Six Months of Therapy in One Week with Dr. Marcus Earle | PoP 470

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Six Months of Therapy in One Week with Dr. Marcus Earle | PoP 470

What is a super-intensive? Is this something that you could implement in your practice? How can working with a team of therapists better your clients’ outcomes?

In this podcast episode, Joe Sanok speaks to Dr. Marcus Earle about super intensives – getting six months of therapy done in one week.

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Meet Dr. Marcus Earle

Six months of therapy in one week with Dr. Marcus Earle | PoP 470Dr. Earle is a Family Psychologist with over 30 years of experience. As the clinical director of Psychological Counseling Services (PCS), he practices with over 25 therapists. Along with his father, colleagues, and client feedback PCS has developed an innovative Intensive Treatment Program delivering 60 plus hours of therapy in 8 days.

Dr. Earle is passionate about developing a relational treatment system providing a space for compassion and challenge.

Visit Dr. Earle’s website and connect on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Contact the office at 480-947-5739

 

In This Podcast

Summary

  • Doing intensives
  • Other staples in the program
  • The “sales pitch”
  • Marketing intensives

Doing intensives

After seeing the great outcomes from Marilyn Murray’s work, it didn’t take Dr. Earl’s practice long to see that they should put that together with their treatment mentality. They started with four days of five to six hours of therapy each day and also got their clients to do groups. When people have the opportunity to do a lot of work in a short period of time, this feels more human to them and they prefer it to dragging it out over a long time.

Their work is trauma-focused and they try to uncover and dig deep so when starting a group, they ask their clients to talk about what they don’t want to talk about and that’s where the real opportunity occurs. Another thing that worked in their practice’s favor was their ability to talk to each other between sessions. One of the concerns had been clients having a difficult time connecting again when jumping to different therapists throughout the day but the therapists’ ability to communicate in between the sessions helped maintain continuity from session to session. Clients weren’t able to avoid information that came up in a previous session, the next therapist would bring it up and continue working on it. It ended up being an additive process rather than circling around the same story again and again.

Other staples in the program

  • Genograms – it’s helpful for clients to be able to visually see and understand where they’ve come from and the system that influenced them. Seeing the impact of how people were and the patterns that evolved between them is immensely helpful for clients.
  • Trauma egg – Within a big egg shape, clients write out their traumas, and the impact that these traumas have is represented by the thickness of the line. They talk about their thoughts and feelings around that and what they have learned from it. This gives Marcus and his team a template to work from.

There are a number of other things that are more typical to happen during the intensive and once those things get rolling, then the process unfolds. Early on is a lot of acquiring information about the client and getting to know them, and then the real movement begins to happen on Wednesday, Thursday and into Friday.

The “sales pitch”

When someone calls and is interested in an intensive compared to being in weekly therapy Dr. Earle will speak confidently and comfortably about what they have done as they are constantly receiving good feedback, not just from the clients but also from the people who refer them. That being said, it is expensive. There are variations in the cost process depending on which therapists are involved in the intensives but you are getting six months’ worth of treatment in this much shorter timeframe and that’s the cost.

As a private pay practice they have ruled out a large segment of their population but they do have a not for profit entity (New Hope Educational Foundation) that can supplement intensives for some people and provide some financial help for them. It’s rare for insurance to cover the treatment so Dr. Earle would like to talk to the representatives for insurance and tell them that this program works, it will save them money, and they will have happier clients as a result.

Marketing intensives

  • Give talks
  • Attend professional conferences
  • Networking
  • Make regular calls and develop relationships

Dr. Earle’s practice has a history of giving talks on their work in sex addiction and this gave them a niche early on. These talks, to professionals and the public, give them information that’s helpful and it helps these people get to know them and what they do. Building trust with people is critical, especially for other professionals. It’s a big leap for therapists to take and Dr. Earle is so appreciative of the ones who have developed that trust with them over time. They also attend professional conferences where they have a table where they can talk about their program, and do normal networking.

