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Are you a disillusioned psychotherapist?
- Steph Turner
- Dec 7, 2024
- 10 min read
Updated: Dec 11, 2024
Are you a disillusioned psychotherapist? Do you long for a different career?
Become a need-responder. Instead of trying to help the individual adjust, you incentivize others to adjust to your client’s vulnerable needs.
Get in on the ground floor and help co-create this amazing alternative to legal services. Help us all resolve more needs to help us improve our overall wellness.
Which do you prefer?
Remain working in a profession you find dissatisfying, hoping somehow things will get better.
OR
Join efforts to co-create a fresh alternative for accountably responding to your needs.
When prompting ChatGPT for the “top reasons counselors can be disillusioned with offering psychotherapy,” it offered these 18 pain points. See how the new professional service of need-response answers each one.
Click on the listed item to go there instantly. Return to this list by clicking on any header below in green text.
After each of these items below, see how need-response can be far, far better. Click the right arrow to expand the text.
After each point below, see how need-response can be far, far better. This is where you can join the effort. You are welcomed to respond to this vision, add to it, critique it, and help shape this alternative. Join us in resolving more needs to improve our overall wellness, which the law itself can never do.
According to ChatGPT, “Counselors and psychotherapists can become disillusioned with their profession for various reasons. Here are some common factors.”
“Constantly hearing and processing clients' traumas, struggles, and pain can be emotionally exhausting, leading to compassion fatigue or burnout.”
Need-response improves our capacity to tolerate life’s discomforts.
As a professional need-responder, your focus is more on the power relations affecting the client. Instead of trying to help the individual adjust, you equip and support the individual to adjust the terms of their relationship with those in positions of social influence.
You equip your client to improve their tolerance for discomfort, for emotional pain, for processing more trauma, to remove cause for pain. You share this emotional load with the client’s support team.
“Therapists often carry the emotional weight of their clients' issues, which can take a toll on their mental well-being.”
Need-response links your evoked emotions to your affected needs.
As a professional need-responder, you help your client connect each of their emotions to a specific affected need. You do the same with the client’s onboarded support team members.
You then distinguish between what they can do themselves to resolve such needs, and what they cannot do. Instead of bearing this emotional weight yourself, you equip them to address the source of each need prompting each emotion.
“Clients may expect immediate results or see therapy as a ‘quick fix,’ which can lead to frustration when progress is slow or challenges persist.”
Need-response equips clients to manage their own expectations.
As a professional need-responder, you equip your client to stretch their capacity to endure discomfort. This should deflate their urgency for quick results.
You give them the tools to fix their own problems. You guide them to appreciate the time required to incentivize others to be more responsive to needs.
You direct the flow of the process. You provide them alternatives for when others in power resist the necessary responsiveness. By improving your client’s capacities to meet such challenges, you raise the client’s expectations of themselves.
“Therapists may feel ineffective or disheartened when clients don’t make progress, resist change, or relapse into harmful behaviors.”
Need-responders enables greater improvements by addressing externalities.
As a professional need-responder, you only onboard clients demonstrating sufficient capacity to follow this disciplined process. In most cases, the client screens themselves using our online self-assessment form.
You then help your client identify if any resistance to change indicates a necessity for some externality to change. Wellness is psychosocial, so resistance to change could emerge naturally as they intuitively expect others to adjust as much as they are adjusting for them.
This sheds light on relapses into harmful behaviors. It likely indicates excessive emotional pain from their still unresolved needs. You’re incentivized to help improve their wellness outcomes by enabling them to address each unmet need causing them unbearable pain.
“Managing professional boundaries can be difficult, especially with clients who become overly dependent, cross boundaries, or misinterpret the therapeutic relationship.”
Need-response risks less crossing of personal boundaries.
As a professional need-responder, you begin with a hands-on approach. But then gradually delegate more and more of the process to your client’s support team.
You can monitor if boundaries get crossed between team members. You yourself can shift more of your focus to addressing powerful impactors.
You model to your client and team members how best to maintain professional boundaries. While friendly toward each other, this is not a group of friends who can take each other for granted. Success depends on maintaining a professional décor.
“Many therapists face challenges with inconsistent income, low reimbursement rates from insurance, or the financial strain of running a private practice.”
Need-response provides you with a steadier flow of income.
