Ever wondered about the intricacies that transpire behind the curtain of the world of counseling? Get ready as I reveal some spine-chilling tales from my supervision journey. In this latest episode of the Texas Counselors creating Badass Businesses Podcast, I dive deep into four unique stories that underscore the importance of understanding the rules for dual-licensed individuals, the dangers of misreporting supervision hours, the perplexity of dual relationships and ethical violations, and the trials faced when guiding individuals with different theoretical orientations. I bring to light the significance of clear communication and firm boundaries within the supervisory relationship, both key for public safety and a prosperous supervision experience.
Let's embark on a journey through the labyrinth of supervision hours needed for LPC and LMFT licenses in the Lone Star State. Be aware, the road is fraught with potential pitfalls and penalties if the hour-based requirements aren't met. The conversation takes a twist as we confront the issue of supervisors lacking multicultural competence and the ripple effect this has on their supervisees. As a response, I advocate for supervisors to actively pursue multicultural competence, laying the groundwork for an anti-racist foundation in their practice. And here's a surprise - I announce an upcoming webinar with Christina De Luna that will not only offer updates for 2024 but also a golden opportunity to earn a free CE credit. So, why wait? Sign up and share this indispensable information with your network. Prepare to be stirred and enlightened!
Get your step by step guide to private practice. Because you are too important to lose to not knowing the rules, going broke, burning out, and giving up. #counselorsdontquit.
Ever wondered about the intricacies that transpire behind the curtain of the world of counseling? Get ready as I reveal some spine-chilling tales from my supervision journey. In this latest episode of the Texas Counselors creating Badass Businesses Podcast, I dive deep into four unique stories that underscore the importance of understanding the rules for dual-licensed individuals, the dangers of misreporting supervision hours, the perplexity of dual relationships and ethical violations, and the trials faced when guiding individuals with different theoretical orientations. I bring to light the significance of clear communication and firm boundaries within the supervisory relationship, both key for public safety and a prosperous supervision experience.
Let's embark on a journey through the labyrinth of supervision hours needed for LPC and LMFT licenses in the Lone Star State. Be aware, the road is fraught with potential pitfalls and penalties if the hour-based requirements aren't met. The conversation takes a twist as we confront the issue of supervisors lacking multicultural competence and the ripple effect this has on their supervisees. As a response, I advocate for supervisors to actively pursue multicultural competence, laying the groundwork for an anti-racist foundation in their practice. And here's a surprise - I announce an upcoming webinar with Christina De Luna that will not only offer updates for 2024 but also a golden opportunity to earn a free CE credit. So, why wait? Sign up and share this indispensable information with your network. Prepare to be stirred and enlightened!
Get your step by step guide to private practice. Because you are too important to lose to not knowing the rules, going broke, burning out, and giving up. #counselorsdontquit.
You're going to be ethical and you're following the rules and everything's going to be A-OK. Now, where the code of ethics and the licensing rules diverged, though, now you need to be conscious and aware of the fact that you may be following the rules, but perhaps not following your code of ethics. Now does that mean that you are ripe for a complaint? This is the Texas Counselors creating Badass Businesses Podcast with Dr Kate Walker, where I teach you, texans and non-Texans alike, the latest research-based information to hit your income goals, stay out of trouble and make a bigger impact in your community. Join me and let's fill the gaps in access to mental health care and create a counseling career you'll love. Let's get to work. Welcome to Texas Counselors creating Badass Businesses, where it's all about working smarter, not harder. And here's your host, dr Kate Walker, who chooses to make every day a great day. Welcome to episode 60 of Texas Counselors creating Badass Businesses Podcast. This episode is all about supervision, but if you're an associate and you're working with a supervisor, you're going to love this one too. Don't forget this month I'm discounting the 2023 supervisor training and you can get it until the end of December. Go to katewalkertrainingcom. Forward, slash supervisor and grab the disco. Now let's get to work.
Speaker 1:All right, I'm Dr Kate Walker. I'm an LBC and LMFT supervisor in Texas. Welcome to your weekly Step it Up Training. Every week I give you a live training if you're in the Step it Up membership. Now this whole month has been about scary stories and last week I talked about scary stories from the licensing board, which, of course, is going to mean complaints, and that's what I talked about last week our complaints. Now this week I'm not necessarily talking about complaints. These are scary supervision stories and, as always, I'm not just going to give you the scary stuff, I'm going to give you the solutions to go right along with it. Now, it was really tough to pick out what I wanted to talk about today because my position I hear a lot of scary stories.
