A Common Therapist Dilemma: Trained in Multiple Therapies but Still Feeling Lost

In the domain of psychological therapy, the reality is stark—50% of clients who attend treatment will not recover fully. So, our field has an issue. And the impact of this issue is profound and it extends far beyond “client outcomes”. When the majority of our clients aren’t improving, their pain continues and so does ours. Poor therapeutic results impact our clients, they impact us, and they say something about our field as a whole.

An obvious way to try to improve client outcomes, used by many mental health professionals, is to invest more time and more money into more therapy models. And that’s on top of all of the time and money they have already spent on training. But, when we analyze what we gained from our investment, it probably wouldn’t tell us to invest more in the same way. 

Ask yourself this: When you invest in learning more therapy models, do you really feel more equipped to deal with more clients? 

Of course, learning more models has an intrinsic appeal to us as clinicians as it satisfies our natural curiosity and love of learning. It seems to promise to give us something we didn’t already have or to provide a missing piece that will help us to put our puzzle together as a coherent treatment package. But when the promise of yet another therapy model gets broken, ironically we begin to think that the only way to improve is to keep finding more models to invest in. 

At the PBBT Institute, we found this to be such an endemic issue for the clinicians we train that we recently undertook a piece of in-depth qualitative research using extended interviews with clinicians with a range of expertise exploring this and related topics. And what we found was staggering. The majority of senior clinicians had invested in training in as many as 10 different therapy models. And what did they do with all of these? They tried their best to integrate them into a coherent package that they could use reliably and comfortably. And is that what they ended up with? No. Unfortunately, the different models left them feeling like a “Jack of all trades and a master of none.”

This phenomenon isn’t just frustrating and it isn’t unique to clinicians with specific levels of experience. Instead, it reflects a field that has not provided a holistic treatment package that effectively addresses clients’ needs whilst allowing clinicians to work from a coherent perspective. Instead, professionals are left to piece together various models, without a guiding framework that offers clarity and consistency in how to work with clients.

At the PBBT Institute, we are determined to address this challenge. Our approach to training is designed to integrate the knowledge and practice of PBBT. PBBT is a framework that is both scientifically grounded and adaptable to the diverse needs of clients. Our training in PBBT gives clinicians a coherent pathway that works like a roadmap to guide them on what to do with a client, why to do it and how to do it at a given point. The PBBT pathway gives you an overarching framework that you can trust, lean on and keep coming back to for guidance and direction in sessions with your clients.

It would be a fair question to ask whether clinicians who train in PBBT go on to invest in more therapy models or do they really find what they need in a single framework? And the answer is simple. The vast majority of clinicians who invest in PBBT use it as a last stop because it gives them exactly what they need. Instead of investing in more models, they focus on developing their PBBT knowledge and skills and bringing these together in their own way, developing tools that they feel comfortable using and that fit their individual style.

If you’ve ever felt that despite all your training, you are still searching for something more, you are far from alone. You are in the majority. The field of psychotherapy needs a transformation. Clients and clinicians deserve more, but we can’t give them more if we keep doing the same thing. At the PBBT Institute, we do not believe that more therapy models is the answer, it was just the assumption built on what the field has failed to provide. Together, we can rebuild our field with a coherent framework that clinicians can lean on for guidance and direction and that can give clients hope for a new start.

If you would like to learn more about how PBBT can support you as a Clinician, get in touch with us.