Originally published in the August 13, 2026 Newsletter.
Each week, every Associate Clinician and Trainee meets with Remarkable Services' Clinical Supervisor, James Parker, LMFT, to seek out professional advice and guidance. A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of sitting down with him to ask him about his own experiences and career trajectory.
James’ journey into mental health was not a traditional one. He began his career in the business world, despite a deep and longstanding interest in human psychology.
“I can recall moments in time, as you do when you're young, [where I asked myself], what am I going to do with my life? I remember one specific memory where I had a group of my friends and peers gathered around, and I was facilitating some sort of a discussion. I was like, if I could have a job where I could have this kind of connection and community … if that was a job, I'd take it.”
“So then what did I do? I went to business school,” James laughed.
He had discovered his strengths in talking, listening, and building relationships, but found it difficult to understand how to connect his skills to a viable career option for himself.
“I didn't get it at the time, because I was thinking [of] all these other benchmarks, universities, schools, business, engineering, pre-med. Business school was, as one would expect it to be, not rewarding or fulfilling. Then, I decided I was going to study psychology. And so, as some will do, they'll turn to their parents and look for advice. And I said to my father, ‘I think I've found my path. I think I'm going to study psychology. What do you think?’ And he said, ‘Well, I don't even know what you're gonna do with that.’ So I didn't really have a lot of support or understanding of what that might mean.”
James then earned his degree in academic psychology, which he used to return to business management. He spent years working in sectors spanning from retail to fitness, entertainment to security.
“After an existential corporate working crisis, I decided to push the eject button and reprogram the way my life was going,” he said. “It was only later that I bridged it into the real idea of working in mental health and psychology.”
James had taken an interest in mental health from a young age and attributes some of his formative experiences to what eventually drew him into the field.
“Some of us who enter this field, we have some sort of a connection with mental health, and that’s certainly been the case for me. I came from a divorced, broken home family, and for a lot of my formative years, I was raised by a mother who struggled with addictions and mental health issues. So I had a front row seat to that, as many people do. During some of those formative years at that time, I was able to participate in therapy myself. The support of that kind of an environment must have really created a lasting impression for me.”
Eventually, James realized that no matter the industry, he had always been in the business of working and connecting with people.
“There were things that added up as to why being in this field would connect with me, and why I could do pretty well with it. I was a talker, and a listener, too. Those things became pretty emergent. Maybe at the time, being a talker and being in school wasn't looked so favorably upon. So I earned my share of poor conduct — much to the dismay of my father,” he added with a grin.
As it so often is, hindsight is 20/20, and only with time did James recognize that the same qualities that got him reprimanded as a child were actually strengths that could translate into a career in mental health. Before entering college, he had taken a Strong Interest Inventory assessment, which pointed him towards psychology and teaching.
“I started to reframe strengths that I had, because as we look at the different types of intelligence, there's lots of different types. But in my narrow model, I didn't have many options and I didn't realize that there was such an expanse of the way that people look at the different areas of intelligence. In our field, a lot of times it's intrapersonal and it's interpersonal. So that was a great reframe for me because I just thought I was a rebellious kid who liked to talk a lot, right?”
This process of discovery — first for himself, and later with his clients — became one of the aspects of psychotherapy work that James finds the most rewarding.
“I like helping people solve problems. I like the idea of critical thinking and motivating change. Something that has been on my mind recently … is the idea of the Johari window, which is a self-discovery tool that was introduced in the ‘50s. What it suggests is that we have an open self, a hidden self, a blind self, an unknown self. There's things that we know about ourselves that others don't know about us, so we get to share that. There's things that others see in us that we don't know about ourselves. And then there's this unknown territory. I like that emergent part of what gets discovered as you're exploring through the depths of someone's experience and process, and helping them find confidence, their strengths, help them build competence. Creating that community and culture. Connecting with people, right?”
After working for a few years as a therapist, James transitioned into supervision and teaching, driven by the same deep and enduring curiosity about people. In addition to providing individual and couples psychotherapy, James serves as a Clinical Supervisor at Remarkable Services, the Area Chair and Lead Faculty at the University of Phoenix, and an Adjunct Faculty member at Palomar College. For James, teaching and supervision became a natural extension of the mentorship and people-centered work he had already been doing.
