20
votes
IT professionals and therapists
If you are an I.T. professional have you ever talked to a therapist about career/job related angst and felt that they just didn't fully understand beyond a superficial level?
If you are an I.T. professional have you ever talked to a therapist about career/job related angst and felt that they just didn't fully understand beyond a superficial level?
Therapists are just people, and they're just people who have been selected from a subset of the population that could afford to go to college, get a Masters, and jump through the hoops for certification. Much like PhDs are notoriously bad at things outside of their field, therapists have extensive training in mental health, but won't necessarily have the personal background to understand a given clients' challenges. Therapists often develop specialties based on the kinds of challenges they help people with, and not every therapist can help with every problem.
My question to you will be: is their shallow level of understanding getting in the way of you working to resolve the challenges that led you to finding a therapist in the first place? If it's important for your therapist to understand more deeply, you might work with a therapist who already has worked with IT professionals in the past enough to develop more of an understanding, or you can work with your current therapist to help them understand why you're feeling the way you do.
I might suggest that the very process of helping them understand the problem might be helpful for you in understanding the angst and how you want to go about resolving it, but not all therapists are compatible with all people. Sometimes the right choice is finding a therapist who has the proper dynamic with you. Though I recognize that it's not a cheap or fast process.
...So basically, rubber duck debugging with mental health instead of code?
More seriously, I second this advice. Mental health is a vast field that's different for everyone. Therapists tend to specialize in certain fields and even demographics to an extent, which makes them good fits for some patients but not others. They can be excellent at their jobs and knowledgeable about the general nature of your issues, but if the dynamic isn't right, then that can really impede progress. Looking for another therapist with more experience or knowledge of the IT field may be the best option.
If it works, it works. ;)
I don't mean this to sound snarky, it's going to sound that way because text is text.
What makes IT special from every other career that therapy patients may have?
I work a blue collar job that my therapist can't remotely begin to understand. Yet they help, because at the end of the day, we all have the same kind of problems at their core. They're issues with people, systems, workload, or some combination of the three. A therapist really doesn't care about or need to understand the specifics of what you do, but how you can respond to it.
Different subculture. You wouldn't feel completely understood having certain problems and having them within that subculture.
This is true of a lot of subcultures, and yeah I second the advice that if it's truly important, finding a therapist with experience seeing IT folks (or a history in IT themselves) could help. But if someone isn't feeling heard by their therapist, either the therapist isn't actually understanding key points or the client is getting caught up on wanting specific validation on work things rather than focusing on bigger picture. Or both things can be true. But it sounds like just a mismatch.
Representation matters - not having to convince white therapists that they're dealing with racism is why POC want POC therapists - but therapists are also trained to help regardless of that.
So it's hard to say what's going on in a particular therapeutic relationship. Client should tell the therapist they're not feeling heard though so they can try to fix or refer as needed.
A (good) therapist isn't going to tell you that you should have gone to your manager over someone's failure to act on an assigned ticket, or give you advice on how to pace your git commits.
A therapist should not give you advice on decisions at all. A therapist should help you navigate your emotions and help you reach the best decisions on your own. There are a variety of therapy techniques, and I encourage you to bring up trying another one if you don't feel like you're making progress. If your therapist isn't well versed in another technique, they may refer you to someone else.
Ultimately, IT isn't unique when it comes to careers. There's this stereotype about SysAdmins drinking their pain away while feeling burnout. But I assure you, there are people who respond that way in every career path, from tradespeople to CEOs. And it's not healthy for anyone.
Managing your work-related emotions is something your therapist can help you with, but that type of help is typically isolated from the details of the type of work you do, and for good reason.
Let's look at this two ways, a lot of other comments have covered the same ground, but let's do it anyway.
and
The therapist will pick up on frustration at others not understanding capabilities and requirements - not all the jargon. Trust me, there's plenty of bad therapists out there. I've met plenty (for one session). Don't worry about them not understanding the technical aspects.
I tend to suck at smoking out people in interviews who aren't a right fit.
How do you tell in just 1 session that a therapist isn't for you?
Therapist here:
The general rule is that if you aren't connecting with the therapist within four-six sessions, then the therapist may not be a good fit for you.
If you feel like the therapist is missing you or not hearing you well, feel free to bring it up.
Strong therapeutic connections can be formed when there has been a rupture and it gets repaired. How a therapist works on repairing the rupture may give you information very quickly as to whether you want to continue with that therapist or not.
Hope this helps a little.