Speaker 1:I've been a liaison to the LPC board in Texas for the Texas Association for Counselor Education and Supervision. I've been the president of the Texas Association for Counselor Education and Supervision. I have taught the 40 hour training to become a supervisor in Texas and I just had to look this up today since 2006. So I have been doing this a long time and I've heard so many stories from supervisors and supervises struggling with each other, and so my mission, my goal in life, is to make this world I'm knocking my fists together if you're listening to me on a podcast. I'm trying to help us get along, to preserve the supervisory relationship, because without that supervisory relationship intact, bad things can happen right, and our job as supervisors is to make sure number one, we're protecting the public, and supervise your job is to make sure you're protecting the public, and so we've got to be able to talk. That is the key element of supervision. You have to make sure that those lines of communication are clear.
Speaker 1:So today I will talk about scary stories. Yes, I will give solutions. So my goal is to take you through four scary stories. I know, you know I love the number three, I love grouping things in three, but today I think I actually came up with five. So if we can get to all five of them, awesome. So scary story number one, and everything today is de-identified, even the stories I'm going to tell on myself. Everything is de-identified. So I want you to listen to these and be able to apply it to anything with anybody in your own supervision experience if you're a supervisor or a supervisee and feel free to tag me if you have questions or you want to talk through things a little bit more, especially those of you who are listening or watching right now, who may be in the middle of taking the 40 hour training to become a supervisor.
Speaker 1:So number one is a dual licensed supervisor who doesn't know the rules for both licenses. Now, a lot of them, especially in Texas, I would say most of them are the same. In fact, since Sunset Review and the establishment of the Behavioral Health Executive Council, the LPC and the LMFT Board have aligned on a lot of things that are administrative. Now they are both keeping their professional identity because they are such unique licenses. But it's easy if you're dual licensed to say, well, I don't really have too many of X kind of licensees, so I really need to just focus on this license because that's who I am mostly supervising. Well, okay, until something.
Speaker 1:And I'm just going to give you an administrative difference. What if the direct hour accrual time, or DHAT, is different for the two licenses? For example, in Texas, the DHAT, the direct hour accrual time for LPC is 18 months. That's the minimum amount of time you can take to accrue those direct hours or those 3,000 hours for your license LMFT, on the other hand, their minimum direct hour accrual time is 24 months.
Speaker 1:So imagine if you are a supervisor with your little supervisor, private practice, and you're charging monthly for supervision and you and your supervisor you're so excited because you're coming up on that 18 month and they have been rocking out at their hours, they have been on track, they have their 3,000 hours and they're like I did it supervisor stamp, that piece of paper, I'm going to go upgrade. And then they realize, when they turn everything in, that I mean you kind of see where this story is going. Yeah, they've got another six months to go because you were supervising them based on the wrong license. You thought they only needed 18 months to accrue all of those hours and you were never worried because they had a great job where they were accruing tons and tons of hours. And now you have this person for another six months.
Speaker 1:It doesn't matter that they finished their hours, it doesn't matter that they have gotten all of their hours that they need for their license. What matters is the DHAT the direct hour accrual time meets the rule for that license. So it doesn't matter that they finished their hours. If they are supposed to finish in no less than 24 months. They've got to sit with you for another six months and you think they're going to be happy about having to pay you every month now for the next six months. They don't need the hours and, as of the day before when they were finished, they really didn't even need you for supervision. So now you have this person that you've got to come up with activities for and things to do, and you're still responsible for their cases.
Speaker 1:So solution is if you are supervising folks with multiple licenses, if you are one of those unicorns and my gosh, we need you. We need you supervisors who have more than one license and in Texas that's LPC and LMFT and all the others. Please be sure that you are in line in your keeping track of the little administrative details like DHAT, dat, direct hour, accrual time, and don't make this a nightmare for your supervisee, who now has to go home and maybe tell their partner sorry, but we've got to keep paying my supervisor for another six months. Yeah, that car payment, yeah, we got to keep doing that. So scary supervision story number one don't do it All right.
Speaker 1:Scary supervision number two is oh, by the way, I have another job that I didn't tell you about, or I have a private practice that I didn't tell you about, or I have another site that I didn't tell you about Supervisors. I get it If you are working with a supervisor you love and you want to make sure you're protecting the relationship as well, and you're thinking, okay, I don't know if they would like this site, or I don't know if they would like this, me doing private practice on the side, I don't know, but I really don't want to have to go find another supervisor and I really don't want to tell the supervisor I have and, oh, when they find out and they will find out, because eventually you're going to have to upgrade and submit this paperwork and they look and they see, wait a second, you were at another site this whole time. So here are the problems with that. Number one even though you're under supervision, those cases never got supervised. You never allowed your supervisor to look over those cases to know what kind of issues you were dealing with.
