We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Michelle Largent a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Michelle, so great to have you on the platform. There’s so much we want to ask you, but let’s start with the topic of self-care. Do you do anything for self-care and if so, do you think it’s had a meaningful impact on your effectiveness?
Self-care is my number one priority. As a therapist, I’m assisting people in their own self-care every day. And I know that if I’m not okay, I can’t give my best treatment. For me, self-care is to leave work at work and rarely give therapeutic advice to friends and family. These are boundaries I have made with myself that I feel is very important to maintain. I am also an introvert, so I need A LOT of time to unwind on the weekends. That’s where I do a lot of things alone like going to the park, seeing a movie, and playing Animal Crossing (my island is coming along quite nicely, thank you). I also am a book lover, so I made a reading nook in my apartment with a comfy chair and wallpaper in a print I like. It also happens to be right next to my cat’s tree, so we hang out and read together. When it comes to reading, I make it a point to not read therapy type books in my free time. To me, consuming things related to therapy is not leaving work at work; and I’m not trying to break my own boundary.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
Honestly, the most important thing to me for my career is serving different communities and being a good ally. I work very closely with the LGBTQIA+ community and have found a passion for it. Currently, I work at a group practice, called Diversified Health and Wellness Center, that specializes in working with this community. If I find myself opening a private practice one day, I will continue this work. In group practice, I am fulfilled with the work I am doing. My goal professionally is just to help as many people as I can for as long as I can.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
CONFIDENCE. Confidence in my abilities, my mind, and my education has been crucial to get me to where I am now. Starting a brand new career was scary, but it was very important to me that I kept my confidence through my counseling education because I didn’t want insecurity to keep me from helping my clients as best as I can. Something else I have been doing recently to progress my career is keeping an open mind. By that I don’t mean attending conferences and keeping up counseling education. This is a very important aspect to the counseling field, but I’m talking about learning from my clients. I let them educate me about their diagnoses by telling me their symptoms of something that I didn’t know about. It has helped me identify aspects of something another client may be dealing with that they don’t know about. A third quality I maintain-and would advise for anyone entering the counseling field-is being myself. Think about if you have every been to therapy. You want to like your therapist, right?! It is so important that you like who you’re speaking with because that helps build trust, which helps motivate you to come back to therapy. From the very first session, I go out of my way to let a client see my personality so they can know from that first session if we will be able to work well together. So, for anyone who is starting their journey towards becoming a counselor, the most important piece of advice I can give is to always be yourself with your clients. Because people can tell when someone is not being authentic, so don’t even give someone a chance to think that.
As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
When I first started at my current practice, I read a book called Tell Me What You Want: A Therapist and Her Clients Explore Our 12 Deepest Desires, by Charlotte Fox Weber. In this book, the author broke down conversations she has had with clients about what they really want, like belonging, understanding, freedom, and to be loved. What I enjoyed about this book was that the desires were things that everyone wants. The relatability of this book was helpful not only for me, personally, but for any and all clients I see. I reference it in session, assign it, and tell my colleagues about it all the time. This book has helped me broach topics with clients I wasn’t sure how to address before. The palatability of Weber’s writing makes it a good read for anyone guiding or going through a mental health journey. The goal in therapy is to help people make connections with themselves, and I think Tell Me What You Want delivers that.
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