APA Council: Where Psychology Becomes Policy
with Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby and Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson, PsyD, LP · Recorded on location at APA 2026
The Senate of Our Profession, and Why Most of Us Have Never Heard of It
Something changes in how we are allowed to practice, or in what our clients can access, or in who gets paid for what. And we find out after it has already been decided. The rule arrives. Nobody asked us. The body that decided it, more often than we realize, is the APA Council of Representatives.
The APA Council of Representatives is the policy-making body of the American Psychological Association. Its members are seated by states, divisions, territories, and Canadian provinces. It meets twice a year, it debates, and it votes on the resolutions and policies of the association, which the APA advocacy office then carries to members of Congress. It is, functionally, the senate of our profession, and most of us have no idea it exists.
I sat down with Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson, PsyD, LP on location at APA 2026. She owns SGW Psychological Services in Minnesota, where she works exclusively with survivors of domestic violence. She represents Minnesota psychologists on the APA Council of Representatives and chairs the APA Rural Health Caucus. This year she was a mover on three new business items, including a resolution on intimate partner violence and gender-based violence built specifically so the APA advocacy office could hand it to legislators. I asked her for ten minutes and got a civics lesson about my own profession I did not know I needed.
“We aren’t just impacting APA. We’re impacting on a greater level as well.” — Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson
What’s in this article
Because decisions about what you are allowed to do, who gets paid for it, and what your clients can access get made in rooms like this one. I did not understand the machinery either, and I have been doing this a long time.
No. The advocacy work reaches federal legislation, which reaches everyone practicing regardless of license type or membership. The specific mechanics I describe are APA’s, and most professional associations have some version of them.
Three new business items she was a mover on, and I walk through each one. The one with the widest reach is the intimate partner violence and gender-based violence resolution.
Not tomorrow morning, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It changes what funding and protections exist over the next few years, which changes what you can refer to. There is also one clinical correction in this episode that changes your practice immediately, and I include it.
More than you think and less than you fear. The last two sections are about exactly that.
Moments from this episode
Episode transcript
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: The statistic that is the most staggering to me is the fact that on average, every minute, 24 Americans are severely abused by an intimate partner.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Here today at APA 2026, continuing to talk to interesting people about interesting things. And right now I’m sitting down with Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson, who is APA Council representative from Minnesota, and also a champion for survivors of domestic violence.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: My goal is to treat people and to get them on with their lives. It’s not my goal to keep people in my office forever. I want people to live the life they want to live.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I am so excited to talk to you.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: I am so grateful to be with you. Thank you so much for this opportunity.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: One of the reasons I really wanted to have this conversation is because, Dr. Shannon, you have been in the room with the APA Council for days. Trapped in a hotel ballroom with the APA Council for days and days. And first of all, are you okay? But then secondly, for therapists who weren’t able to attend or be part of that conversation, I would just love to hear your thoughts about industry trends, or things on the radar of APA that other therapists might want to know about.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: That’s a great question. The answer is yes, I’m okay, so thank you so much for asking that. It was a very interesting Council of Representatives meeting. It was very productive. We passed a couple of great NBIs. NBIs, for those that don’t know, is new business items.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: New business items.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: Yes. So it’s like the policies and things of that nature set forth for the American Psychological Association, which is very cool. We passed a number of great NBIs, and I was a mover on three of them, so it was a very busy council. One was going to be a bylaws change that is going to require increasing the majority for a roll call vote, because the way it stands now, only 25 percent of the vote is needed to be able to induce what’s called a roll call. And a roll call is where everybody has to disclose how they vote. So the purpose of this is to increase psychological safety, and to make it so people feel more comfortable.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Oh, my goodness.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: So that was a really important one. There was another one on immigration, policies for immigration for APA. As a Minnesotan, we had a lot of interesting things happen earlier this year with ICE and things of that nature. So this was a really integral NBI, of a very timely nature, to say the least. And then as well, you had mentioned, my heart lies with intimate partner violence and gender-based violence. So we actually passed a resolution that is going to be useful for the APA advocacy office for the extension of the Violence Against Women Act. And what’s really cool about that is it mentions and gives policies for GBV and IPV that hadn’t previously been there. So it was really amazing. It was probably the highlight of my council experience, to stand up and be able to talk about that.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: That’s incredible. That’s so good. And that’s so interesting to me. It’s like Congress.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I mean, there’s like a whole Senate thing going on within APA. And before getting to know council representatives such as yourself, I don’t think that just as a psychologist practitioner I was really aware of all the machinery, and everything that APA is doing, certainly internally, but also then to influence legislation in the United States. And so just for people listening who might be like, “Wait, what?” Can you say a little bit more generally about how that works, and how the APA then translates into broader public policy, or new laws?