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Meet Joe Sanok

private practice consultant

Joe Sanok helps counselors to create thriving practices that are the envy of other counselors. He has helped counselors to grow their businesses by 50-500% and is proud of all the private practice owners that are growing their income, influence, and impact on the world. Click here to explore consulting with Joe.

Thanks For Listening!

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Podcast Transcription

[JOE]:
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This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 470.

We are about a month and a half out from when Next Level Practice doors open again. And so, if you’re not familiar with Next Level Practice, Next Level Practice is the premier membership community for starting a practice. So this is a community of people that from the moment you think, I want to start a practice; maybe you’re even at the end of grad school, you’re about to launch, you’re going to get, you know, pre licensed, unlicensed, and in your state, you can have a private practice. We’re going to walk you through that process. We have over 30 courses that you’re going to get full access to. A paperwork packet worth over $200. You’re gonna get a logo designed for you, a $300 value. You’re going to get put into a small group, get accountability partners. We do live events called ‘What’s Working?’ where I facilitate conversations, and we bring in experts every month. At least one expert where you get to ask them questions about different aspects of private practice, and then Whitney and Alison also do Q&A’s on top of it. There is more than enough there to support you in your private practice launch. And this is going to be opening up in late August of 2020. So, if you want to be in cohort number 13… we are not skipping the number 13. I was married on Friday the 13th. And so, we are not going to skip it. So, it is going to be opening in late August. And for you to get the invite, heading over to practiceofthepractice.com/invite, and you will get access to Next Level Practice when that opens up.

Today, we’re going to be talking about six months of therapy in one week. So super intensives. Marcus Earle, I’m so excited about this conversation. When people do therapy in a way that kind of challenges the norm, I just love that disruption in the private practice world because there are ways to do it that are fine, they’re regular, it clicks along. But there’s also tons of different ways that people practice that are ethical, they’re clinically sound, and they’re different. And that just fires me up when I find these people that… even just a couple of episodes ago, in 466, where Christine talked about how, in a year, she got 30 clinicians to join her practice, like, that’s bonkers. Holy cow. Or the idea of doing six months of therapy in one week and how that happens; it’s just so interesting to me. So, without any further ado, I give you Dr. Marcus Earle.

Well today on the Practice of the Practice podcast, we have Dr. Marcus Earle. Dr. Earle is a family psychologist with over 30 years of experience as the clinical director of Psychological Counseling Services. He practices with over 25 therapists, along with his father, colleagues and client feedback, PCS has developed an innovative, intensive treatment program, delivering 60 plus hours of therapy in eight days. Marcus, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast.

[MARCUS]:
Hey, thanks, Joe. It’s great to be here.

[JOE]:
Yeah, well, let’s just start with, so you’ve got a lot of people working with you – 25 plus clinicians, you’ve got an intensive. Take us back a couple of years and let’s talk about just the development of this practice. Because I know a ton of our listeners maybe are solo practitioners, maybe they’ve hired their first couple clinicians, but they would love to be at, you know, 20 plus clinicians. Take us kind of through some of that story of how you got to this point.

[MARCUS]:
Well, you have to remember that I’m 59. So, it’s more than a couple of years. So, we’ve been developing this for 25 years now, and it has been a learning process the entire way through. Where we started was my dad started the practice in 1974 and then I came and joined him in 1988. At that point in time, it was a group of about eight professionals. And after I got there, we noticed people leaving, and so we went through a difficult transition initially, and as we continued to rebuild what we were doing, we were making referrals to another professional, Marilyn Murray, who was doing intensive work herself. And she would see two individuals a week for 20 hours each, for the week. So, she would just invest herself and immerse herself in their story. And we were noticing that that was having a really productive outcome for people working on their trauma. So, staying with it, hour after hour, day after day, was producing some really great results. What also is true about our practice is that my dad has always had this mentality, being trained in systems that, you know, why shouldn’t the treatment also reflect the system’s mentality? And so, he would regularly include other people with any case he was working on, realizing that other professionals had strengths that he didn’t have. And so, the outcome for clients…

[JOE]:
Were those other counselors, or were there other, like natural paths or professionals like that?

