In keeping with our mission to train therapists, GETME offers year-long internships for Counseling graduate students who want to learn to work experientially. (Note: GETME would be happy to take Social Work graduate students as interns; unfortunately, the Maine Social Work Board prohibits me, as an LCPC, from supervising you. Sorry!)
Here’s what you can expect from GETME:
Supervision: GETME interns have scheduled supervision twice a week: One hour of individual supervision, and a 90-minute group supervision. The supervision group consists of current interns, but also includes former interns who are continuing their training in experiential therapy. (Attendance in the group is free for conditionally licensed alumni of the GETME internship).
Although we’ll spend time on administrative supervision, the bulk of our efforts will be clinical in nature. It’s been said that the video camera is the microscope of psychotherapy, and GETME agrees; interns are expected to tape and review at least 1-2 sessions a week. 10-minute segments are brought to both individual and group supervision for review and consultation.
Theory: Being clear in your theory is enormously helpful in facilitating a successful therapy. If you intern at GETME, you’re going to learn to be very clear in your thinking about how you work. GETME takes a humanistic/experiential view of psychotherapy; if this is where your heart is, you might find an internship here quite congenial. In particular, we train in Person-Centered, Gestalt, and Emotion-Focused therapies.
Private Practice: The internship is set up very much like a private practice. You will do some of your own marketing, which will teach you 1) How to present yourself to the world as a counselor and, 2) How hard it is to get clients in the real world. Although I screen potential intern clients, once I’ve passed them on to you you’ll do all your own scheduling. You’ll also learn practice management software, clean your office, etc.
Here’s what I expect from Interns:
Supervision: You agree to meet weekly for both the individual and group supervision meetings.
One full year of internship. There are no short cuts in therapy, and there are no shortcuts in therapy training. It takes a long time to become an expert therapist — much longer than counseling school plus a year of internship. The students I want to work with gladly embrace life-long professional development, and doing a full year devoted to training in experiential therapy is not onerous for them.
Minimum of 8 clients a week: And maybe more, since you often have to schedule 9-10 to get 8, as there will typically be cancellations, etc.
Single Site: I’m looking for students who want to focus their attention on the GETME internship, rather than splitting their time among 2-3 sites.
If you’re interested . . .
Get in touch. I really enjoy talking with counseling students, so don’t be shy! If the first phone call sounds like we may be a match, we’ll set up a meeting. I usually meet two or three times with someone before I offer them an internship. (If the weather is nice, this may include a long walk!) Sometimes there are readings assigned between these meetings. We’re going to be working closely together for a long time, so I want to be sure we both feel quite strongly about undertaking this process together.