Hey, deserving listeners, it's just me today.

If you were to ask, if you were to somehow approach my supervisors, particularly my supervisorsies, I guess my students too, but particularly if you were to somehow contact some of my supervisorsies, people that students, too, but particularly my, if you were to somehow contact

some of my supervisees, people that I, you know, new therapists that I'm supervising,

if you were to talk to them and ask them in confidence what they disliked about me the most,

there would probably be, you know, a pretty sizable list because I, you know, I have all my

various flaws. And any flaw you have is likely to emerge in supervision. But one of them

would be that I will rant often about confidentiality and about how to follow certain regulations and standards of care when it comes to couples counseling, family counseling, family therapy.

And what they would say is, well, you know, Kirk's always yelling at us about making sure that everyone signs the disclosure statement and never getting involved in the court and avoiding

custody battles and, you know, whenever there's sort of different modalities of family and couples

and individual that we have to follow all these stupid rules. And the thing

is, is that the reason why I am annoying about it is because I am worried about everybody,

because I have read many cases and seen many cases firsthand of therapists who make these mistakes and then end up getting in big trouble for it.

And the instances in which you're going to get in trouble are rare.

You could perhaps go your entire career without ever even having a complaint waged against you, let

alone getting in a specific trouble like the kinds of things that I rant and rave about

in terms of this stuff. But why take the chance when you can avoid it so easily?

That's my whole thing. It's like if you just follow a certain set of very simple rules, you can avoid a huge amount of headache and annoyance and sleepless nights worrying about it.

Honestly, whenever I talk with people who are getting sued or having a complaint waged against them, the actual consequences aren't that big of a deal, which I'll get into later.

But the biggest, 99.9% of the toll it takes on a therapist is the waiting, the shame, the

wondering what's got to happen.

And, you know, just I have therapists, and I've been through it myself, where you're worried

that a complaint is going to happen.

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