[MARCUS]:
Well, those were days where we didn’t have natural path. So, it was mostly other professionals, other clinicians, but may have included a clergy person if the person was involved in the church, making sure to talk to physicians if there were medical issues. So, whoever needed to be part of the treatment team was going to be included in the conversation, and sometimes he’d have people come out. So, I learned a great deal from him early on about being inclusive in the work that I was doing and not trying to do everything myself, which was certainly a tendency that I had, being young and ambitious.

[JOE]:
Yeah, I remember when I worked for Wraparound in Kalamazoo. And Wraparound has this mindset that the family’s at the center of it; oftentimes if someone’s in child protective services, and there’s all these professionals having meetings about the family when the family’s not even there, and the whole thing with Wraparound is ‘no meeting about me without me’. And I just loved that idea of, instead of having the family have to go meet with the probation officer, then meet with the therapists, then meet with child protective services, why don’t we just have a meeting once a month where we all come together, make sure we’re on the same page, support the goals and then go do our respective work? From my perspective as kind of the lead Wraparound person, it just was so much more effective to bring that team of people that were invested in the family.

[MARCUS]:
It makes sense. And I don’t know, especially if you’re a psychologist, not typically trained to think systemically; as a marriage and family therapist, you’re taught to think more that way. I just didn’t find, back in days gone by that professionals acted on that very well. They just got in and kind of got into their tunnel vision about what was going on and pursued that. And so the ability to expand the input, so to keep the system more of an open system, rather than just a closed system, you know, where it’s just my perspective, or even just myself and one other person, let’s keep expanding the perspective; creates more resources and more opportunity to affect change with somebody.

So, we had this experience, where Marilyn Murray, and the referrals we were giving to her, very great outcome; we had this treatment mentality that we had. And it didn’t take long for us to say, well, maybe we should mix these two, you know, like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. And if we dip this in, you know, this has potential to work. And so, for me, tentatively… I was young, my dad tends to be more courageous, certainly when I was younger, and say, well, let’s go, let’s go for it. Because the going for it meant that we were going to bring people in and ask them to spend multiple sessions a day, over multiple days. And I think we started with about four days and probably about five to six hours of therapy each day, and also having them do groups that we had existing at the time. And we found that was working. My anxiety at the time was, wow, we’re asking people to take off work – this much work for that period of time. Plus, we’re asking them to pay money while they’re taking work off. And so, my young mind at the time goes, wow, we’re asking a lot of people. What I realized with time is that individuals, when they have an opportunity to do a lot of work in a short period of time, feels more humane to them, than dragging the work out over a long period of time. And because so much of our work is trauma focused, and so much of our work is trying to uncover and dig deep as we can into things that people haven’t talked about… So I start every group, and my dad would start every group with, please talk about what you don’t want to talk about; talk about the most difficult things, because for us, that’s where the real opportunity occurs is when people are talking about those things that they’ve kept hidden throughout their lives.

The other things that have worked in our favor as we continue to evolve and change this this program, another question was, how are people going to do, changing from therapist to therapist in the same day? So, they see a therapist for an hour or two, then they move to another therapist for an hour or two. And aren’t they gonna have a difficult time connecting again and staying with their process? And that’s a reasonable question. But what we found is that our ability to communicate in between sessions helped maintain continuity from session to session for the clients. So one of the feedback we get from clients is that I’m amazed at how you continue to know what had happened previous, and I couldn’t get away from that information, I couldn’t try to avoid it because, you know, the next therapist would bring it up and want to continue working on it. So, it ended up being an additive process, rather than continue to circle around the same story again and again.

[JOE]:
Yeah, that’s what my fear would be as either a client or as someone that was doing it, would be, I have to retell my story over and over, or I made some great progress with Marcus and now I got to switch to somebody else. And how is that new person gonna even know where to start? Like, technically, how does that happen where that handoff occurs between clinicians?