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: Sure. So the Council of Representatives is a group of us. We’re made up by states, divisions, and then also territories, and folks from provinces from Canada have representation.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Oh, interesting.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: So it’s not just necessarily, as we would think, typically American, but American being kind of North American in this case, plus territories as well. And so we get together twice a year, in both February and August, and we vote the resolutions, policies, et cetera, for the American Psychological Association. It is like Congress, exactly like you said. We actually get together, we debate, which is a really cool experience.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: And it is something where it has meaning, it has value, it can go on and do some cool things. So the intimate partner violence NBI I had actually just mentioned, I collaborated really closely, and my co-authors collaborated really closely, with the advocacy office. This was by no means just mine. My primary co-author, [CO-AUTHOR NAME PENDING CONFIRMATION], and I really worked hard on this one, so I don’t want to take all the credit. It’s not all mine.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: It must be a huge job. Really, to get all that together.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: But we worked really closely with the advocacy office to make sure this was a document that could actually be given out to legislators, to US legislators, that has the ability to make a difference. So it’s not just APA. We are trying to expand things and do things at a broader scale, and make change, which really matters for people.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: And then the relationship between APA and the actual Congress and Senate, what does that look like?
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: So in our February meetings, February meetings are always here in Washington, DC.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: As we know, convention isn’t. Next year, for example, convention’s in San Francisco, so council will meet in San Francisco next year before convention starts. But our February meetings are always here in DC. And the day before we do our council work, we actually get scheduled and meet with all of our legislators. So we get what’s called Hill Day, APA Hill Day.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Oh, like an actual…
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: We legitimately go there and we meet with the legislative offices. Yes. And so we get to talk about agenda items identified by APA, and then talk about things that we’re doing with these resolutions and things like that, that get passed by council. So we aren’t just impacting APA. We’re impacting on a greater level as well.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I didn’t even know that you guys were doing that. But that makes me feel so good, that members of Congress, or is it Congress or Senate, or both?
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: Both. We do both House of Representatives and senators, yes.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: But that they would be receptive to that, and be wanting to talk to psychologists and understanding our industry, the things the APA is concerned about, and then being able to translate that into how they ultimately shape the law. I mean, that’s really cool.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: That’s why I said we get the opportunity to make a difference on a broader scale, which is, I think, something that a lot of people don’t know exists. And I’m glad that you’re giving light to that. So thank you for the few moments to acknowledge that.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Well, no. Our therapist friends listening to this, I hope that you guys feel excited about this as well, because what this means is that we all have more influence than we know, right? Like, I’m not going to get on the phone with a senator, but in Minnesota, I might be able to talk to Dr. Shannon and understand what’s going on, and be able to work together to have downstream impact on the world in a bigger way.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: Absolutely. My heart lies with advocacy. I couldn’t be more grateful to get to do everything I’m doing.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Now, tell us, if your time allows, I would love to hear more about your work with domestic violence and intimate partner violence in particular. Tell us more about, I guess, just your mission. Let’s start there.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: Sure. So I own my own practice, SGW Psychological Services. At SGW Psych, I do a lot of individual and group psychotherapy. And so by the time those people get to me and end up in my office, they are where they’ve experienced IPV, or DV. I define IPV as part of the DV spectrum. To me, domestic violence is, how I define it is, boundary violations perpetrated within the home, or in the context of past or present intimate partner relationships, for the sake of taking power and control and impacting boundaries. So that’s my personal definition of it. And so that’s why I said IPV can be part of DV, but DV can also be a lot bigger. Parent to child, child to parent, sibling to sibling, aunt to niece, et cetera. So DV is much broader than just intimate partner violence, although IPV is certainly a really large part of DV. So I do a lot of work with, well, I exclusively work with survivors now. And so the bulk of my work is individual. As I said, usually by the time people come to me, they’ve already experienced, and they know they experienced, some type of domestic violence.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: And so if they are not yet in a safe place, we are talking about separating or getting out of the situation, what they want. I in no way would ever push a survivor to decide what was best and right for them with my own agenda. And so we avoid the question, “Why don’t you leave?” Because that question is one of the most harmful questions that there is.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Say more about that.