On the latest Got Therapy?, I asked Dr. Dan Rose a question that sounds philosophical but turns out to be a training question: do you think you have to be old to be wise?
Dan was working from an article that defines wisdom as something that "accrues from the practice of critical thinking." It doesn't arrive with a degree. It builds up over time. The article went so far as to say wisdom "cannot be accrued until you're after 30." Whatever you make of that number, the principle should change how we train clinicians.
Here is the position: our training culture should reward visible critical thinking, not premature certainty. And senior clinicians should model wisdom by publishing, teaching, and talking about what went wrong.
Look at what we ask of beginners. Dan supervises a lot of young clinicians, many in their early twenties, and he describes a pattern any supervisor will recognize. They're asked to declare a theoretical model, and the question "usually locks people up." So they answer from "a place of certainty," because certainty is what they think is being graded. But, as Dan put it, "some of that requires a level of understanding that they couldn't possibly have yet." Demanding it is like "criticizing a baby for not being able to dunk a basketball."
The trainee who says I haven't really been doing this very long, but I think I like this is doing exactly what we should want. "They're actually practicing critical thinking." They are "on the road to wisdom." We should grade that answer higher than the confident one.
The other half of the problem belongs to us. Beginners measure themselves against "the therapists they see on the videos or read about in the books," and the comparison is rigged, because "most folks don't publish their failures." The rare clinicians who did, Casement writing up his worst cases and Freud writing up the cases that went wrong "to say how to inform the model," taught the field something no polished case study can: that "the more you know, the more you realize you don't know."
There's a structural issue, too. Dan pointed to research suggesting "it takes about 10 years in any profession to develop a level of expertise." He also noted that some of the people teaching trainees "went straight from training to being a professor." I worked ten years before returning for my PhD, and I really think it helped to balance that experience against the academic side. "The experience goes hand in hand with the critical thinking."
So stop asking trainees to sound wise. Ask them to think out loud. Show them your own stumbles. "You have to be lost before you can be found," and the field gets wiser when its senior people say so in public.
Got Therapy? is hosted by Michael Baltimore Ph.D. and Dan Rose Psy.D.