[MARCUS]:
Yeah, let me… I’ll come right back to that, because you triggered another thought for me, which is, you know, when you do this kind of work, it teaches you a great deal of humility, because I feel great about the work that I’m doing. The client goes to the next therapist, and then they do something entirely brilliant that I didn’t think of, and I go, oh, wow. I missed that. And I tell you, it’s been so good for me, to be seen, and to notice the great work that everybody else does, and then learn from them, and have the opportunity to be stretched by them; and these are people that I’ve trained. It’s really cool to watch the way the system evolves. And so the way we communicate initially, back in the days of pen and paper was that we would go to a central office location within our building, and we would take our notes and put them in there so that the next therapist could pick those notes up; oftentimes, we’d meet them in this small office, a bunch of therapists crammed in a small office, and then just give a quick summary of what had occurred, what we were working on, and kind of what we thought would be helpful to work on. And so, we maintain communication in between. What currently happens is we have an electronic record set. And so we’re putting the notes in either during or just after the session, you know, everybody has their personal preferences about how to do that part of their note taking, and if there’s something real critical, then we’ll make a phone call, send an email, because they have a [unclear] email system internally. And so, we keep the communication going either through the notes, face to face, a phone call, or through email, because I know how important it is to keep tracking with the individual stories unfolding. And it keeps building that way.

The other the other piece, Joe, that we do is we have certain staples to our program. So, one would be a genogram because we believe understanding where they’ve come from and the system that influenced them, super helpful. And then for them to be able to visually see where they’ve come from, and the impact of how mom was, how dad was, or stepparents, or siblings, and then the patterns that evolve between people is immensely helpful for clients to see. We also do what we call a trauma egg. And what that is, it’s a big circle, it looks like an egg – this is something that Marilyn Murray developed – and within that egg they write out their traumas. The impact those traumas have are represented by the thickness of the line. They talk about the thoughts they have, the feelings they have around that, what they learn from that. And so that gives us a template to work from. And there’s a number of other things that are kind of more typical to happen during intensive and once those things, you know, get rolling, then the process unfolds. So, the early on is a lot of acquiring information about the client and getting to know them, and then the real work, really, movement begins to happen on a Wednesday and Thursday and into Friday.

[JOE]:
And I want to go back just a little bit to the pricing side of it, because I think that’s something that a lot of people would say, well, yeah, I can see it being way more effective to go through a lot of this quickly. Even just thinking about my own daughter, she was struggling with reading. And so, we have a reading intervention and they do no fewer than four one-hour sessions a week. But, in like eight weeks, they can often pull a kid up at least a grade level because of that intensiveness. And you’re not kind of restarting each week versus you go to one tutoring a week for the rest of your life, and maybe you maintain. So how do you speak about it, or how does your staff speak about it, in regards to outcomes, in regards to pricing? I can see some people saying, well, you know, if they’re purchasing 20 or 60 hours, maybe we should give them a discount on the pricing but then, why give them a discount if there’s better outcomes? So, talk through maybe the pricing and… I hate to call it just the sales pitch, but you know, what’s the sales pitch when someone calls and is interested compared to being in weekly therapy?

[MARCUS]:
You know, that’s a tough thing. So, I speak confidently and comfortably about what we’ve done because, you know, constantly people are giving us feedback, not just the clients, but the people that refer to us. And even after somebody’s been back and work with them for a time, if they continue, you know, with their aftercare plan they do well. That being said, you know, it’s also expensive, because we don’t do our process with a lot of group, you know, which is a way to kind of cut costs internally. So, we still have 22 hours of group, but there’s 35 hours of individual in our in-person program. That’s been honed down for our telehealth intensive program right now. So, it’s a lot of therapy. I value our therapists and so they get paid what they would get paid normally when they’re seeing regular patient clients. And so it’s the same charge and that’s why there’s a variation in our fees for the intensives, and why there’s a range in what people are charged because, you know, if I’m involved and I’m charging more for the intensive versus having some of our newer therapists, or some that are just choosing to keep their fees at a steady rate and not change, and not upping their fees, that causes variation in their intensive process, a cost of the process. And so, what I have found is that when we’re characterizing the treatment, as you know, you’re getting like six months’ worth of treatment in this timeframe. That’s the cost for that.

