Why Work With Me for Therapy Supervision or Consultation?

Because sometimes you don't need another training. You need someone you can say "What the fuck do I do with this?" to.

Graduate school teaches you a lot about being a therapist. Then there are the things you need to know when you're sitting across from a real human being. What do you do when you don't know what's happening with a client? How do you know when your diagnosis is wrong, when trauma, ADHD, autism, anxiety, OCD, attachment, and years of coping strategies all look remarkably similar? How do you document complex work without writing a novel, hold boundaries without becoming rigid, or tell a client something they don't want to hear?

And how do you stop questioning whether you're a good therapist every time you have a hard session? Those are the conversations I want to have in supervision and consultation. Becoming a great therapist isn't about memorizing more information. It's about learning how to think clinically, trust yourself, stay curious, and remain human while doing complicated work.

I Don't Want to Create Therapists Who Practice Exactly Like Me

If you're looking for someone to tell you exactly what to say, which intervention to use, and how to become a miniature version of their clinical style, I'm probably not your person. I don't want you to become me. I want you to become more confident in you.

Good supervision shouldn't create dependence on your supervisor. It should gradually help you need them less. I want you to bring me a complicated case and eventually hear yourself say, "Wait. I think I know what I need to do." That's the goal.

We can talk about theory, diagnosis, and interventions. I'm also going to ask what you're noticing, what doesn't make sense, what's happening in the room, what your gut is telling you, what you're avoiding, what you're assuming, and what else could be true.

Clinical judgment develops when you're given room to think, not just instructions to follow.

We Can Talk About the Messy Cases

I like complicated. Give me the client who has been diagnosed five different ways, the person who has been in therapy forever and still feels stuck, or the presentation where trauma and neurodivergence overlap. Give me the client who intellectualizes everything, the case where you wonder whether you're helping, and the client you keep thinking about after work. Those are often the places where consultation matters most.

Instead of jumping to "What's the right intervention?" we'll slow down and look at the whole person: their history, nervous system, relationships, environment, protective strategies, identity, strengths, diagnosis, and the therapeutic relationship happening right in front of you. Sometimes the thing we're treating isn't the thing we thought we were treating. Being willing to reconsider your formulation isn't evidence that you're a bad therapist. It's evidence that you're paying attention.

I Care About Diagnosis Without Reducing People to Diagnoses

Diagnosis matters. It informs treatment, affects documentation, and can give clients language for experiences they've never understood. When we get it wrong, we can spend a long time treating the wrong thing.

But humans are messy. Trauma can look like ADHD, ADHD can look like anxiety, autism can be missed underneath years of masking, OCD can hide inside what sounds like generalized anxiety, burnout can look like depression, and multiple things can be true at once. I want therapists to understand diagnostic criteria and stay curious about the human underneath them. We're not checking boxes. We're building a clinical picture.

We'll Talk About Documentation Too

Yes, notes matter. And no, nobody became a therapist because they were passionate about progress notes. Documentation carries real clinical, ethical, financial, and legal weight, yet therapists get surprisingly little practical training in it.

I care about helping therapists see the connection between assessment, diagnosis, treatment planning, interventions, progress, and documentation. The goal isn't to write more. It's to document intentionally, so your notes support the work you're doing without eating your entire evening.

We Can Talk About the Business of Being a Therapist

Nobody adequately prepares us for this either. You can be an excellent clinician and have no idea how to build a sustainable career. We can talk about marketing without making you sound like a therapist robot, along with private pay, referral relationships, specializing, building programs, adding revenue streams, leaving insurance panels, handling hard financial conversations, and figuring out what you want your career to look like.

Burnout isn't always a personal failure to practice enough self-care. Sometimes you've built a professional life that isn't sustainable, and the answer isn't another breathing exercise. It's changing the system.

You Get to Be a Human in Supervision

Therapists are good at pretending we're fine. We're supposed to be regulated, ethical, boundaried, self-aware, compassionate, competent, trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and somehow unaffected by spending our days with grief, trauma, fear, abuse, shame, suicidal thoughts, family systems, and the enormous complexity of being alive. That's not realistic.

You're going to have reactions to clients. You'll have clients you love working with, and clients whose names show up on your schedule and your whole nervous system sighs. You'll make mistakes, question yourself, and have things happening in your own life while you sit with someone else's. We need to be able to talk about those things, because self-awareness matters.

You can't examine what you're not allowed to admit.

I Will Challenge You

Support doesn't mean I'll agree with everything you do. If I think you're missing something, I'll tell you. If your own stuff might be entering the room, we'll get curious about it. If you're avoiding a hard conversation with a client, we'll probably talk about why. If your documentation isn't supporting your clinical work, we'll fix it, and if you're making yourself responsible for a client's choices, we'll look at that too. And if you're being incredibly hard on yourself for being a human therapist, I'll point that out.

Accountability and compassion can exist in the same room. I think that's where some of the best growth happens.

I'm Not Interested in Performative Expertise

There's a lot of pressure in our profession to sound like we know everything. We don't, and I don't. Sometimes when you bring me something, my answer will be, "I don't know. Let's figure it out." I think that's good clinical practice, because curiosity is more useful than pretending.

Good therapists aren't the people who always know the answer. They're the people who recognize when they don't, ask better questions, find good information, consult appropriately, and stay open to changing their minds. That's the kind of clinician I want to help you become.

EMDR Consultation

I'm an EMDRIA Consultant-in-Training, working toward becoming a full Approved Consultant, and I offer consultation for clinicians completing EMDR basic training or working toward EMDR certification.

• EMDR Certification consultation: 10 hours of group consultation for $350, or $50 for a single group session
• Basic Training consultation: 10 hours of group consultation for $350, or $50 for a single group session
• Individual consultation: $100 per session

See all the details on my supervision and consultation page.

Who I Work Best With

You'll probably like working with me if you want someone who is direct without being shaming, clinically thoughtful without being rigid, and willing to talk about both the evidence and the complicated reality of working with actual humans. That's especially true if you work with trauma, neurodivergence, burnout, complex presentations, EMDR, psychedelic preparation and integration, or clients who have spent years feeling misunderstood by traditional mental health systems.

You don't need to have everything figured out before consultation. That's literally why consultation exists. Bring the weird case, the note you're overthinking, the diagnosis that doesn't quite fit, the boundary problem, the business question, the moment from yesterday's session you're still thinking about, or the "I have no fucking idea what I'm doing here." We can start there.

The Kind of Therapist I Want to Help You Become

I don't want you to leave supervision with a bigger collection of scripts. I want you to become a therapist who can sit in uncertainty without panicking, who knows the difference between following a treatment model and blindly following a protocol, and who understands diagnosis but still sees the human. A therapist who can tolerate being wrong, knows when to consult, sets boundaries, and doesn't confuse exhaustion with dedication. Most of all, a therapist who doesn't believe they have to stop being human to be good at this work.

Therapists are humans too, and being human is fucking hard. If you want supervision or consultation that gives you room to think, question, grow, swear occasionally, and become more confident in your own clinical voice, see my consultation options or reach out. I'd love to work with you.

About the Author

Becca Gerlach, LMSW, CAADC is a therapist, consultant, and coach, and the owner of Being Human Group. She helps high-achieving women and neurodivergent adults recover from burnout, unmask, and stop living in survival mode, through focused burnout recovery intensives, EMDR, psychedelic-assisted therapy and integration, and clinical consultation for therapists. She knows burnout from the inside, too. Read Becca's story.