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: Sure. So that particular question really induces shame. And shame makes it harder to leave.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I could see that.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: So it is really important that we avoid that question, and avoid inducing that type of shame, because we want to support survivors where they’re at. We want to give them the best opportunity. I know what I want to do for myself, but I don’t know what’s right for other people. That’s not my job. I’m not in other people’s heads. There are millions of reasons why people don’t leave relationships that are unhealthy, beyond just love, and I don’t know that everybody realizes that.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I do. I’m an MFT as well as a psychologist. I get it. You have all kinds of reasons.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: It’s important. So a big part of what I do is work with people to figure out what they want, and what is best and right for them. And then once that’s identified, if there’s safety concerns, we figure out how to mitigate safety as much as we can. If somebody chooses to end the relationship or something of that nature, we will do some type of planning to help them figure out how to move forward and have a big life transition, which matters. And then eventually treat the PTSD symptoms that are often there. More often than not, the bulk of the individuals in my office have some type of trauma diagnosis. How could they not? Which isn’t terribly surprising. So I use a couple of different evidence-based treatments for the treatment of IPV and DV, and we make sure that the symptoms reduce, which is really important to me as well. My goal is to treat people and to get them on with their lives. It’s not my goal to keep people in my office forever. I want people to live the life they want to live.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: That’s awesome. Dr. Shannon, you’re obviously so knowledgeable on this topic, and it really is not just a specialty, but I would think a scope of practice where if you didn’t know what you were doing, there could be a lot of potential for a therapist to unintentionally, while trying to help, maybe cause harm. I’m curious to know, are you doing any types of training programs or supports for clinicians seeking to develop their competency in this area?
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: Absolutely.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Oh, you are?
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: Absolutely. This is actually a huge area of what I do. I’m not just a psychotherapist. I do a lot of community trainings. It is really important to me.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: Right now, there’s a massive gap happening in this area, and in a lot of graduate programs. I’m not going to say all, but in a lot of graduate programs, this topic isn’t discussed.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: It wasn’t in mine. Two degrees. A masters, a doctorate. Never discussed. Wait, no, we did look at the power and control wheel, like, once. That was it.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: Yeah. And again, when you’re thinking statistically, between one out of three, one out of four women who experience this, one out of six to one out of seven men. I will tell you this, the statistic to me that is the most staggering is the fact that, on average, every minute 24 Americans are severely abused by an intimate partner. So we’ve been talking for how many minutes? Take that times 24, and that will tell you where we’re at.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: That’s a big problem.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: That is a very big problem.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: And such a need for therapists to understand and be able to help.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: Absolutely. And that is why I do so many community trainings, and trainings for other clinicians and things of that nature, because this is a problem, and it’s one we’re not addressing and not talking about.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: I will share with you, on the Council of Representatives, I am not just the Minnesota member, but I am also the Rural Health Caucus chair.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: The what?
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: Rural Health Caucus chair.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Rural Health Caucus chair.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: Yes. So I’m not just treating from the urban perspective. It is really important and absolutely necessary that we’re talking about intimate partner violence in rural areas. They have a whole unique set of challenges that the folks in the urban areas don’t have. We see things like access to care issues. For example, I’ve worked with people that have been hours away from safe shelters, and they don’t have the transportation to get there, and what do you do? We also have issues like broadband issues, for example. So it really impacts the ability to even do telehealth with these individuals. I do a lot of telephone calls with individuals in rural areas because they don’t have the ability to have data to make the videos happen. So we have to do a lot of telephone only. And my clients often can’t do it in their houses because it’s not safe, so they’re doing it in parks or on gravel roads frequently, to be able to come for therapy. So it’s a very different set of unique experiences if you’re in the rural area.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Wow. That’s why I’m so grateful right now for the opportunity to sit down with you, to share your perspective with our other friends, because I think there are so many things that are happening in our profession, in our field. Therapists listening to this right now might be thinking, “Oh, me too.” Right? But how do we come together in order to help people here? Okay, so then just a couple other questions. Your training opportunities, are they available to clinicians anywhere, or is it an in-person thing in Minnesota? Somebody listening to this, how could they benefit from what you have to know?