What I really struggle with is, you know, what we do is private pay. And I’m acutely aware that that rules out a large segment of our population and we have a nonprofit entity. The New Hope Educational Foundation that we established some time ago with a gift from a client – just came out of nowhere, it wasn’t asked for, because you can’t ask for it, which currently is frustrating because it’s hard to fund something like that. And so, what we can do is supplement intensities for some people and provide some financial help for them. When we do that, what we’ve done is give them some money, they have to invest in the process, and then all the therapists reduce their fees and at times, we’ve dramatically dropped the fees for the groups as a way of getting people in that normally couldn’t afford to get in. Sometimes insurance will cover it, but that’s certainly more rare than common. For people that work in an insurance only based program then I would want to build a relationship with the people I talk to, the representatives for insurance, and say, this is a program that can work, here’s how we could do it. Here’s gonna be the expense and we think it’s gonna save you money and you’re gonna have happier clients as a result. Obviously I haven’t done that, that may just be idealistic, but I like to think about potential, and what might happen, because I really do believe this model of treatment moves people along in some really powerful ways and, and at times people in crisis, so whether their marriages is falling apart, they’ve had some very traumatic experience go on, when they can jump into something and be held by a group of people who are working to understand and to help them to work better with what’s churning inside, it’s just a really nice process for people to be in.

[JOE]:
Now, are there ever times that you say to yourself, I wish this was longer? I’m just thinking, there is some trauma where you kind of have to have, or even marriage skills, where you gotta have some time to work on it, you know, getting in a fight with your spouse or kind of mulling it over. For people that are fast thinkers, an intensive might be really helpful, but maybe there’s other people that it has to simmer for a while. How do you figure out who is the kind of person that maybe needs to simmer for a while, and this wouldn’t be appropriate for, versus those that maybe this would be very appropriate for?

[MARCUS]:
Yeah, that’s a really great question. One that I actually haven’t thought through as well as I should have. So I think what we’ve done is depended a lot on the referring therapist, you know, to decide whether or not this type of program is a good fit for this client, because there’s certainly other programs, like residential programs, that have a longer stay. And certainly, for people just coming out of an addiction, trying to get sober, something where they can stabilize is more important. People that have a hard time holding on themselves and stabilizing themselves would benefit from something that that ends up being six weeks or three months or something like that. So, those are types of clients that aren’t an ideal fit for us. For sure. What we have found, just in the length of our programs, we have people stay for a couple weeks at times and at times we have people say for three weeks; people max out at three weeks, it’s too much therapy, can’t do it any longer. But here’s to address what you’re talking about is that I have continued to work with the people that refer to us, and even with our staff, to be talking to the therapists that refer to us, to not have a client come back and just do one hour a week. Try to do one to two hours, two to three times a week. So what they’re doing is kind of titrating down from all the work they’ve been doing with us that allows them to move from all that intensity to move out of that intensity to better hold on to the work they’ve done than just have it drop off. Because what we do know is that the system they left is more like… when they left, it didn’t have the same kind of change going on.

And so, there’s all those influencers, when somebody gets back to the old system, that can pull them back into and drag them back into the old ways of behaving. And that’s a conversation I have with everybody before they’re leaving when I have a chance to talk to them to say, don’t be surprised if you fall back into some old behaviors, that’s not failure. That’s just how things were. And you’re going to revisit that because that’s what you’re comfortable with. It’s what you know, and you’ve changed a whole lot in a very short period of time. And be patient with yourself. Because you always have the ability to make what went on here with us as the reality for you. And view this as how life can be for you and how you want life to be for you. This isn’t unreal, this isn’t mythical. This is real, what’s gone on and how you’re experiencing yourself is a reality that can be a new reality for you. So, keep climbing back into that and I work for people that write out how they view themselves so they can refer to that when they come back. And so those are the ways to try to help that.