Speaker 1:Number two even though your heart was in the right place, you are now going to lose those hours, right? Because your supervisor is not going to sign off on hours that they didn't supervise. So you know, okay, you might be thinking, okay. Well, the workaround is I'm just not going to count those hours. I'm going to make sure I get tons of hours at the site. They do not yet. Don't start doing that now. Don't cut corners. Have a conversation with your supervisor and that supervisor.
Speaker 1:If they're not comfortable with the site because of, perhaps, the issues that are going on there they just don't have the expertise in, or they are not comfortable with you being in a private practice or something like that, at least give them the opportunity to facilitate you moving to another supervisor. You know, in Texas you can actually have two supervisors. So if you see this coming, if you're like, oh my gosh, I hate my job, I got to get out of here and this site is amazing, but I know my supervisor won't go for it, have the conversation. Give your supervisor a chance to brainstorm with you. Remember, having two supervisors is completely okay and you're going to be able to count those hours in the end. So, yes, real story happens all the time. I don't even really have to de-identify that one because it goes on a lot and it's too bad because, as the outsider right, I'm just hearing about these stories. I don't know the kind of relationship that you have, right, the two of you, and so I'm always thinking okay, they're just not wanting to hurt feelings or they're not wanting to have conflict. Don't be a conflict avoider, right? That's what we teach our clients. You've got to have the assertiveness and the ability to have these conversations and get everything out the open. This one's kind of minor, but it's not A lot of supervisors mistake the code of ethics, like the ACA American Counseling Association code of ethics for our licensing rules and, to be fair, a lot of times they're going to coincide.
Speaker 1:But you must follow your licensing rules or else face a complaint. If the ethics overlaps with the licensing rule, not a problem, right, you're going to be ethical and you're following the rules and everything's going to be A-okay. Now where the code of ethics and the licensing rules diverged, though, now you need to be conscious and aware of the fact that you may be following the rules but perhaps not following your code of ethics. Now, does that mean that you are ripe for a complaint? Well, I don't know right, because I'd have to know the exact situation. My point is as a supervisor in Texas, you are obligated to teach your supervisor the rules LPC, lnft, bhec all of those rules, all of those codes and fill in the blanks with your code of ethics Anywhere, like the wood example I always go to.
Speaker 1:Is technology right? We all know that our licensing boards have made huge strides on talking about the right way and the wrong way to use technology when we're counseling clients, but there's a lot of open space. There is a lot that's not talked about or discussed, or anyway you get the idea. But our ACA code of ethics holy moly, even though the last revision was in 2014,. There is a wealth of information there that helps us really do amazing work with our clients and with our supervisees, because following those ACA code of ethics makes us better practitioners. It keeps our clients safe, it helps us make great decisions, and you know how we do this right. We do this in a room where nobody's watching, under duress. So those types of decisions are absolutely well founded, guided well by our ACA code of ethics. But our ethics and our rules are not always the same. So be sure that you know the difference when you're going through your ethical decision making model and making those good decisions.
Speaker 1:All right, next one this one I call the hot potato, or I just want him to go away. Picture yourself as a supervisor and you have a supervisee who maybe it started out beautifully and you thought, man, this is a superstar and no problems, everything's going well. And then in supervision we talk about developmental levels level one, level two, level three, right, so level one is just so great and you're like, oh, how lucky am I to have an amazing supervisee like this. Level two happens, which we often refer to as the honeymoon's over. You know, it's the supervisee kind of realizing the rigors of the job, understanding, you know, maybe this isn't the field for them.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of push, pull going on with the supervisor, which is completely normal, as the supervisee establishes themself as a professional and establishes their professional identity as a counselor. So imagine you're the supervisor and you're like huh, I don't like this. Things just kind of get worse and get worse and you're thinking I don't know what to do with this person. Now here's the solution. Unfortunately it's kind of too late.
Speaker 1:The solution is the OER triad orientation, evaluation, remediation and it starts with a great contract, which most of us are great at right, and especially if you took the Kate Walker training online 40 hour LPC LMFT supervisor training, you came out with a working contract. So it starts with this but, folks, if you don't do an orientation and introduce your supervisee to this idea that, hey, kiddo, you're going to be having regular evaluations, you're going to have to get used to criticism and not meeting expectations and that's okay because we're going to grow together. If you don't introduce that right at the beginning and then do it right you have to actually do what you say you're going to do. If you say you're going to evaluate and you have to actually do that do the evaluations then you're going to have a situation where now you have this almost level three supervisee. They're ready to go out into the world and you know you should have remediated them months ago, but now you just want them to go away, you just want them to upgrade, you just want them to go be somebody else's problem. And I get you. I have heard from you, I've talked with you. I know that this is hard, but even if you have waited and go back and listen to the episode I believe it's episode 52 of Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses and I talk about the importance of a remediation plan sit down with a colleague, do some consultation, but please don't upgrade a supervisee just because it seems like the easiest thing to do. All right, get some consultation, get that remediation plan in that supervisee's file if you have the least bit of hesitation about their abilities to do their job.
