I am going to take a risk and possibly expose a lot of my ignorance of therapy but I am curious to know if I am the only one who thinks it would be beneficial to have more than one therapist that I can call on for help.

If I could afford the time and money to add a therapist to my treatment I would want to add two; a DBT T (or other psycho-educator) and a pastoral counselor. I don't know that I would see both of them every week or for an extended period of time but I like the idea of having these as options to add to my therapy. I did a modified version of this idea for a few months when I attended a DBT Skills group and a therapy group while seeing a pastoral counselor and I found it helpful. I am not doing that anymore. When the therapy and skills groups ended, I also stopped seeing the PC and began with a T who works specifically with SA trauma and began attending a twelve week support group for that as well.

The psycho-educator would help to continue building and maintaining the skills which help me handle the intense emotions that come up between individual sessions with my therapist. I would not process the emotions or the content which stirred those emotions with the psycho-educator, but I would need to learn what is needed to contain them and then keep a list of the triggers to work through with the primary T.

The pastoral counselor would help with the spiritual struggles that come up during counseling. Especially in the area of acceptance of what has happened in my past, the issues I am currently facing, and of what never will be in the future. Lol, writing that made me think I need a grief counselor too! I might say that except for me I know that acceptance is strongly tied to my understanding of the sovereignty of God; therefore, wrestling with acceptance is in fact wrestling with some of my faith issues. When life appears to conflict with what I know is true about God I need someone with the same faith that I want to embrace (key point) to help me with that piece. Maybe a minister of the gospel can do this sort of thing. I don't know. I just know it has to be someone whose faith will not be rocked because a client, who is digging deep in their soul, has hard-to-answer questions.

I know the usual client would not need this much care but it seems like a good idea for those who are a high risk to SI or have other high maintenance issues and want to avoid hospitalization. Another reason might be to expedite the process of healing or at least what is involved in the healing process. The peripheral therapists would have to set boundaries on what can be discussed in session with them. That way they will only enhance what the client is getting from therapy and not interfere with it. I am sure there are other reasons beyond the fear of losing a client or lawsuit issues that would keep a therapist from sharing a client with another therapist but, because I am not a trained counselor nor privy to the secrets of their trade, I cannot think what they would be.

I would love to hear thoughts and any experiences you have with this.

deeplyrooted