It does, especially #1. That is easy to do.
Looking back at a mediocre experience, #2 and the failure of #3, experienced several times (unfortunately) with a particular therapist was what drove me to end making appointments with him.
I hate to say "vibes" but it comes down to a few things - openness, understanding, and general empathy.
Hit them with some light trauma that I've already resolved or worked through and see what they suggest. See if they come to the problem with an actual angle or idea or if they get hung up on something stupid. The old "if you can't handle my smallest problem, how do I trust you with the bigger ones?"
Also, I'm decently paranoid and if I don't get a good feel right off the bat, I won't feel comfortable being open.
I have to laugh, because I have found myself knowing something, but not being able to articulate how I know it.
Interviews suck because they don't give you nor the interviewee a chance to actually work with each other.
Agreed, but you have to start somewhere.
Yes and no. Practice explaining stuff and finding the important parts. If they're any good, they will guide you. It's not important that they understand. Their job is to help you understand.
Also, they don't necessarily have to be a therapist. Sometimes you can talk with your friends about serious stuff too.
Oh, and it gets easier with practice. At some point you will be able to come to a decision even without another person.
There's always going to be a difference in experience as people because a therapist will come from a different socio economic background.
I also have quite a niche job and am also a minority at where I live. I expect nearly all therapists to not be able to relate to me fully.
But what I look for is common ideals. Same idea of what therapy should consist of. Their ability to listen and understand as much as they can. A person who is safe and not judgemental.
I went through three therapists before I got to my current one. The first therapist was great and I'm very happy with my current one too.
The ones in between though. The therapist I had before this didn't seem to understand what I was trying to say even though I explained a lot about how my culture worked. She was also dismissive and had a certain idea of what my issue was and tried to steer me towards it.
But it was often wrong.
My current therapist is from an entirely different culture bubble but we get along very well. And she gets things very quickly when I explain how things work and can empathise. As much as she's able to at least.
I guess it's more about finding a therapist you can get along with who can also understand the way you explain things rather than having to find a therapist who knows IT.
So it might be worth finding someone who has experience working with autistic adults, because a: you might be, and/or b: your coworkers might be. I'm in no way diagnosing you (or your coworkers) but IT does tend to attract a certain ~flavor~ if you will, and your average therapist will miss that. Or they won't know what to do with it if they do see it, and either way you won't get as much out of therapy as you need to.
Just a thought.
I'm not autistic. I'm sure my coworkers aren't either.
Based on my experience you are right about the I.T. field tending to attract a unique variety of people, some of whom have a lower EQ.
Fair enough! Probably just a personality clash/difference in experiences with your previous therapist then, which sucks but happens. Do you have any non-work friends who also work IT or IT-adjacent jobs with therapists they'd recommend? In any case, good luck with the trial-and-error of finding a good fit. It is worth it when you find the right person, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating.
I have one friend in I.T.. I vent to her. I don't want to overdo it, so I would like to find a professional to avoid that and possibly gain another set of helpful insights. She does not know of a good therapist.
I guess I'm curious why your therapist should understand above a superficial level. It doesn't pertain to the service they're providing. Can you elaborate?
Part of feeling better by telling someone your troubles is that you feel understood at more than a superficial level.
I'm not saying you don't think that's part of how you feel better, but I guess I'm asking if you've ever considered that it's a bad metric? My partner doesn't need to know how hard it is to do my profession to sufficiently empathize with how it's affecting me. They just need to make space for how it's impacted me and provide support in the ways I need.
Is it possible that you feel the need for someone to sufficiently "Understand," because your struggles aren't valid unless someone else can affirm that it is indeed hard? Just something to consider.
I want my therapist to understand how the things I'm experiencing affect my mental health. They don't need to understand how hard it is to terminate a cat5 cable or what NAT is, just that I am warrantedly stressed by my boss' expectations because he too doesn't understand IT. Your struggle is valid whether they grasp the technicalities or not and your therapist will hold space for it.
They don't need to understand the intricacies of it, but they do need to understand enough to agree that it is hard. Otherwise you get into situations where they think the problem is you're being lazy, and try to help you solve that (possibly nonexistent) problem.
But that is the literal essence of a therapists job, to understand that it is hard. They don't make value judgements for you about what is or isn't hard, your experience is your experience. If you have a therapist that's making value judgements about how you spend your work time, how hard your job is, or whether your suffering is valid, then I can tell you with confidence to find a different one. They would be failing at the very base level of their job requirements.