ReConceive Therapy: Co-Therapy for Everyone’s Nervous System

Sometimes solo therapy feels pretty bleak . . .

A client tells you he has no emotion as he reveals his father’s suicide. Therapy fails to gain traction and he continues to not feel. Another client has an auto-immune disorder that started when she discovered her husband’s secret addiction to porn. Months of therapy yield only slight improvements in her mood, and the physical issues persist.

Ever feel like you have half the pieces you need to solve a puzzle? This feeling contributes to therapist burnout.

ReConceive podcast focuses on therapist (and all helper/healer) burnout and how to reverse it. We talk about what a well-supported therapist looks like and how all of us can take steps to feel better and make our work more effective and sustainable. First, all of us need a village.

Every Therapist Needs a Village.

In fact, a therapist’s own tribe makes the work possible. Without our systems of mutual support, we:

• get tired and depleted, 
• we feel stuck in seemingly impossible client problems, 
• we stop learning and growing, 
• we go into trance (not the good kind), 
• and we become automated in our approach to helping.

This is a recipe for burnout, which also means therapist depression.

Yesterday in our podcast show, ReConceive, Tracy Maxfield and I talked about putting our skill sets together for co-therapy. Working together as a team gives us: 

1. Greater creativity, flexibility, and freedom in session (aka, fun)
2. A fuller set of possible interventions and insights; more opportunities to learn new things as we work
3. An improved and shortened therapy process
4. Mutual support and supervision
5. Shared responsibilities and decision-making, and
6. A shared emotional load
7. MORE IMAGINATION

Co-Therapy: Why would anyone do this work alone?

For Tracy and I, co-therapy means one of us can focus on the body aspects of our client’s problem while the other listens for the big picture of trauma and attachment issues. Tracy knows the nervous system and its interrelationships with all other physiological systems, inside and out. I  know relationship, family-of-origin, and story. Tracy tracks emotion in the body and I help a person take hold of it. Tracy uses many interrelated methods to relieve specific pain or dysfunction and I use many interrelated methods to broaden and deepen the improvement.

Most of all, we feel supported and alive with the learning possibilities that go with doing ReConceive Co-Therapy. What if every workday could feel like this?

Look for more detail to come soon: the work expands and unfolds as we dig into it. We hope that you will follow along and find your own ways to ReConceive the important work you do in our world. 

Write to us with questions, stories, and problems: here on the website or at reconceivetherapy@gmail.com.

Talk soon . . .