When you seek out a professional helper, let's stick with a psychologist for now, you want to make sure he or she can help you. Makes sense right? But how do you do that? You can look at her credentials, diplomas on the wall? You can check on what kind of schools or clinical experience she has had. Good enough? Hardly. Training is necessary but not a sufficient measure of competence. The rest is experience. There are plenty of competent helpers who are experienced without necessarily being professionals. Self-taught and lived through of the experiences they are trying to help others with. But I'm talking about finding a professional who has both training and personal experience with the problem. The number of these individuals is probably greater than publicly acknowledged. Probably for the sake of protecting professional reputations, a lot of professionals keep their personal experience out of their professional presentation. Unfortunately some are not aware of the personal reasons they are competent or committed to certain love-life topics for example. Not that the public would not understand. In my experience the public is often reassured especially if what they (the professionals) had to go through is past history and enriched them personally and professionally by going through it. Now the public can reap the benefits of their experience for themselves.
I have 50+ professional psychologists working as workshop leaders at the Love-Life Workshops website www.lovelifeworkshops.com. It took me a couple years of interviewing to find them. At our profile pages on the site I asked them to not only list their credentials and professional experiences but also their relevant love-life experiences as well. Most of them gave me plenty of detail as to why they consider themselves professionally and personally competent to conduct their particular workshops. I thought this was extraordinary. I did not get any of the resistance I half expected. I have 60 of the finest professional psychologists available. And beyond that, they all have the personal experience required to talk with authority about their particular love-life workshops.
