How to Be a Bad Therapist, Nick Totton & Allison Priestman

How to Be A Bad Therapist, Nick Totton & Allison Priestman
A video to introduce the How to Be A Bad Therapist book. Available in book and Kindle form on Amazon.
In this short and hopefully easy-to-read book we aim to throw open some windows, to bring fresh air into the discourse about what makes a good or bad therapist and to offer some redefinitions of therapy. We suggest that therapy isn’t an expert knowledge system, open to being standardised and manualised, but is more akin to local, indigenous, embodied and relational forms of knowledge. Therapy isn’t primarily an academic activity, and we would argue is not best taught in an academic, rigorously assessed context. We are interested in questioning who sets the rules? Are the rules and expectations of how to be a good therapist the most helpful ones? In the search for high standards and protection of the client has something been lost?We believe that the core skills of being a therapist are human and innate. Rather than offering a restrictive model of what should and shouldn't be done, training could reframe itself to look at what's getting in the way of the practitioner's ability to be in contact, offer intimacy, create and maintain an appropriate relationship. Training to explore how to work creatively with, rather than act out from, our wounding. Counselling and psychotherapy, especially when we work relationally, is often an unpredictable process. We will explore how to embrace the inherent messiness, awkwardness and un-knowableness, of working as a therapist.