Continuing Education for Therapists: Why I’m Teaching Again

Teaching has always been one of the great loves of my professional life.

For twelve years, I had the incredible privilege of teaching psychology and counseling students at Whitworth University. I loved the classroom—the questions, the conversations, the moments when something complicated suddenly clicked, and especially getting to watch students slowly become clinicians.

When I stepped away from full-time university teaching, there were a lot of things I was ready to leave behind.

Teaching was not one of them.

I missed taking things that can feel intimidating—diagnosis, ethics, documentation, treatment planning, the messy realities of actually being a therapist—and helping people make sense of them. I missed getting to say, “Okay, here’s what this actually looks like in the real world.”

And over the last several years, I realized I never really stopped teaching.

The classroom just changed

These days, much of my teaching happens through clinical supervision, consultation, training therapists, conversations with colleagues, and answering the seemingly endless stream of questions that come with actually doing this work.

Some of those questions are clinical. Some are ethical. Some are about diagnosis, documentation, insurance, boundaries, money, or private practice.

And some are the wonderful kinds of questions that don’t have one perfect answer.

Over and over, I find myself doing the same thing I used to do in the classroom: taking something complicated, pulling it apart into smaller pieces, and helping someone figure out how to think through it rather than simply telling them what to do.

I don’t want therapists to leave a training knowing what I would do.

I want them to leave feeling more confident in their ability to decide what they would do.

That, to me, is good teaching.

The things therapists actually need help thinking through

Graduate school gives us an incredible foundation. But there is only so much you can learn before you are actually sitting across from a client.

Then the questions get messier.

A client doesn’t fit neatly into a diagnostic category. A treatment plan looked perfectly reasonable three months ago, but now you’re wondering whether therapy is actually helping. An ethical principle sounds straightforward until two equally important values seem to conflict. You want to make therapy accessible while also building a career that is financially sustainable.

You know the rule—but you aren’t quite sure how the rule applies to this particular person, in this particular situation, on this particular Tuesday.

That is the kind of territory I love teaching in. Not because I always have the answer. Usually, the most important questions don’t have one perfect answer.

But there are ways to think more clearly about them.

I want continuing education to actually be useful

Most therapists need continuing education to maintain licensure, which means CE can easily become another item on the professional to-do list.

Find the hours. Complete the training. Download the certificate. Check the box.

But I think continuing education for therapists can be so much more valuable than that.

The trainings I remember are the ones that gave me a new way to think about something. The ones that put words to an idea I had been struggling to articulate. The ones that made a complicated situation feel a little less overwhelming.

That is what I want to create.

I want my courses to be practical without pretending our work is simple.

I want to talk honestly about the gray areas.

I want clinicians to hear things that sound like the conversations they are actually having in supervision and consultation—not just the clean examples that fit nicely on a slide.

And I want people to finish a course with something they can use the next time a difficult question lands in front of them.

I’m still a professor at heart

I don’t have a traditional classroom anymore.

There aren’t students walking into my office hours or settling into seats before class. I’m not grading papers at night or building syllabi around an academic calendar.

My professional life looks very different now.

But the part of me that loves teaching apparently wasn’t going anywhere.

I still get ridiculously excited about finding a better way to explain something. I still love the moment when someone says, “Ohhh. That makes sense now.” I still love helping people connect theory to the actual human work of being a therapist. And I still really love being around people who care enough about this profession to keep learning how to do it well.

So I’ve started creating self-paced continuing education courses for therapists and other mental health professionals, and I plan to keep building them around the questions that show up in real clinical practice.

Basically, if I find myself saying, “Someone really should teach a class about this,” there is now a pretty decent chance I will.

Thank you for letting me teach again

There is something unexpectedly emotional for me about returning to teaching this way.

I loved being a professor. I loved my students. And when I left university life, I knew I was making the right decision—but I also knew I was saying goodbye to something that had been a huge part of who I was for a very long time.

It turns out I didn’t have to say goodbye to all of it. The classroom just got bigger.

So to my former students, supervisees, colleagues, therapist friends, and everyone who has ever brought me a question and let me think it through with you: thank you.

You have shaped the way I teach.

You have also given me a very long list of things therapists deserve better training about.

And to those of you who find your way into one of my continuing education courses someday:

Thank you for letting me be your professor for a little while.

I’ve missed this! ❤️

Interested in learning with me?

You can explore my current continuing education courses for therapists and mental health professionals here:

Explore Continuing Education Courses →

If you’re wondering how CE credit works or whether a course may count toward your licensure requirements:

Learn How Continuing Education Works →

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