Lessons from an Early Career Therapist: Managing Mistakes, Missteps, and Other Minor Disasters

This book is a reassuring guide both for novice therapists and those further along in their journey, normalizing, validating, and empathizing with the human aspects of the profession and supporting readers to feel empowered and confident managing real-life situations with real-life clients.

Dr. Ménard shares lessons she learned in her early training years as well as those learned as a "grown- up" psychologist, addressing the perils and pitfalls of connecting with clients, working in diverse settings with different supervisors, balancing work and home life, and, perhaps most importantly, repairing and recovering from therapeutic stumbles and missteps with humor and compassion. Chapters address topics such as internship and licensure, therapist self-care, professionalism, diversity, supervision, and teletherapy and include important questions about clinical training and professional development like "What do I do when my client isn’t making progress?", "How do I know when I’m too sick to work?", "Is it okay to curse in session?", "Do I even belong in this program?", and "What should I do if there is a wildlife invasion of my office?"

This book will provide mental health professionals with the tools and skills they need to problem-solve these situations and others on the road from graduate school and licensure to independent practice.

A. Dana Ménard, PhD, C.Psych, is an assistant professor of clinical psychology at the University of Windsor (Windsor, ON) and has held previous academic appointments at the University of Western Ontario (London, ON) and at Wayne State University (Detroit, MI). As a clinician, Dr. Ménard has worked at Detroit Receiving Hospital, the London Health Sciences Centre, the Royal Ottawa Hospital and the Ottawa Hospital, among others. She is the co-author of Magnificent Sex: Lessons from Extraordinary Lovers (2020, Routledge) with Peggy Kleinplatz, which won the 2021 Consumer Book Award from the Society of Sex Therapy and Research.