This week the topic of substance abuse treatment has arrived at the doorstep of the class. I have worked in drug treatment for over 5 years, first as a tech, then as a paraprofessional and now as an administrator of sorts. It seems to me like substance abuse treatment is a whole separate entity from therapy per se. I don’t think it fits into my mind as the type of thing where a person has met a great deal of their needs and now wants to grow as a person a la Maslow, which is where I see myself as a therapist in private practice, some years down the road. I see drug treatment as a very behaviorally oriented intervention, where people are educated about the tools they need to have in order to stay clean and feel happy staying clean. If they remain in recovery for some amount of time then they may most certainly seek therapy later. What I guess I am saying is – drug treatment is not therapy.

So after taking the what-kind-of-therapist-are-you-test last week, I decided to purchase the Yalom book, The Gift of Therapy. I couldn’t put it down last night, the guy is damn insightful. He also seems to be of the belief that managed care has severely compromised the ability to engage in a commitment to open ended therapy with a clinician. Somehow I doubt that Yalom has a hard time getting private-pay patients into his practice. There seems to be a certain defeatist attitude in terms of managed care. I suspect that if a therapist is well established they will be able to find patients that are willing and able to pay out of pocket for treatment. Let’s face it, private health insurance is only about 15 years old, and probably won’t last forever. Freud probably wasn’t paid by HMO’s either.

Haven’t written in a little bit. It’s hard to keep up the discipline to journal or blog or whatever you want to call it. I don’t think I could ever keep a daily journal, at least not one that was written in a physical book – it would probably get lost.

This week in class we took a little diagnostic exam as an exercise. The exam was to give us a hint as to what overarching theoretical perspective we were most aligned with. The one that came up on top for me was the existential school. Which I was completely surprised about. I know that I was a philosophy major in undergrad, but I didn’t really get into the whole meaning of life part of Philosophy. I was more concerned with the foundations of language and mathematics as well as epistemology. I guess now I will try to read some more about existentialism in therapy.