In the focus groups, our students naturally told us that they felt they needed more training, and more focus on tough, real world, client populations, such as individuals with borderline or substance abuse problems. And they also said that they needed us to attend more carefully to the issues of safety and complexity that they struggle with as they develop their skills and identity as PE therapists (for detail, see Chapter 14). Finally, they told us that it would be helpful to them to hear about how we became PE therapists and about our struggles in doing so. That is the subject of the next section of this chapter.
The authors represent multiple generations of training in the humanistic-experiential therapies that then became Process-Experiential therapy. Furthermore, each of us has continued to refine his or her skills as a process-experiential therapist and continues to grow as a therapist, experimenting with new tasks, new variations on old tasks, and new client populations and problems. Each of us has a different story, came to PE therapy by a different route and with different talents, and has had to struggle with different aspects of the treatment.
(In rough chronological order:)