Psychologically harmful and invalidating environment for clinicians with 0-2 years experience in the field.
Pros
You will become acutely aware of your own personal and professional identity, ethics, values, and beliefs
Cons
Management utilized tactics of negative reinforcement and token economy to reinforce and reward staff for achieving unrealistic expectations and disrespecting their own personal boundaries. In this way, clinicians were infantilized, denied acknowledgement of their own mental capacities, education, qualifications, and clinical experience. As a therapist who naturally aligns with theoretical principles other than behaviorism, my values, beliefs, and knowledge were ignored and oftentimes not tolerated. I felt starved of clinical learning opportunities throughout my time with this agency. I was appalled by lack of ethics. I was often at the receiving end of gaslighting/passive insults whenever I brought up concerns regarding ethics, or exercised independent thought. In caution, check the license status of all supervisors. I started to pose ethical questions when I realized one of my supervisors has had an AMFT license status for over 12 years. I do not understand how this person was granted power and control over the clinical learning opportunities of AMFT/ACSW clinicians 0-2 years out of grad school. Unfortunately I was unable to have any constructive learning opportunities with this individual due to this supervisor's ignorance of marriage & family therapy theories applied to clinical practice.