As a professional need-responder, you receive financial support from the Anankelogy Foundation for basic income. As you grow your responsive capacities, you expand your marketability as others demand your unique services.
You don’t appeal to insurance panels for revenue. Or lower your hourly rate to fit the strained budgets of your singular clients. Instead of a private healthcare cost, you are providing a wellness investment that others can get behind.
You encourage your client to speak truth to power with a crowdfunding campaign. Your client attracts investment in their wellness cause, which helps others as much if not more than themselves. The more support they attract, the greater your revenue share.
“Working within larger systems (e.g., healthcare, education, or social services) can be frustrating due to bureaucracy, limited resources, or systemic failures that hinder client care.”
Need-responders challenges social structures like the healthcare system.
As a professional need-responder, you cover both internal and external contributors to your client’s wellness goals. This includes addressing structural barriers.
You equip your client with the support system to challenge social structures hindering the resolution of needs This includes the built-in barriers in our healthcare system, in bureaucracies, in educational systems and social services, and more.
Need-response exists outside of these strained institutions. You likely can find some respite for yourself as you assist your clients, with less risk of countertransference.
“Despite growing awareness, stigma around mental health can make it harder for clients to fully engage in therapy or for therapists to feel that their work is valued by society.”
Need-response dissolves stigma by addressing external wellness factors.
As a professional need-responder, you recognize wellness as more than what goes on within one’s mind. You learn to appreciate the label “mental health” as a synecdoche.
Like “boots on the ground” or “hired hand”, you appreciate “mental” as merely part of the whole process of wellbeing. But you also recognize the distorting biases when taking that figure of speech too literally—and neglecting the externalities that affect wellbeing.
Your whole approach emphasizes how wellness is psychosocial. Unlike psychotherapy, you help your client directly address powerful barriers to their wellbeing, in ways that incentivize powerholders to engage and therapeutically adjust where appropriate.
09 Isolation
“Solo practitioners may experience professional isolation, with limited opportunities to collaborate with or receive support from colleagues.”
Need-response builds social connections with a support team.
As a professional need-responder, you rarely work alone. You help your client build a support team.
Along the way, you may forge partnerships with other professionals to help in the process. That includes other psychotherapists.
You help each assisting psychotherapist to shift from adjusting the individual to adjusting the terms of each unresponsive relationship. Especially those with powerholders, who may even collaborate with your efforts to improve your client’s wellbeing.
“Counselors often face complex ethical challenges, such as balancing confidentiality with legal obligations, which can be stressful and emotionally taxing.”
Need-response risks fewer ethical conundrums.
As a professional need-responder, you gradually disengage from day-to-day contact with your client. You step back and let them lead, or be led by, their emerging support team.
You become more of a prompter, helping them remember their lines. This lets you steer clear of ethical traps you may encounter in psychotherapy.
For example, you don’t risk slipping into being too permissive with a client out of a likely fear they may not return. You continually help your client and their supporters to respect every inflexible need as the standard for others to respect their inflexible needs.
“In agency or organizational settings, therapists may feel pressured to meet productivity targets or focus on documentation over quality care.”
Need-response automates documentation of wellness improvements.
As a professional need-responder in the era of artificial intelligence, documentation can be automatic. You typically serve your client via a videoconferencing call, where documentation can be automated.
The process invites your client to periodically record their current wellness levels. You receive helpful feedback to help you improve those outcomes.
Measurable wellness improvements are central to quality of the process. Accountability gets built into the process, to keep your hands free doing the work of wellness improvement.
“Hearing detailed accounts of clients’ traumatic experiences can lead to vicarious trauma, negatively impacting therapists' mental health.”
Need-response equips all to process their emotionally disturbing experiences.
As a professional need-responder, you help your clients address any current causes of trauma. Unlike typical psychotherapy, you are not helpless to do anything about it.
Instead of serving as a sounding board for your client’s trauma, risking your own emotional wellbeing, you equip your client to challenge the source of such trauma. But in a way that helps those sources own up to their impacts.
The more your client can “stop the bleeding” of ongoing traumatizing events, the less their past traumas tend to be evoked. You help your clients to get their disturbing feelings to better serve them, so they no longer feel powerlessly trapped to serve their feelings.
“Therapists who prioritize their clients' needs over their own may neglect their own self-care or professional development, leading to stagnation.”
Need-response provides ample opportunity for personal improvement.
