On Being a Training Site: Not a Credential. A Clinical Stance.
- Feb 23
- 2 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Real Talk Clinical Psychology has been selected as one of 18 programs nationwide for the APPIC-sponsored Postdoctoral Membership Readiness Project, a pathway toward APPIC membership for postdoctoral fellowship training programs. We want to say something about why it matters in real life.
Most fellowship programs don't look like ours
APPIC membership is held by a relatively small number of postdoctoral training programs in the United States. The majority are housed in VA and academic medical centers, university training clinics, and large hospital systems. These institutions have infrastructure and established training cultures that have existed for decades, and fellowship programs grow naturally from them.
Group practices are rare in that community because the administrative demands of a formal training program are significant, and most group practices are built around clinical delivery rather than clinical formation. Training is treated as something that happens elsewhere, before a clinician arrives.
This type of work does not interest us.
Being a training site: not a credential. A clinical stance.
Real Talk is a doctoral-level team. We work mostly from psychodynamic and humanistic orientations and take seriously the role of culture, language, and identity in psychological life. We have clinicians from all over the world, and we offer therapy in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Farsi, not as a marketing feature, but because language is where meaning lives.
A clinician who has been carefully supervised and asked hard questions about their cases, theoretical assumptions, and blind spots brings something different into the sessions. That difference shapes how they listen, how they tolerate ambiguity, how they hold clinical standards under pressure. A clinic built around that kind of formation thinks differently than one that isn't. It is more likely to catch what others miss, to stay with complexity rather than simplify it.
What the PMRP selection means in practice
Being a training site and pursuing APPIC membership requires demonstrated evidence of a structured training program: a defined competency framework, regular supervision, a didactic curriculum, formal evaluation processes, and the administrative infrastructure to sustain it all. Building that inside a group practice, especially one that is insurance-based, without the institutional scaffolding of a hospital or university, requires a deliberate decision to treat training as central, and to allocate resources that could otherwise go toward revenue.
We've made that decision.
To the field
If you are an early-career psychologist considering a postdoctoral fellowship, we hope this gives you a clearer picture of what we are building and why. If you are a referring clinician or colleague, we hope it clarifies the standard we hold ourselves to. And if you are another group practice wondering whether this kind of training infrastructure is possible outside an institution, it is. It requires intention, some sacrifice, and a willingness to treat clinical formation as the most important value in the room. That is what we are trying to do here.
