Self-Therapy for Mental Health Professionals:
As to research into the specific area of therapy for counsellors, there has been more attention paid to this recently. The ground breaking book by Geller, Norcross and Orlinsky (2005) The Psychotherapist's Own Psychotherapy: Patient and Clinician Perspectives’ considers the role of therapy that therapists themselves undergo. One of its aims is to “provide clinically tested and empirically grounded assistance to psychotherapists treating fellow therapists, as well as to those clinicians who seek personal treatment themselves” (Wong, 2007). Therefore the EPT will not fulfil the empirically grounded and objective approach, because it is more experiential and subjective in nature.
However, the work by Hill (2005) indicates that a therapist who is undergoing therapy has a far better understanding of the process of the individual finding their self and managing their mental health (Hill, 2005). This is because the subjective is the central criteria; rather than an objective and unrealistic ideal of good mental health. The move away from the objective is one of the reasons that Hill et al (1993) revisited dream therapy not to have it interpreted objectively by a therapist, but by the individual in therapy themselves in order to have a better understanding of their self. This understanding will lead to an increased ability for the individual to resolve their mental health issues:
Interpreting one’s own dream was superior to interpreting another person’s dream and interpreting one’s own recent event in terms of subject-judged session quality (Depth), indicating that it was not just the process of interpretation that leads to how good or deep sessions were judged to be... Rather, it made a difference that one’s own dream was being interpreted (Hill et al, 1993).
Therefore by combining these two approaches of experiential