Do Therapists Need Therapy? Reflections on Training Requirements

I’ve been reflecting on whether counsellors, psychotherapists, and also Clinical Somatic Educators should be required to experience therapy as part of their training…

The Case for Personal Therapy in Training

I strongly believe that to qualify as a counsellor or therapist, you need to have experienced therapy as a client. When I trained as a counsellor, I was surprised that not many programmes available to me in my area actually required this.

I was fortunate to have another job, so I took a year between my Foundation course at and starting full training, during which I went to therapy for the first time in my life. My experiences of therapy were beneficial on multiple levels – ALL of which left me better equipped to be someone else’s therapist.

The Problem of Exclusivity

However, there’s a concerning flip side. A key thing that put me off training as an existential therapist, for instance – and what I heard from my supervisor about other expensive trainings (often psychoanalytic in nature) – was the sheer number of very expensive personal sessions required, especially when they’re available only with a limited number of therapists.

This underscored how exclusionary such trainings can be (despite rhetoric about inclusion, which is well intentioned but doesn’t seem to change much!).

While I don’t expect people not to charge what a training is “worth,” it seems problematic to make things so exclusive without creating funding or sliding scale opportunities.

For my training in Somatic Experiencing, the personal session requirements were more reasonable, but meaningful. I completed the required personal and supervision sessions (and then some) to become an SEP quite readily, finding them useful both personally and professionally.

A Different Experience: Clinical Somatics Training

My experience training in Clinical Somatics revealed something quite different.

I only ever discovered Clinical Somatics because I was experiencing ever-worsening pain that nothing seemed to help.

Hence, I trained as a Certified Clinical Somatic Educator (CCSE) because Clinical Somatics resolved my chronic pain of over a decade – most of it in a matter of weeks, and all of it within a year. It changed my life.

And… my personal experience of struggling daily with chronic pain remains completely invaluable when helping clients with anything from chronic pain to niggling discomfort.

Why? Because I completely understand where they’re coming from. I deeply understand, from personal experience, how often they’ve been poorly served – not just by mainstream medicine, but usually by many physical therapists as well.

I get their frustration, their feeling lost, and their utter despair.

(This isn’t to say medical professionals and physical therapists aren’t highly skilled and well-intentioned. It’s that I understand that most don’t grasp the central role of the neuromuscular and nervous systems in creating chronic pain, and so don’t have anything helpful to offer about resolving it.)

At the time I trained, there were no ‘requirements’ for us to have a certain number of CSE sessions, but this was largely because everyone who came to the training had experienced Clinical Somatics (at least in a group class format): that’s why we were there!

This was an intriguing difference.

A Cultural Divide

This seemed like such a different training experience from psychotherapy, including as an SEP.

There’s something about psychotherapy that draws on universal understandings of emotion, struggle, and suffering (as well as of holding space, and of listening being essential aspects of healing).

But with Clinical Somatics, it’s almost as if to really understand the training – particularly that it’s not ‘bodywork’ – one has to have experienced long-term discomfort or pain that seems beyond anyone’s capacity to help.

Usually, those who’ve had this experience have found full or partial relief (and a full understanding of their pain) only in Clincial Somatics.

Without these experiences, it’s rare for anyone to take the training… because the approach is not well known, and flies in the face of much mainstream healthcare, despite being grounded deeply in neuroscience and physiology.

This contrasts sharply with counselling and psychotherapy.

Many people train in these fields who understand the ‘symptoms’ that psychotherapy seeks to support, and many experience those symptoms in varying degrees. But comparatively few therapists I’ve met have had their life changed first by psychotherapy and were thus motivated to become a therapist.

Something This Reveals About Our Wider Culture

This isn’t really about some specific difference between psychotherapists and Clinical Somatic Educators, nor even about the two approaches. It’s about our culture.

While symptoms defined as emotional and psychological are regarded as needing help via listening and talking – and sensing, as increasingly is used by somatic therapies that pay attention to the body – there’s still something about physical pain, especially ‘medically unexplained symptoms’, that’s dealt with as if it’s ‘all in the mind’ if medical, healthcare or ‘bodywork’ approaches don’t resolve (or find an explanation for) the pain.

The medical and ‘bodywork’ approaches are still considered the first ports of call… and then, treatment for trauma is often the go-to.

The approach of Clinical Somatics (the ‘original’ Somatics, developed by Thomas Hanna), though, says something quite different: that the first port of call with human pain and suffering should be somatic. That we should start from the inside out.

Understanding the Soma: Why Experience Matters

In Clinical Somatics, the soma is understood as a living, breathing, moving process. Its problems come from literal stuckness – not metaphorical stuckness.

This literal stuckness shows up as pain in the muscles, which cannot move without the brain and nervous system’s input.

This is why specific neuromuscular movements that speak directly to patterns of stuck stress create release and relief (and why the sensing and less specific movement work of approaches like SE can often powerfully support that release).

This raises an important question: do those who haven’t suffered from chronic pain or discomfort really appreciate this distinction?

I’m often told that somatic therapy has ‘helped’ in reducing someone’s pain, but then they come to me (or a CCSE colleague) because the physical pain returns. Or because they feel better, but it hasn’t quite gone.

This is one reason I think there’s a long way to go in understanding what truly somatic work entails.

I’m not suggesting that no one can be a somatic therapist unless they’ve experienced debilitating pain! But there’s something about that experience – in our culture as it is – that allows for a greater lived awareness of, and intellectual grasp of, humans as somas. Not as a ‘mind’ with a ‘body’ where these two aspects can be helped separately, but as integrated wholes.

It’s only in truly somatic work – practice based on a lived understanding of what a soma really is – that the whole soma, the whole self, can truly release. This isn’t about helping ‘the body’ more or less than ‘the mind,’ but about listening to and speaking to the whole soma.

Yet in our culture – even with the rise of ‘somatic’ therapies – this understanding of human pain and suffering isn’t as widely shared as concepts of emotional and psychological distress.

We still tend to compartmentalize: talk therapy for the mind, bodywork (now including ‘sensing’) for the body, medication for symptoms.

In contrast, true somatic work recognizes that we are integrated wholes.

Until this understanding becomes more widespread, and until we approach human suffering from this truly somatic perspective, we’ll continue to miss opportunities for the kind of profound release and healing that comes from working with the whole person as a living, breathing soma.

If you want to know more about the work I do to integrate Clinical Somatics into therapists’ personal and professional practuce (from fellow SEPs and other somatic therapists to counsellors and psychotherapists without formal training in ‘somatic’ therapy), get in touch and ask for details, or click here.