[JOE]:
No, that’s really helpful. Thanks for walking through that. I’m interested in how you market this, you’ve said that oftentimes other clinicians will refer. What are some ways that you market this in the world for people to kind of understand the value of it, understand the transformation and want to come work with you?

[MARCUS]:
A lot of time. And so, always have given talks, and one of the things that we do work in is sex addiction and then working with partners of sex addicts and so we have this history of giving talks around that which gave us a niche early on; it’s certainly something that is talked about more now. And with a great debate around it as well, which I consider a really healthy debate going on. And so, giving talks to the professionals, giving talks to the public, allows us to (1) give them information that’s helpful – I hope it’s helpful – and then (2) they get to know us and what we do. And because building trust with people is critical. Especially for other professionals, for them to entrust us with their client and encourage the client to come and spend that kind of time and that kind of money is a big leap for therapists to take and I’m so appreciative to the ones that have developed trust with us over time. Attending professional conferences, and we have a table, if you will, where we can talk about our program when people come by; we work to give talks during conferences. And then just normal networking that you do.

So, the other part of the history that I learned from my father was, call people that are connected to this client. So, call the professionals, as I was talking about earlier, and get to know them, you know, don’t just make it a one-time conversation, make it a regular conversation, so that you develop a relationship with these other professionals and they get to know you, they get to know what you do. And that helps them to trust you and certainly keeps your name and presence in front of them. I think a lot of therapists are really challenged with stepping outside of their work environment, uncomfortable talking to other professionals, you know, what am I going to say, what am I going to talk about? And it doesn’t… we know what we know, and we know it well. So, trusting that you know what to know, trusting that the other professional has some things that they know that’s going to be helpful. There’s a conversation just there. If you happen to be cold calling somebody, which I did a lot early in my career, I would ask them about their profession. I talked about what I was doing. And generally, there’ll be some hints about some personal thing that I could pick up and ask them a bit more about. And so, I get to know them more personally, rather than just being a professional contact. I can tell you, I was shaking in my boots when I was younger. I’m sure I stuttered a lot and it was shortness of breath.

[JOE]:
Well, I think that personal side is so important, because those are professionals that are often making enough money to afford your services too. And so, whether it’s them or their friends, they’re gonna be running in a community of people as well. It kind of reminds me of before I sold my practice, we had this half page sheet that was called the Doctor Update form. And it was a three-part carbon copy thing where we could have one in the file, we could give one to the client, and then we could mail one, physically mail it to the doctor. And it’s interesting how doctors respond differently to things that are mailed than things that are emailed or faxed even. And so, we would send that to them. It was really just a simple checklist, like this client is dealing with the following symptoms, here’s the medication they’ve reported to us. Here’s a suggestion for things to talk about. And then we would follow up, especially if we knew that there was a, say, an annual physical coming up, or a doctor coming up or a med review, that, then we had a reason to call that person or to even coordinate with maybe, you know, their nurse practitioner or someone like that. So then that allowed us with every single client to start to… assuming they, you know, signed all the confidentiality, for us to be able to coordinate with those doctors coordinate with those people. Even though we’re 100% private pay, just like you, it really helped those doctors see that we were providing that extra service that went beyond maybe what other clinicians locally were doing.

[MARCUS]:
That’s an awesome idea. And I think because I think physicians in particular like simple information, so just straightforward. Give me bullets because I’m gonna look at it real quickly.

[JOE]:
Yeah, are they moving towards their goals, away from their goals. What are the main goals? They got 15 minutes with them. They want to have quick information.

[MARCUS]:
That’s exactly right.

[JOE]:
Yeah, I have a question about… so my dad’s a psychologist, and the closest we really worked together is I rented from him early on from his office, so we shared an office there. And then later on, he ended up doing police assessments and rented from me, but we never had a really working business relationship, and I think that my kind of direction ended up going far away from just the clinical work. I’m interested in that dynamic of a father son in a business together, because I think oftentimes there can be kind of a competitiveness, there can be a being treated like a son rather than a professional. How has that worked well? For you guys to work together this long, it seems like you’ve cracked the code in some ways, or maybe it’s just you had a relationship that was conducive to this sort of relationship. Talk a little bit about working with your father in a professional setting.