“After I left that corporate workspace in management, I started working in personal and professional development, executive and life coaching. It again followed a path of supporting people in finding strengths, creating opportunities, building on skills. In many ways, that became a natural transition for me to begin to [provide supervision and] teach in a few programs, and to enjoy those skills of helping people find themselves and find their way.”
Like many new therapists, James entered the field aware of the ways in which it naturally aligned with his personality, but he hadn’t fully anticipated some of the more challenging parts of what the work would entail. Some of these dynamics included learning to navigate ethical boundaries and dual relationships.
“Something that I process with my students to think about critically from a number of sides is the idea that psychotherapy is the purchase of friendship. But that didn't reveal itself to me until when clients want to invite you to their weddings because you've helped them navigate a difficult developmental period in their life as a couple, or they want to invite you to their daughter's graduation because they feel like you've done something to keep their family cohesive. The impact of having to say no to that, and manage some of those really intimate personal relationships you've built, but having to keep those firm boundaries around it. That idea of once a client, always a client. They're in our office, and not outside of it.”
The paradox of the profession is that we are drawn to this field because of our affinity for connection and curiosity about people, yet at the same time we must draw firm boundaries around the container of the therapeutic relationship. While we feel connected due to the nature of the job, it can also be very isolating at the same time.
“Someone might make the assumption that, oh my gosh, you must feel so supported and well connected in your life. I might [spend] a majority of my waking hours connecting with people who I'm very close with, but they're still strangers. It's an interesting feeling of isolation as well. I don't think I realized that as much before I came into the field. We get to be very grateful that we get invited in to be a part of their process, but it's with a lot of respect and separateness in a lot of ways.”
I asked James if he had a piece of advice that he wished someone had given him to pass on to the rest of us. He touched upon a challenge that nearly every clinician encounters at one point or another: impostor syndrome. He also referred to the Dunning-Kruger effect — the observation that increasing expertise often brings greater awareness of how much there is still to learn.
“I think the impostor syndrome is healthy. I think it's healthy to not always feel like you know, and to try and continue to learn, because if anything, I learned just as much from my clients or associate therapists as they might learn from me. And there's going to be a lot of obstacles. Old philosophies will say that the obstacle is the path. We're going to have all of these different obstacles that come in our way, and then when you encounter them, that's the work.“
Especially as new practitioners, clinicians often seek out techniques to fill a toolbox of interventions drawn from different theoretical orientations. James emphasized that, in his experience, it’s the attitude of the therapist, more than the specific techniques, that drives the most meaningful change.
This philosophy also informs his approach to supervision. The day-to-day work of psychotherapy exists on a spectrum between highly-structured and modular approaches such as DBT, and more open-ended orientations like existential or psychodynamic therapy. James sees it as his job to help the clinician discover which works best with their unique perspective, style, and personality.
“It's like a mind map, that treatment process. Everybody has their own diverse way of existing in it. There's a lot of paths to success, I think. It's that authenticity, the curiosity, the connection and passion, the inquisitiveness. It's those things that lay the foundation for the connection, the trust and rapport and the genuineness of the relationship, that has the highest degree of curative factors outside of all these techniques that everybody wants to gather. That's always meant a lot to me. I can only say that I've come to that conclusion because I've gone through all of these different technique gatherings, and then realized it's those who can really connect and be a human person first and a clinician second who seem to do the best.”
Outside of work, James loves strength training and playing music, video games, and complex strategy board games. He is as guilty as anyone of loving to binge-watch TV shows and movies. Currently, he’s working his way through Civilization 7 and looking forward to the newest installment of Grand Theft Auto.
When asked what advice he hoped clinicians would carry forward with them, James said, “Embrace your identity in it. I think one of the things that I seek to do is to help people artistically integrate their clinical identity and learn to be not only okay with that, but really confident with it because we're diverse practitioners and we're meeting a diverse population and so it makes sense. And there's a lot of paths to change. It's all genuineness.”