As a professional need-responder, you may be highly emotionally invested at the beginning of a wellness campaign. But as your client works more with their emerging support team, your intensity naturally wanes.
As you observe how your client’s wellbeing improves, your own wellbeing likely improves. The process allows for less risk of neglecting your own self-care.
Much like the counselor reporting to their supervisor, you typically will report to a more senior professional need-responder. Who will ensure you’re taking care of yourself enough to reliably serve your clients.
“Working with resistant, aggressive, or highly demanding clients can create a stressful therapeutic environment.”
Need-response filters out unqualified clients.
As a professional need-responder focusing on improving wellness, you rarely if ever have to serve a client who is not functioning at a standard minimum. Clients presenting any aggressive or demanding attitude must identify a proxy or ally to represent their interests.
In some situations, that proxy could be their psychotherapist. Need-response utilizes a business associate agreement to partner with such psychotherapists. Instead of addressing addictions directly as psychotherapists do, the need-responder addresses it indirectly. Any addiction gets symbolized by how much money and energy uncontrollably spent elsewhere, as the specifics matter less than ending the cause of a client’s pain from unmet needs.
At this point, you never have to work with an involuntary client. The client must demonstrate their readiness, willingness and ability to get through a process that puts them in charge of their own wellbeing. And demonstrate the skills to cooperate with their peer supporters.
“Therapists may struggle with societal issues such as systemic inequality, lack of access to mental health resources, or navigating cultural differences with clients.”
Need-response equips all to take on unresponsive social structures.
As a professional need-responder, helping your clients take on structural barriers is your specialty. You equip them and their supporters to tackle systemic inequalities.
The first phase of the wellness campaign tries to exhaust all your client can do about their affected wellbeing. Thereafter, the process challenges Western culture’s presumption of individuality. You embrace this cultural difference that appreciates how wellness is psychosocial.
You help your client attract supporters most aligned with their cultural values and outlook. You gain insight into common and divergent cultural views with the support team.
“Despite the critical nature of their work, therapists may feel undervalued compared to other professions, especially in terms of compensation and societal respect.”
Need-response can unleash your potential to earn the public’s respect.
As a professional need-responder helping clients take on the world at large, you’re poised to garner a unique level of professional respect. Demand for your specialization could command much higher levels of compensation.
The more you can incentivize powerholders to be accountably more responsive to your clients, for the benefit of their constituents, the greater your potential for earning prestige. Especially when they leave testimonials appreciating your work.
“The risk of client complaints, licensing board investigations, or legal actions can create a constant undercurrent of anxiety for practitioners.”
Need-response responds more effectively to client complaints.
As a professional need-responder, you learn how to prioritize inflexible needs over flexible laws. You quickly link any cited norm to the needs it exists to serve, the address the context of those affected needs.
You give your clients and team members ample opportunity to express their affected needs with how you conduct yourself with them. Any investigation or legal action gets held accountable to respecting the needs on all sides.
Need-responses asserts a higher standard over adversarial law: properly resolving each other’s needs. And to thoroughly unpack, in an environment of mutual understanding and support, how each can improve their responsiveness to needs—without slipping down the rabbit hole of questionable preferences.
“The emotional demands of the job can make it hard to ‘leave work at work,’ potentially impacting the therapist’s personal relationships and well-being.”
Need-response lets you balance your personal and professional lives.
As a professional need-responder, you rarely face the kind of private emotional turmoil common in psychotherapy. After the initial one-on-one phase, you find it easier to leave the work behind and enjoy your personal life more.
The more you observe everyone’s wellness improve, the less you would want to leave such beneficial outcomes at work. You may welcome the same in your own personal life.
ChatGPT adds, “Addressing these challenges often requires therapists to prioritize their self-care, seek supervision or peer support, set boundaries, and occasionally reassess their career path or the populations they serve.” Need-response can do all that and more.
Instead of treating the individual, you treat the power relation. Instead of helping your client seek relief from symptoms, you help them identify unresolved needs prompting those uncomfortable symptoms. Instead of charging them for serving their private health needs, you invite their peers to invest in their public wellness cause.
Does this speak to you? Can you see yourself embracing the opportunity to become a need-responder?
Thank you for your interest. Follow developments by listening to the Need-Response podcast each Wednesday, starting 30 April 2025.
Let’s build this amazing service that can more effectively serve your overlooked needs.
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