Richard R RamosRichard R. Ramos. Founder of Parents on a Mission,Youth on a Mission, and Latino Coalition for Community Leadership

How Personal Healing Makes a Therapist a Better Parent Coach!

28 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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1:01

In this spoken segment, the presenter explains that accredited therapy programs mandate personal therapy for trainees, describing it as a "weeding out" process that ensures future clinicians have firsthand experience with the therapeutic process. The speaker argues that many therapists, including themselves, are drawn to the profession because they carry unresolved personal issues—what they term "unfinished business"—and seek to heal themselves while helping others. They recount their own family background: a loving, stable household that nonetheless carried intergenerational trauma, with a mother who was the youngest post‑World‑II daughter and a father who returned from war with PTSD. This personal narrative illustrates how the therapist’s own healing journey informs and enhances their effectiveness as a parent coach.

Chapters

Well, I would never recommend something I hadn't tried myself, and they don't let you graduate from therapy school without getting some therapy yourself. They just like, like, you know, there's like a weeding out process of us folks who think we want to go into therapy. And why do we think we want to go into therapy? Because most of us are resolving our own unresolved, you know what, like oftentimes we go into a career because we're like, oh, the, this career seems like I could make a difference, or It has made a difference for me and I want to learn how to do that for more people. And so there are a lot of us therapist types who, who go into the work because, because of some unfinished business that we've got to take care of. And I am no exception to that. I grew up in a household that was loving, that was caring. We never went without, we never had more than we needed, but we never went without. And my mother also brought into her marriage and her mothering own baggage. She was the youngest of two daughters born after World War II, her sister born before. Her father came home with PTSD.