A depth-oriented therapist's therapist for colleagues at any career stage.

Therapy for Therapists

Doing this work changes the person doing it. Some of the change is good — the depth, the steadiness, the comfort with material most people cannot stay near. Some of it is cost — the slow erosion of energy under sustained empathic load, the surfacing of our own material through clinical work, the loneliness of carrying what cannot be discussed at dinner. Therapists need therapy. This page is for counselors, psychotherapists, psychologists, social workers, marriage and family therapists, supervisors, and other mental health professionals who are looking for someone who will not require them to translate.

I have worked with counselors and other psychotherapists as clients, and I enjoy working with colleagues. The work is some of the most rewarding work I do.

Norman Klaunig, MA, LPC, NCC | Texas LPC #89856 | English and German

Schedule a Consultation or Session

At a glance

  • Therapist: Norman Klaunig, MA, LPC, NCC

  • License: Texas LPC #89856

  • Specialization for colleagues: Vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress, countertransference and its surfacing of one's own material, professional burnout and compassion fatigue, career-stage transitions (pre-licensure, early career, mid-career, retirement), the existential weight of clinical work, the dual identity of being both clinician and client, the loneliness of the profession

  • Working with colleagues: I do not require explanation of clinical concepts, I am comfortable with the shorthand of the field, and I respect the dual identity rather than asking you to set it aside

  • Theoretical orientation: Depth-oriented, existential, trauma-informed, transpersonal, spiritually integrative

  • Service area: Online statewide in Texas; in person in San Antonio

  • Languages: English, German

  • Insurance accepted: BCBS, Curative, Medicare (traditional Medicare and BCBS Medicare Advantage plans). Self-pay is often preferred by clinician-clients for confidentiality reasons.

Why therapists need therapy

The work is intimate and sustained. We sit, hour after hour, with what most people cannot bear to be near. We become the regulating presence in someone else's nervous system, and the nervous system that is doing the regulating is our own. We absorb material, sometimes without realizing how much. We carry our clients' weight home with us, in ways we have all learned to manage but cannot fully eliminate.

We also have our own histories. Many clinicians arrived at this work because something in their own lives made the inner world of others matter. That same history continues operating while we work. Client material has a way of surfacing our own material — sometimes obviously, more often subtly — and the clinical literature is clear that this is not a failure of training or boundaries. It is a structural feature of the work.

And we are often alone with what we are carrying. Consultation and supervision help, but they are professional spaces with their own constraints. Our partners and friends, when they exist, cannot fully be inside what the work asks of us. Many clinicians experience a particular loneliness around their own emotional life, masked by the fact that we know more than most people about emotional life.

Therapy — real therapy, not supervision — is one of the places clinicians can take all of this off and look at it.

What this work tends to address

The clinical territory of therapist-as-client work has features that are particular to the profession.

  • The accumulation of trauma material in clinicians who do trauma work — and most of us do, whether we name it or not. Vicarious trauma is a research-documented phenomenon, and its symptoms (intrusive imagery from client material, hypervigilance, cynicism, sleep difficulty, somatic complaints, narrowing of empathic capacity, changes in worldview) are common in clinicians who have been doing the work for years. Naming it is part of addressing it. Working with it directly — including with trauma-specific tools when needed — is the other part. See also [trauma therapy → /trauma-therapy].

  • Client material reliably surfaces the clinician's own material, often in patterns the clinician knows intellectually but has not personally addressed. The intellectual knowledge is real; it is not the same as having metabolized the material. Therapy for clinicians often includes the work of addressing what client work keeps bringing up — not so that countertransference disappears, which it does not, but so that it informs the work rather than shaping it.

  • The slow erosion of professional aliveness under sustained empathic load. Burnout in clinicians has a particular shape — it is not laziness or lack of dedication; it is the predictable consequence of doing this work without sufficient replenishment, over time, in a profession that does not structurally provide enough recovery. Working with burnout is part clinical, part structural, and part existential.

    • Pre-licensure and early career. Imposter syndrome, supervision dynamics, and navigating the gap between what training prepared you for and what client work actually asks. The work also often surfaces personal material that the prior training stages did not have time to address.

    • Mid-career. The reckoning with what you have built and what you have not. The question of whether you want to do the work in the same form for another twenty years. The fatigue and the wisdom both arriving.

    • Late career. The question of legacy, of what you have learned that has nowhere to go, of the practice's future, of how to wind down without losing yourself.

    • Retirement and post-clinical life. The reorganization of identity when the role that has been organizing your life for decades is no longer the central one. See also [life transitions therapy → /life-transitions-therapy].

  • We work, day after day, with mortality, meaning, suffering, freedom, and isolation. We do not get to leave the existential conditions of being human at the office. For many clinicians, the existential layer of their work becomes part of their own inner life over time, in ways that need their own space. See [existential therapy → /existential-therapy].