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: In general, I recommend reaching out. And I’m going to guess you can probably post any contact information for me.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: Which I would appreciate. I do a lot of developed programs for specific organizations. So if you’re part of an organization that wants a specific training on this topic, please reach out. I would love to come in.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: We can even talk about that. So say a little bit about that part, and then we’ll go into all the details.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: Sure. So I develop specific trainings on things like intimate partner violence, gender-based violence. I’m a massive brain nerd, so I do a lot of talks on the neurology of trauma, things of that nature. So that’s really important to me. I also do work through the People Incorporated Training Institute. Those are online trainings. So that would be another opportunity to learn and get this information. So there’s a lot of different ways, but I usually just best recommend reach out to me, let’s talk. I will figure out how to get you the resources you need.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: So good. And so then with this, we’ll put all your contact information in the show notes, and a little article. I heard you say People First would be one place to go.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: People Incorporated.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Oh, I’m so sorry.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: It’s People Incorporated Training Institute. People Incorporated is a nonprofit in Minnesota. And they have a separate arm that is called the Training Institute, and so I regularly do trainings through there because I’m an adjunct instructor for them.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Fantastic. And then you also have some programs that you’re developing, which I think is interesting, for organizations to be able to manage domestic violence or intimate partner violence with their employees. So, sorry. I knew this was going to happen, Dr. Shannon. I was like, “Oh, we’re going to talk for like 10 minutes,” and I’m like, I want to talk to you for the rest of my life. But so just really briefly. The role of an employer in this. Because as an employer, I feel like I need to have some boundaries around people and their personal lives. Like Jesse over here. Hey, Jesse, want to come and say hi to Dr. Shannon? This is my friend and colleague, Jesse, here. But I’m not going to be like, “So, Jesse, what’s going on at home these days? Tell me everything. Have you and your partner been fighting lately? Let’s talk about it.” I’m not going to do that, right? So that’s why I’m sort of interested. When you’re doing employer-based work around domestic violence, what does that even look like?
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: So let me share with you where this actually stemmed from. I had a previous career before ever being in the mental health field. I actually worked in commercial real estate for a few years. And my now best friend came to me when I was going through my graduate training, and she asked me, she’s like, “I think my assistant is being abused at home, and it’s impacting her work. What do I do?” And I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t know. Despite years of working in domestic violence shelters, things of that nature, I didn’t know. And so I had to go into the research, which is what we do when we don’t know things, right? But what I found was the literature was really scant on this issue. It just didn’t really exist. And so I ended up actually developing that as my clinical dissertation. And so I did a qualitative study in which I interviewed survivors of DV to figure out how DV was impacting work, and I found out that there were so many different ways. We would find, for example, people’s uniforms for work would be destroyed, or their cars would be tampered with, or their abusive partners would keep them awake all night so that they couldn’t concentrate.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: We know that domestic violence impacts US workforces at a rate of, the last number I saw was 5.8 billion, but I’ve seen also other numbers coming out saying 7.8 billion. So there is a really large impact of domestic violence on US workforces that we’re not talking about. And so to me, it’s important that we work with workplaces so they can make their employees safe. They can also protect themselves, which I think is really important in this too. The reputation of your workplace becomes in jeopardy if there becomes a problem there.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Okay. That makes a lot of sense. And even just as we’re talking, thinking about this whole thing, for someone in that situation, being abused at home, being able to go to work might be the only private place they have. Because one of the key features of this is isolation and being disconnected from other relationships. So I’m imagining somebody where the only place they go is work. The only other people that they talk to are coworkers. And so then what do we do with this organizationally? And you know what? While we’re here, I’m going to do a quick plug for Division 13 of the APA and the Society for Consulting Psychology. Shannon and I are both affiliated with SCP. And what I love about the mission of Division 13 is that it’s psychologists seeking to create big, big, big systemic change through organizational work like this, because it’s all important. Individuals, families, but at an organizational level, the impact is just multiplied, frequently by so much. And so I’m just so grateful that this is also one of the dimensions that you’re actively building out in order to support people. This is great.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: Thank you. Thank you. Oh, my gosh, I am so grateful to have had this opportunity.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Me too. This is so good. So any other last words to share, or how would people get in touch with you? Do you have a website?
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: SGW Psychological Services is on LinkedIn as SGW Psych. That is my shortened version, because SGW Psychological Services is a mouthful.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: That’s a lot to type out with your thumbs. I get that.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: I certainly can be reached through my website, which is sgwpsych.com. That is probably the easiest way to get in touch with me. I’m also on Instagram and Facebook as well, as SGW Psych.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Amazing. Well, Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson, this has been such a pleasure, and thank you for your service.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson: Thank you so much for letting me be here, and to talk about these important things.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Thank you.
What to take with you
The APA Council of Representatives is the policy-making body of the profession, and it works like a legislature.
Representatives are seated by states, divisions, territories, and Canadian provinces, they meet twice a year, they debate, and they vote.
A new business item is how a single clinician changes association policy.