Speaker 1:Remember this is in our licensing rules LPC and LMFT. Here's a good one and it's short, so supervision hours roll over right. So this kind of goes back to my first scary story, which was administrative right, oh, you need 24 months. I thought you only needed 18 months. Okay, so this one is an administrative one as well. So in Texas, lpc associates must have four hours of supervision every month as long as they're seeing clients. So if you see one client, you got to have four hours of supervision. If you see 80 clients, you have to have four hours of supervision in that month.
Speaker 1:Now I'm not going to talk about the definition of month. I've talked about that before. It has to do with direct hour, accrual time. So go back and look at your license minimum number of hours to accrue those direct hours. Now I'm a supervisee and I'm saying, oh man, we're going to take this amazing trip next month and I wonder if we can get seven hours of supervision this month and I can roll it over to the next month and your supervisor says sounds like a great idea to me, uh-uh. No, it's not, it's a terrible idea. If you get more than four hours of supervision in your month, those hours do not roll over to the next month.
Speaker 1:Okay, now what you can do, hear me out have four hours in the month without the trip and then in the month with the trip let's say you have one week left in that month you and your supervisor somehow schedule four hours of supervision in that week. Some of my colleagues will even do phone calls. So if you can get in a 30-minute phone call here and there and you're able to do supervision over the phone, you can log that as supervision time. So we've got two months right the month with the trip and the month without the trip. So use the month without the trip, just get your four months and the month with the trip. You're going to carve out some time in there to get your four hours of supervision. If you don't get four hours of supervision and a month's supervisees, you lose all of those hours for that month. And you've heard me talk about it here. Back when the board meetings were open and I was able to sit in and watch. I saw hours taken away all the time when the staff would pull logs and they would look and they would see, oh well, they didn't get their four hours this month, so there goes 80 hours down the tubes. Not good, right? So be sure to get your four hours per month. Now I have one that I'm saving for last because it is serious.
Speaker 1:This scary supervision story happens when the supervisor either refuses to or yeah, I don't know what's going through the supervisor's head, but they're not multi-culturally competent. So they start to rely on the supervisee who identifies as a multicultural something or other and they just defer all of the supervisee questions to that supervisee. So, for example, if you are a supervisor and you have one supervisee who is bilingual and your supervisees are asking questions about this particular supervisee's ethnicity, their language, their culture, and you say, well, I don't know, ask so-and-so and so-and-so continually has to do your job because that's their culture, that's their ethnicity, that's their language. That's not okay, supervisor. That means you're not doing your job of becoming multi-culturally competent. Now in Texas we have CE hours that we must get in order to stay compliant, but forget that your entire supervision practice must be built on an anti-racist foundation. That means you have to be multi-culturally competent.
Speaker 1:That doesn't mean you can't ask your supervisee questions, but if your supervisee feels like they're having to hold your hand while you're supervising and you're not able to handle the issues that they're experiencing on the job, with the client, out in society, in the political arena, and when they come to you and you say, yeah, I don't know, that's not an okay answer. So I saved this for last, because this is, for me, one of the scariest supervision stories and it actually, when the LPC Association entered public comments into the meeting minutes for the LPC Board a few years ago, this came up quite a bit. I'm having to hold my supervisor's hand through these multicultural issues and I'm afraid to say anything because I'm afraid they won't sign off on my hours. So I'm saving this for last because you guys, you know what the solution is. Take the CEs, take the course, do the work, supervisors, so that you are multi-culturally competent and your supervisee doesn't feel obligated or you're not putting them in the position of having to hold your hand through all of these issues. And I'm looking at myself too right, we all have biases. So address them, ask questions, attend trainings like this, do the work and help your supervisee enter the profession on this foundation that you've created that is anti-racist and opens that channel for clear communication.
Speaker 1:Alright, I want to make sure that you know how to sign up for that webinar in January with Christina Deluna, because I know you want to make sure that you have all of the updates for 2024. And it's so easy to do. Just go to katewalkertrainingcom. Forward slash free webinar and grab your free ticket and share it with a friend. It's free and you get one CE. So if you're looking for continuing education, that's super cheap. You can't do better than free, right? So grab your ticket today. I'm Dr Kate Walker. Thank you so much for listening to Texas counselors creating badass businesses. Thank you to Ridgely Walker for her lovely voiceovers at our introduction and do me a favor when you get a second, please like, share and subscribe and write us a review. That's really how we get picked up by other RSS feeds and we get this information out to the mental health badass as we need it. Thanks again, and keep saving the world with excellent therapy.