[MARCUS]:
Yeah. Or maybe we just cracked when you said cracked the code. Yeah, it’s a long conversation, and so the shorter version, because I want to be respectful, you know, with a conversation that actually deserves time, is that I think early on, you know, I always knew I had a ton to learn. And I certainly held in high regard what my dad had accomplished up to that point. And he has a very strong entrepreneur type personality. And for me, I was a more step back, take in everything that’s going on, and plan your steps, if you will. And so, what ended up happening is we ended up complementing each other very well, early on. So, he’s this, let’s go forward, and I’m this okay, well, let me figure out how we’re going to go forward with this. And so, we continued that process for a long time, and it continued to evolve what we have today, and so we worked exceptionally well in that regard. And then, time and age, I was changing. I was shifting and I was growing; I was gaining confidence. And I was finding out that I had qualities that he has, you know, and so then you have two chiefs in the same tribe. And so that’s really where the rubber’s hit the road for us, is realizing, okay, now we have two strong individuals in this practice, and how are we going to work that through? And honestly, we’re still working that out right now. He’s 83. I’m 59. And it has not been a short journey. It’s a long journey. What I appreciate about him, and what I appreciate about me, is the willingness to continue to work at it. That doesn’t mean that I at times have not said, I’m done.

[JOE]:
Sure.

[MARCUS]:
There’s been times I’m sure he has wanted me to be done. But we both have a commitment to keep working it out. And that matters to me. And I know it matters to him. And some would say maybe it’s just a form of torturing one another. I actually believe it’s producing… I know for me, it’s producing tremendous growth that I would not have experienced had I made other choices. So, in some respects, it’s been easier for me; certainly, for a time it probably kept me more stuck in a way of behaving, in a way of believing about myself. [Unclear] longer if I’d gone out on my own, I don’t know those answers. I’m aware now, though, that I don’t think there’s a stone that’s not been overturned at this point in time. And this is hard work right now for each of us. And it’s good, hard work. And I think in doing that, it’s been important for me to have congruence, that I’m not asking people to do what I’m not doing for myself. But I have not been perfect with that. Definitely not been perfect at that. But I keep getting called back to that, as a therapist. If I’m not growing, if I’m not continuing to look at what I do that causes harm to myself, that causes harm to people in my life, that causes harm to people I work with, if I can’t continue to engage in a growth process, then how can I do this with other people; it doesn’t make any sense to me.

[JOE]:
I love that idea of congruence, of wanting to make sure that you’re living out the thing that you’re teaching other people. I partially asked, yes, for my own relationship with my father, but also because I’m now entering into a business relationship with my two daughters who are five and eight. And so, we’ve started podcasting. At first they didn’t want to do it and I said, that’s fine. And then, as I was getting it set up with the two microphones, they were like, oh my gosh, I want to try this. And so, we just started chatting. And now they want to interrupt my workday all the time and record podcasts. And so, which is awesome, but also, it’ll be interesting to see, you know, as this develops… so, we’re doing this thing called the Leave to Find podcast. We were going to be doing a year-long road trip, but with this Coronavirus thing, we’re going to kind of see how it goes. Right now, I guess it’s the Leave to Stay podcast or the Stay to Find podcast.

[MARCUS]:
Right, right.

[JOE]:
But it’s just interesting to think about what’s going to come up in our relationship as we work together. And as they homeschool with us that wouldn’t have come up. And I think like what you said that it’s gonna give us all a chance to grow differently and to learn differently, you know, to talk about that it’s not just my podcast; it’s not me just interviewing you, that anyone can have ideas if this is genuinely a family podcast. And so, we’ll see how it plays out. Thus far, it’s been an interesting show with the kids, where I mean, a five-year-old, an eight-year-old talking on a podcast, it’s a lot of interruptions, but very entertaining, at least for us.

