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Qualified therapists’ experience of personal therapy
Author(s) -
Daw Becky,
Joseph Stephen
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
counselling and psychotherapy research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.38
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1746-1405
pISSN - 1473-3145
DOI - 10.1080/14733140701709064
Subject(s) - personal development , experiential learning , psychology , personal distress , personal care , personal life , distress , value (mathematics) , psychotherapist , medicine , clinical psychology , medical education , family medicine , pedagogy , philosophy , epistemology , machine learning , computer science
Recent work shows that the majority of therapists strongly value personal therapy for what it can bring to their professional practice, and for personal development. The aim of this study was to explore qualified therapists’ experiences of personal therapy. Of the 220 qualified therapists who were contacted via post and asked to take part in a questionnaire study, 48 returned the completed questionnaire, which consisted of a series of closed and open questions. Two‐thirds of respondents had engaged in personal therapy. The two most frequently cited reasons for engaging in personal therapy were personal growth and personal distress. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) identified two broad domains: impact on the person and impact on the professional. Results show that those surveyed recognised the value of personal therapy to themselves as a form of self‐care and personal development. Personal therapy was valued in professional practice as a form of experiential learning from being in the client role. The limitations of this research included a relatively low response rate, raising the question of whether those most likely to have had positive experiences of personal therapy were more likely to participate. Future research might deliberately seek to understand negative experiences of personal therapy. Other avenues for future research include the need to understand how experiences of therapy relate to gender, profession, and therapeutic orientation.