Three passed this year with the guest as a mover, including a bylaws change designed to make the room psychologically safer to vote in.
Hill Day is the part almost nobody knows about.
The day before the February meeting in Washington, Council members sit down with their own legislators, House and Senate both, and walk them through what Council passed.
The intimate partner violence resolution was written to be usable, not symbolic.
Built with the APA advocacy office specifically so it could be handed to legislators, and it adds policy language on gender-based and intimate partner violence that was not previously there.
The timing is not incidental.
Violence Against Women Act programs are authorized through fiscal year 2027, which means the reauthorization window is open now.
Rural access is a policy problem wearing a scheduling problem’s clothes.
Hours to the nearest shelter, broadband that will not carry video, and clients taking phone sessions from gravel roads. None of that is fixed by a better calendar.
Your leverage is closer than a senator.
You will probably never call a member of Congress. You can absolutely find out who your state’s Council representative is.
APA Council of Representatives: What Happens Behind Closed Doors
Here is a feeling most of us know and almost never name out loud. Something changes in how we are allowed to practice, or in what our clients can access, or in who gets paid for what. And we find out after it has already been decided. The rule arrives. Nobody asked us. If you work with survivors of intimate partner violence, something was decided in a hotel ballroom at this year’s APA convention that will eventually reach the people in your office, and the body that decided it is the APA Council of Representatives.
So here is the short answer, for anyone who arrived from a search bar. The APA Council of Representatives is the policy-making body of the American Psychological Association. Its members are seated by states, divisions, territories, and Canadian provinces. It meets twice a year, it debates, and it votes on the resolutions and policies of the association, which the APA advocacy office then carries to members of Congress. It is, functionally, the senate of our profession, and most of us have no idea it exists. If you would rather not learn about your own field’s machinery alone from a blog post, that is more or less what our community of clinicians is for, and I will come back to that.
I want to be honest about my own starting point here. I have been a licensed psychologist for the better part of two decades. I run a group practice. And until I started getting to know Council representatives, I did not understand any of this. Not the structure, not the voting, not the part where they go to Capitol Hill. I said that to Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson on the record, and she was generous about it, and then she said something that I have not stopped thinking about: she is glad someone is giving light to it, because a lot of people do not know it exists.
This is the part where I tell you what an article can and cannot do. This one can explain the machinery, and after reading it you will know more about how your profession governs itself than most of your colleagues. What it cannot do is put you in the room, or tell you who your state’s representative is, or keep you engaged past the week you read it. That takes other clinicians, which is the least glamorous and most reliable thing I know about professional growth. It is the reason my team built a community and CEU program for therapists instead of just publishing more of these. Read the article. Then go find someone to talk about it with, ideally someone who is already doing it.
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson, PsyD, LP owns SGW Psychological Services in Minnesota, where she works exclusively with survivors of domestic violence. She represents Minnesota psychologists on the APA Council of Representatives and chairs the APA Rural Health Caucus. This year she was a mover on three new business items, one of which was a resolution on intimate partner violence and gender-based violence written specifically so the advocacy office could hand it to legislators. We recorded this on location at APA. I asked her for ten minutes.
What Does the APA Council of Representatives Actually Do?
It sets the policy of the American Psychological Association. Council votes on resolutions, policy statements, guidelines, bylaws changes, and the association’s priorities, and those votes are what turn a concern held by clinicians into an official position the association can act on and advocate for.
The composition is the part that surprised me. Council seats are held by representatives from state and territorial associations, from APA divisions, and, as she pointed out, from Canadian provinces, so the body is not strictly American in the way the name implies. Members are elected, they serve their constituency, and they bring that constituency’s concerns into the room. Which means somewhere there is a person whose job is to carry your state’s clinicians into a national policy conversation, and you can find out who that is.
Council meets twice a year, in February and in August. The February meeting is always in Washington. The August meeting travels with the convention, which is why this year’s happened where we were sitting, and why next year’s will be in San Francisco. If you want the broader case for why clinicians should care about any of this, therapist advocacy and systemic change is its own conversation and worth reading alongside this one. This article is about the mechanics.
LMB’s own reaction in the recording is the most useful summary I can give you: it is like Congress. There is a whole senate thing happening inside our professional association, with debate and motions and parliamentary procedure, and it produces documents with real downstream consequences.
How Does an APA Resolution Turn Into Federal Legislation?
It does not, directly. A Council resolution is association policy, not law. What it does is give the APA advocacy office a document with the weight of the profession behind it, which staff and Council members then bring to legislators who are drafting or reauthorizing actual legislation.