[MARCUS]:
Oh, that’s sounds amazing. I don’t know if you know that my… well, I don’t know if you recall, my son has started up a podcast for us, called A Mind of a Therapist, and he’s currently in a marriage family therapy program. So, this intergenerational transmission effect is going, is continuing. And what I know for me as a dad, is my desire is to how can I both encourage my son and be open to his feedback to me, you know, so what is his story? And how have I influenced the story in a way that has both been helpful and harmful? And so, there’s been already, he’s 28, a number of very difficult conversations, very painful, for me to see some of the things I repeated that my dad did with me. And yet, what I know about those painful conversations is there’s freedom for me by facing the things that I need to face. And then for him, to have a dad that’s willing to be in the struggle with him, and to acknowledge that, yeah, I did not do what I needed to do there. I didn’t do my best. You know, one of the things I get frustrated with parents is when they respond, I did the best I could. Oh, no, you didn’t? You just didn’t. You did what you did, and you perhaps worked hard at what you were doing, but you knew it wasn’t your best. We all know it’s not our best. We all know that we’re falling short. The ones that can chase where they’re falling short and do the work they need to do to keep growing. Maybe they’re doing their best. But that’s a small pool of parents out there. And I just wish we’d just allow ourselves to be truthful about our reality and not come up with these sayings that allow us to hide. And I’m now on my little soapbox here so…

[JOE]:
No, that’s all good. Marcus, the last question I always ask is, if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know?

[MARCUS]:
What I’d want them to know is that we need one another’s professionals, that what I have learned is how much better a professional I am that when I work with others, I know people like the work that I do. And what I’m also aware is that people like the work I do more when I’m working in concert with other therapists that do the things that I don’t do or do some things that I do better than I do. And so, when I can work as a team, with any client, I’m giving them the best care I know to give them rather than me trying to be the one stop shop for them. I just can’t be. I do better when I understand that I’m a stop along their journey, and my job is to pay attention to what other steps may be along their journey that could help them be on the path they want to be on.

[JOE]:
So awesome. Well, Marcus, if people want to connect with you and your work, what’s the best way for them to connect with you?

[MARCUS]:
Our website’s probably best, PCSintensive.com. Our phone number is 480-947-5739. And I really appreciate the opportunity to have the conversation. It’s always fun just to sit and chat with somebody. So, thank you, Joe.

[JOE]:
Thank you so much, Marcus. Have a great day.

[MARCUS]:
Okay, you too. Bye, bye.

[JOE]:
I mean, what an interesting way to think about doing therapy, I mean, to do that much therapy in one week, how cool is that? Man, I just love that idea of six months of therapy in one week. You know, there’s people that they don’t want to hold on to their pain for six months, they want to just start working on things and I love how Marcus really dove into the exact structure that they use.

Well, TherapyNotes is the premier electronic health record out there. A ton of our Next Level Practice people use it, a bunch of our consulting clients, it is such an awesome resource. So, make sure you head on over to therapynotes.com, use promo code JOE to get two months for free. And if you are a Next Level Practice member, you get six months for free. And also, Telehealth is included in that two months when you sign up for that, which is so awesome that they’re doing that now. So, use promo code JOE or if you’re in Next Level Practice, just forward your receipt to us. We’ll connect you with their billing folks and they’ll make sure that you get those six months for free. Thanks so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain.

Next time, this is gonna be actually on Thursday, we have Bryan Greenberg, and he’s gonna help you enhance your Google business profile, which I’m really excited to help you do, because it’s so important to show up well in Google. And then we’ve got a little bit of a podcast takeover. We’ve got our Cohort 1 of our Done For You podcasters. We’re going to have their podcasts here on the show. It’s just gonna be awesome to hear all four of their shows. They’re killer. I’m really excited about it. So, thanks for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have a great day.

Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. We really like it. This podcast is designed to provide accurate, authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.