Feelings of Incompetence among Experienced Clinicians
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Feelings of incompetence (FOI) are an ongoing part of the private experience of being a therapist. Although normative, they are often linked to therapist distress and to negative therapeutic processes. Yet systematic inquiries into the subjective judgment of oneself as inadequate in the role of therapist are scarce for experienced therapists. A qualitative approach was used in this study to obtain rich descriptions of experienced therapists’ encounters with feelings of incompetence. Twelve therapists with over ten years of experience were recruited for the study. They were each interviewed for ninety minutes using a semi-structured interview protocol. The resulting transcripts were analysed with procedures based on grounded theory methodology (Strauss & Corbin, 1994). A dynamic, pan-theoretical, and multidimensional theory of therapist feelings of incompetence is presented. The substantive theory describes the relationship between the four main categories of intensity of self-doubt, sources of feelings of incompetence, mediating factors, and consequences. The theory offers a structure with which to understand and diffuse this most serious hazard of our profession. It has immediate and practical relevance for psychotherapy practitioners, educators, and supervisors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.059 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".