The 1st 50 Questions

Safety Stuff 

1. “Is there a lot of sexual abuse in the community that I’m working in?” 

2. “How do I know if someone is suicidal when they say they are? I don’t mean, are they lying, I mean, like, how do I know how bad it is, and what am I supposed to do about it?” 

3. “How do I do a suicide assessment?” 

4. “What constitutes a CPS case?”

5. “How do I keep myself safe as a therapist? I mean I literally just walk off the street and meet anyone?” 

6. “How do I know when something is abuse? What if they're just angry?” 

Intern Problems 

7. “Am I supposed to feel like a therapist (three weeks into my internship)?”

8. “What is a process recording? How am I supposed to do one?” (for social workers) 

9. “Does a child client think of me like a therapist?”

10. “I’m not serving my clients” How do I deal with crippling knowledge that I’m not actually helping my clients because I don’t know how to do anything yet? 

11. “How do I set boundaries with my internship and work?”

12.  “How do I beat impostor syndrome?”

13. “What are the most common or obvious mistakes a new therapist makes?” 

Therapist Client Relationships

14. “How does self disclosure work?” 

15. “What are ways you can connect with a client and build rapport without self disclosure?” 

16. “What are the detrimental effects of praise?”

17. “How do I get positive feedback from my clients?” 

18. “What are some of the other reasons a client engages other than therapeutic healing?” 

19. “How do I know when to challenge a client? I want to be supportive of the person but not something that's not helpful for her.”

20. “What do I do when I have my own mental health issues? I can't be there for people all the time.”

Therapy With Children 

21. “What do parents have to do with their children’s issues?”

22. “Do I win or lose card or board games when playing with a child in session?”  

23. “What do I say to a kid about their parent’s bad behavior?”

24. “How to walk a parent through a hospitalization?”

25. “How to walk a parent through a CPS report being made?”

26. “What do I do when a kid draws a picture of a penis?” 

27. “How do I build rapport with a teen?” 

Medications

28. “Do people need to take medication for ADHD?” 

29. “Why do some people have to take meds?” 

30. “What are the side effects of medication? Will they change my personality?” 

The Philosophy of Therapy 

31. “What do I do when I really need to work with the person who’s not in front of me? (spouse, family member)” 

32. “More therapy all the time or nah?” 

33. “Why do we use groups as a medium for therapy?”

Diagnosis and Assessment

34. “What is the mental status exam and why is it such a big deal?” 

35. “What is ODD and what are the differential diagnoses for it? What else could it be?” 

36. “What is a presenting problem? Why isn’t this a diagnosis?” 

37. “How do I do testing? And what testing should I do?” 

The Act of Therapy

38. “What do I do if I’ve been doing therapy for a while and it feels like I’m doing something wrong but I don’t know what it is?” 

39. “How do I pick up on latent content?” 

40. “In session I don’t have that clarity”? How do I do analysis in between my sessions 

41. “How do I make the session time pass without seeming boring or unfocused?” 

42. “How do I get my client to talk more?”

43. “What’s one thing I can add to my treatment?”

44. “What do you do if you think the client is ready to be discharged?”
    

Documentation 

45. “How do I write a note? More specifically, how do I add therapeutic content to the note?” 

46. “What shouldn’t go into documentation?” 

47. “How do I write stuff down that’s personal when the client is talking?” 

How Do I Respond When…

48. “How do I respond to an unrealistic or fantasy statement by a client?” 

49. “What do I do when a client tells me they are leaving me, or want to, or aren’t interested in therapy anymore?” 

50. “How do I respond when my client has a crisis (eviction, breakup, someone died)?”