Professional Accountability in Mental Health
- Sandi Verley
- May 1
- 3 min read
Founder | Therapeutic Loop IPI-BFS™ Certification Trainer | Educator | Speaker | Mental Health Industry Innovator | 96% Client Success Rate | AI-Resistant Healing Framework | The Timekeeper
April 30, 2025
TRIGGER WARNING: Mentions of Residential Schools and Sexual Abuse.
"If You Don't Know Where Your Own Feelings Live, You Have No Right to Open Another's Pain"
When "Going Deep" in Therapy Goes Too Far | And Not Far Enough
Every day, more people are being encouraged to "go deeper" in therapy.
But what happens when their deepest wounds are opened, and the professional sitting across from them doesn't even know where their own feelings live? Or the session ends.
This isn't healing. It's emotional abandonment, dressed in clinical language.
Mental health professionals today are trained to control thinking, manage symptoms, and intellectually organize emotional chaos.
But feelings are not thoughts nor our thinking to be controlled. And when professionals treat them as if they are, they send an unspoken, devastating message:
“Your real feelings don’t matter.”
It’s the same cycle of harm that has played out through generations, where the powerful tell the vulnerable:
"It’s okay. This is for your own good" while inflicting invisible wounds that can last a lifetime.
Imagine a First Nation child, stolen from their families, forced into a residential school; abused by the very people entrusted to protect them, sexually violated at four or five years old and told:
"It’s okay, child. God loves you. I love you." While being sexually abused! All while their spirit was shattered in the name of “love.” That child knew it was wrong. They felt it. They felt the pain... But where were the adults who would stop it?
There was none…
Today, inside therapy offices around the world, children and adults of all races are living that same betrayal; when therapists, coaches, or practitioners who haven't done their own inner work open emotional crises inside clients…
…and then close the session, believing they’ve ‘gone deep’ with their client.
They have not gone deep. They’ve gone dangerous.
If you are a mental health professional and you do not know where your own feelings live you have no right to open the wounds of another human being.
It is not your degree or your title that makes you safe. It is your personal work. Your emotional literacy. Your ability to hold what you open.
Until this industry demands deeper accountability, we will continue to see therapy that leaves people feeling exposed, broken, and abandoned, sometimes to the point where life no longer feels worth living.
This is why suicide rates continue to climb even as “mental health awareness” campaigns flood our timelines.
Awareness without tools that fix the issue isn't enough. Good intentions without skill aren't enough. And a degree doesn’t mean you’ve done your personal work.
If I ask you how you feel, and then ask where you go to find that feeling and your answer is a textbook, a framework, your heart, or your head like most people, you haven't gone deep enough.
Ask yourself why you went into this industry.
If your answer is to truly help people, we honor you. But before you go deep with your clients, make sure you've gone deep within yourself.
Why?
Because when you expose a client, you need to know how to hold them — not leave them raw, alone, or waiting until next week. A woman shared with me just yesterday that her former therapist told her, “I’ve given you all the material I can. You will have to figure it out." But therapy is not about handing out worksheets or assigning labels. And it’s certainly not about “going deep” unless you've done your own inner work first. Like so many others, she felt discarded and left to navigate it all alone. I hear stories like this far too often.
If you're not providing fixes...change is in the air. We hope to see you in our training system.
If you took this path only for a title, AI Therapy Apps are here to replace you.
The landscape has changed. Most people are already turning to AI, available 24-7 without prejudice they say.
And if you're coaching others using the same old brick-and-mortar therapy education... you may want to revisit the structure of your sessions.
We invite you to join us and experience going deeper yourself before going deep with others.
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