve never worked anywhere other than a private practice or a group practice. Have you seen these things maybe, maybe not. And if it does come up, do you have a supervisor who you can go to and who you can say, hey, like I was at minute 32 of this session, and all of the sudden there’s this gigantic thing in the room that I’ve never seen before, and I didn’t realize I was gonna see, right? That’s, that’s really, that’s really important to have that in place, right?

Katie Vernoy 34:13
Yeah

TJ Walsh 34:14
And then also the other question, the other issue is, like, the advice that we receive on Facebook pages and things where we’re trying to curate our practices with the clients that we want and everything, and then the immediate feedback is like, Oh, you have to refer out right away, right? You know? So, you know, this is part of, like, the vibe that we’re cultivating, not really lining up with real clinical experiences, and then what do we do about them when they when they show up and make it all work together?

Katie Vernoy 34:50
There’s a whole bunch of episodes that we’ve talked about this, so I’ll put a lot of links in the show at mtsgpodcast.com, but I wanted to get back to a point that you had mentioned earlier, because it seemed. Like, this is where things started, which is this concept of whether therapists should actually be neutral. And this, I think, speaks to the vibe, it speaks to validation, it speaks to lived experience. You know, therapists are fully human and Curt, and I’ve talked about this before, but I was just curious, because you put a lot of importance on neutrality and getting to transference and those types of things within this article. Why is neutrality important? What does neutrality actually mean in therapy, and not just like, hey, you can do whatever you want, and I’m not going to push back.

TJ Walsh 35:37
Yeah, it’s about it’s about containment, right? Neutrality, for me, is about, is about containment. It’s about the alliance that we are forming with with our with our patients, our clients. It’s about how and when we disclose things. Right? A lot of you know some of the stuff that I was responding to in this, you know, quickly written sub stack post was about disclosing where we stand on every little thing When a client is coming in, often, in an effort to be relatable to them or to you know, repel them immediately so we don’t have to deal with them. I’m gonna make ourselves more comfortable. And it’s has to do with confusion around our roles, right? Trying to take away clients agency, so it’s not like we are, we’re neutral. We’re not going to say anything, and we’re not going to have any any feedback for a client, or we’re not going to challenge them, right? Neutrality for me is, how do I hold the space? How do I contain it? How do I handle the stuff that comes up for me, countertransference, right? And how do I then use it or not use it? How do I manage the transference that comes in the other direction, right? And, you know, it’s, maybe that’s the thing. It’s like, it’s, how do I contain, how do I hold, how do I manage spillover, or or not? And it less about like, letting people know that you know you’re you didn’t vote for the particular administration that’s in power right now or not right? Like, whatever I would say, like, this is going to get me in trouble, but I would say we probably don’t have to discuss that. And I think there could be actually a lot of richness and depth that can come from working with somebody of a differing persuasion than than you, and you might be able to see some really awesome growth and and maybe even change, if that’s what, if that’s what happens for that person, because they were able to sit with you and you’re able to listen to them and work with them in ways that they’re not used to, as opposed to saying, hey, you know what this person is? A is a blankety blank, and, you know, I can’t work with them because they rub me the wrong way. Well, a lot of people are going to rub you the wrong way and are going to have problematic perspectives, but we need to learn how to work with that and contain that and challenge when appropriate.

Katie Vernoy 38:39
I’m really taking away that it’s something where, and I think Curt, we’ve had other conversations like this, so I’ll keep adding links in the show notes. But our job is not to work with people who are like us that or only work with people who are like us, who share similar beliefs and who we can kind of vibe with. It’s about getting into the process of change, and being able to do that through the relationship and being able to sit with folks who are different from us, who may have different goals or values, and be the therapists they need, versus just showing up as our unfiltered, authentic self and saying, accept me or not. And I think that’s over simplifying, and I think that there’s a lot more nuance to that conversation, and we’re way long on time, so we have to finish up. But I think there’s that, that element of trying to create a little bit of nuance in the larger conversation. Yes, lived experience is important. Yes, being relatable can be important, but that’s not necessarily the work of therapy. The work of therapy is opening those spaces to have the hard conversations and and be able to really move through the yuckiness that can be the change process.

TJ Walsh 39:56
Yeah, 100% Katie Vernoy saying all of the things that TJ was trying to say in a much more succinct way that makes sense.

Curt Widhalm 40:07
Where can people find out more about you and your practice?

TJ Walsh 40:10
Sure, so if they want to find out about my practice, they can go to TJWalshtherapy.com, if they want to find out about coaching and consulting opportunities, speaking, wanting to get me to come in and drone on for a long time. They can go to TJWalshcoaching.com I do have the reflective practitioner circle, which is a space for therapists, healers, to come and process their own stuff and talk about things that we don’t often get to talk about out in the normal supervision and consultation spaces. So I have that, you can find that on the site, and then, yeah, any, anytime, anyone wants to come and talk with me and get some, get some feedback on their on their stuff, I’m happy to hear from them.

Curt Widhalm 40:58
And we will include links to all of TJ’s stuff and all of the other episodes that Katie is referencing in our show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com. Follow us on our social media. Join our Facebook group, the Modern Therapist Group, to continue on with this and other conversations. And until next time, I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy and TJ Walsh.

… 41:21
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