  • Clinicians often find it difficult to be straightforwardly clients. We watch the technique, predict the next intervention, observe ourselves with clinical eyes, and struggle with the asymmetry of disclosing while knowing the other side of the chair. Working with a therapist who is comfortable with the dual identity — who does not ask you to set it aside but does not collude with it either — makes the work possible

  • Many clinicians have unaddressed personal trauma, grief, religious or spiritual material, family-of-origin patterns, or relational difficulties that their professional competence has been managing. The competence is real. So is the material underneath. Therapy is one of the few places where it gets to come forward without our professional identity being part of the picture.

What is different about working with a colleague

Working with you as a client is different from working with the general public in specific, useful ways:

  • You do not need the explanations. I do not have to translate clinical concepts, justify modalities, or explain the rationale for slowing down where slowing matters. We can use the field's vocabulary where it serves the work.

  • You will see what I am doing. I do not pretend you cannot, and I do not perform techniques. When something I am doing surfaces something in you, we can talk about it directly.

  • The dual identity is in the room without being a problem. You are not asked to be only a client. You are asked to be a client and the clinician you are — both at once — without that dual presence interfering with your work being yours.

  • The work is yours, not your practice's. I am not your supervisor and not your consultant. I am not interested in your cases for clinical reasons. The space is for you as a person, not as a clinician.

  • Confidentiality has additional weight. Many clinician-clients prefer self-pay to keep insurance out of the picture, and many prefer not to be in the same professional circles as their therapist. We can discuss what serves your privacy needs in your situation.

How this work proceeds

We begin where you are. For some, that is acute burnout. For some, it is the surfacing of personal material through client work. For some, it is the recognition that something long buried has been operating in your clinical work and is now asking to be addressed. For some, it is a career-stage reckoning. For some, it is simply the work you have been telling yourself for years that you ought to do.

The work uses whatever fits — depth-oriented and existential approaches, trauma processing where indicated, parts work, somatic regulation, meaning-focused work, mindfulness-based methods, and spiritually integrated approaches where the client wants those. The approach is shaped by what your particular work and your particular life are asking for, not by a generic protocol.

Approaches I draw from when working with clinician-clients

  • Existential and depth-oriented therapy

  • Trauma-informed care, including EMDR for unaddressed personal trauma

  • Vicarious-trauma-specific work, where indicated

  • IFS-inspired parts work — often particularly useful for clinicians, who tend to have well-developed parts language already

  • Mindfulness-based and somatic regulation work

  • Career-stage and transitions framework (Bridges)

  • Existential and meaning-focused frameworks

  • Spiritually integrated work where the client wants it

Get in touch

Ready when you are

When you are ready, schedule a free 15-minute consultation.

Schedule a Consultation or Session

Click this link to choose a day and time for a free, confidential consultation or schedule a session.

FAQs

Frequently asked questions

  • Yes, in ways that serve the work. I will not translate the technique, I will not explain what I am doing, unless you inquire, and I will not require you to set your clinical knowledge aside. I will also not collude with intellectualization, with watching from the outside, or with the temptation to make the sessions about your cases. The dual identity is welcome; it does not become a workaround.

  • We can, where they are surfacing something in you that we are working with. The cases themselves are not the focus of the work — your supervisor or consultant is the right person for that, and the boundaries of our work do not include clinical consultation. What we can do is work with what the client material is bringing up in you, what patterns from your own life it is touching, and how to address those at your level rather than at your clients'.

  • The most common reason clinicians struggle as clients is that their therapist is uncomfortable with the dual identity — either deferring to the clinician-client's expertise in ways that hollow out the work, or insisting on a posture of pure client-hood that asks the clinician-client to amputate part of themselves. The middle path requires a therapist who is steady enough in their own work to hold both presences at once. I find this work genuinely rewarding and am comfortable with it.

  • Insurance creates a record of services, diagnostic codes, and dates of care. For some clinician-clients this is not a concern; for others — those with insurance through their employer or practice, those in small professional communities, those concerned about future licensure or credentialing implications — self-pay offers a level of privacy that insurance billing does not. We can discuss which arrangement serves you best.

  • San Antonio's clinical community and the broader Texas community are interconnected. We can discuss in the consultation whether we are within a reasonable professional distance for clinical work. If we are not — for example, if you work directly with someone close to me, or vice versa — I will say so, and we will look at referral options. If we are within a reasonable distance, we agree at the start on how to handle the possibility of running into each other professionally.

  • Often, yes — though usually not in the ways clinician-clients expect. Most clinicians who do their own depth work report that what changes is not their technique but their presence: more capacity to stay with material, more honesty about what they do not know, less reactivity, a different relationship to the work itself. Some report substantive shifts in their conceptualization of certain populations or modalities as their own material gets addressed.

  • We start with what is sustainable. Sometimes the early work is about stabilization, structural adjustment to your caseload or schedule, and the immediate question of replenishment. The deeper work — what is underneath the burnout, what your career is asking of you now, what you have been carrying that the burnout is in part about — comes when the acute load is no longer the dominant feature.

For fees, insurance, telehealth setup, and in-person availability, see the FAQ page.

Further reading

Credible resources on clinician self-care, vicarious trauma, and the psychology of being a therapist.

Understand. Heal. Grow.

—

Understand. Heal. Grow. —