April 27, 2020

Gaslighting Therapists

35 minutes

Curt and Katie talk about the concern that therapists will be gaslit as therapist workforce takes on the next epidemic – the mental health pandemic. We discuss how mental health workers are seen as essential, but are not paid or are underpaid. We dig into the dangerous “Hero Narrative” and its specific impacts on the health and livelihood. We also provide some calls to action to move our profession in the right direction, especially during these times.

It’s time to reimagine therapy and what it means to be a therapist. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy talk about how to approach the role of therapist in the modern age.

In this episode we talk about:

The concern that mental health workers are seen as essential, but are often not paid

The stagnation of wages already present in our profession

The opportunity to stand up and improve our profession

The call for volunteers that has already started

The challenge of considering volunteerism relative to the needs of your clients and your family

The other opportunities to give back and serve clients for free and increase access to mental health services

The public demonization of therapists pushing back on requests to provide free mental health services

The danger of the Hero Narrative

The specific impact of the feminization of caring and helping professions

The fallacy of “getting paid” in supervised hours

How this work is like jumping on a grenade for the greater good (and you can only jump on one grenade)

Ways to pull out the idea that “Sacrificing” yourself is necessary or even acceptable as a therapist – looking at ourselves as the instruments of change requiring us to protect ourselves

Call to Action – the need to stand up for self-protection, refrain from taking unpaid positions, positions without proper protections, and from taking supervisory positions that support these types of organizations

Call to Action – Contacting legislators to support only legislation that provides protections for the therapists, demand language that only provides funding to agencies that already pay their workers

Call to Action – Pressure professional organizations to support and write these types of bills

The importance of asking for a living wage for mental health workers

How to give back and volunteer responsibly and thoughtfully

...more

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By Curt Widhalm, LMFT and Katie Vernoy, LMFT

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