When I started my first clinical internship during my training to be a psychotherapist, I was overwhelmed, to say the least. I had a caseload of about 15 clients who were struggling with anxiety, depression, anger management, grief, trauma, and substance use issues. I cared deeply about the adolescents and adults in my office, but I was a graduate student who had no practical experience in how to help them. I say this not to be self-deprecating, but to be honest about the reality of student internships: I did not know what I was doing.
I had an excellent supervisor, supportive colleagues, an abundance of mental health books and podcasts at my fingertips, and my ongoing education, but in some ways, these factors did as much to contribute to my overwhelm as to assuage it. Information is needed and helpful, but when too much comes too fast, it can be hard to integrate. The metaphor “drinking from a firehose” comes to mind.
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Around this time, I was lucky to stumble across one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever been given. A friend at my outpatient therapy office who had recently been an intern herself advised me to choose one concept each week to weave into my work.
She said, “Pick an idea that you think is relevant for your clients and that you find valuable — like distress tolerance, boundaries, emotion regulation, or stages of change — and get comfortable enough with the concept that you can present it concisely and effectively to your clients. Maybe this will involve developing an exercise that you can practice together in a session or printing a handout that they can take home with them. Throughout the given week, share the concept with whomever you think it’s applicable, and in doing so, you’ll not only help your clients but will expand your personal Rolodex of therapy resources.”
I took my friend’s advice immediately, and I credit “concept of the week” with keeping me from drowning during my early days as a therapist.
Now that I’m a bit more seasoned, the advice continues to serve me well, but for a different reason: It keeps me prioritizing learning new theories, tools, and techniques each week. I’m at a point where I don’t need to be adding new concepts to my work 52 times a year, but regular additions certainly benefit my clients and keep me engaged in the work on an intellectual level.
For instance, I’m currently reading a book about attachment theory, which posits that early relationships with caregivers form the foundation for how individuals develop emotional bonds, trust, and security in later relationships, and I’ve been enjoying sharing valuable insights from the book with my clients in digestible ways. I’ve been summarizing the four main attachment styles in sessions, and then asking clients to consider which style they identify with.
Then, since I have found that clients tend to enjoy completing self-assessments, I have been directing them to this quiz to help them more formally identify their attachment style. We’ll then spend some time digesting the results in our next session, including talking about their childhood relationships with their parents or caregivers, and how they see their attachment style play out in adulthood.
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Identifying a concept of the week has worked so well for me in my professional life that I’ve started to consider ways that I can adopt the practice in my personal life as well. Here’s an example: I love to do yoga, but I’ve found that if I wait until I can fit attending a class into my schedule, there will be no yoga for me. Heck, I can’t even get myself to open my laptop and find a 10-minute video on YouTube. What I can do, though, is learn one new pose each Sunday, and then practice it daily throughout the week as I wait for my coffee to brew.
“Concept of the week” helps me keep learning at a steady, doable pace. It isn’t rocket science…but maybe that’s why it works so well. When life gets busy or I’m feeling overwhelmed, I don’t need complex solutions or intricate plans; I need simple strategies. Integrating one new thing a week – be it an idea, a strategy, a yoga pose, a cooking skill, a guitar chord, a memorized stanza of poetry, or any number of other concepts of interest – is just that.