The step most people miss is that the document has to be built for that purpose from the start. She was explicit about this. She and her co-authors worked closely with the advocacy office specifically to produce something that could be given to United States legislators and actually be useful to them, rather than a statement that lives on a website. That is a different writing task than a position paper, and it is why the collaboration mattered.
If you want to see the machinery in its unglamorous native form, APA publishes the Council handbook that governs how new business items move, along with the Council policy manual and the draft minutes of each meeting. It is dry reading and it is also the actual paper trail, which makes it a useful thing to know exists the next time you wonder where a professional standard came from.
One honest limitation on this section. The August 2026 minutes were not published at the time of writing, so everything in this article about what passed this year comes from her account in the recording rather than from the official record. She was a mover on the items she describes and has no reason to overstate them, and the February 2026 minutes are public and consistent with the pattern she describes, but I would rather tell you where the information comes from than imply I read a document I did not.
What Is APA Hill Day?
It is the day before the February Council meeting, when Council representatives go to Capitol Hill and meet with their own legislators’ offices, House and Senate both. They walk through APA’s advocacy priorities and the resolutions Council has passed, in person, with the people who write the laws.
I did not know this was happening. That is the honest reaction I had in the room and I am keeping it in the article, because I suspect most of you did not know either. The February meetings are always in Washington, and the scheduling is deliberate: the meetings with legislative offices are arranged in advance, they happen the day before Council does its own work, and then the same people walk into the ballroom and vote.
Sit with the compression for a second. A concern raised by clinicians becomes a motion, becomes a debate, becomes a vote, becomes a document, becomes a meeting in a congressional office. Not over a decade. Over a couple of days, twice a year, on a calendar that has been running this whole time without most of us knowing.
What Passed at APA Council This Year That Affects Clinical Practice?
Three new business items she was a mover on, by her account. A bylaws change raising the threshold required to force a roll call vote, a policy item on immigration, and a resolution on intimate partner violence and gender-based violence written to support the next reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
The bylaws change is the one I would have skipped past, and it turns out to be the most revealing. As the rules stood, only 25 percent of the vote was needed to induce a roll call, which is the procedure where every member has to disclose publicly how they voted. Her stated purpose in raising the threshold was to increase psychological safety in the room, so that members feel more comfortable. Think about what that tells you. The people setting our professional policy were sometimes voting under conditions where a quarter of the room could compel everyone to go on the record, and that was shaping how people voted.
The immigration item she described as unusually timely given what happened in Minnesota earlier this year with ICE. I am not going to characterize that further than she did in the recording, and I would point you to APA’s own published policy language rather than my summary of a summary. Clinical work that sits near contested policy is its own competency, and counseling across political divides is the piece I would send a colleague who is finding this terrain hard right now.
The third item is the one with the widest clinical reach and it gets its own section below. Before that, one note on why association policy matters even when it never becomes law. Questions about who is allowed to provide mental health care, and under what credential, are being decided continuously and largely without clinicians in the room, which is the same structural story as mental health coaches replacing therapists. Policy bodies are where the profession either shows up for that or does not.
If reading a list of new business items made you realize you have no idea what your own state association is doing either, you are in extremely normal company. That is the sort of thing clinicians in our community end up figuring out together, because one person always knows and the rest of us find out by asking. It is a low-stakes question that is weirdly hard to ask alone.
Why the Intimate Partner Violence Resolution Is Arriving Right Now
Because the Violence Against Women Act is coming up for reauthorization. VAWA programs were most recently reauthorized in 2022, as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, with authorization running through fiscal year 2027. That means the window for shaping the next version is open now, and a resolution built to be handed to legislators arrives precisely when it can be used.
VAWA has been reauthorized four times since it was first enacted in 1994, and each round has added and expanded provisions rather than simply extending the last version. What she said her resolution contributes is policy language on gender-based violence and intimate partner violence that had not previously been in APA policy at all, which is what makes it useful to an advocacy office rather than redundant. She called it the highlight of her Council experience, and she was insistent that the credit belongs to her co-authors and the advocacy office as much as to her.
For those of us who work with survivors, the practical translation is about infrastructure rather than technique. VAWA money funds shelters, training programs, forensic exams, and services you refer to, and the terms of a reauthorization change what exists in your community three years from now. It also touches the legal machinery that survivors get pulled into, which is worth knowing before you are in it: cases like these are considerably more likely than the rest of your caseload to end with you subpoenaed in a client’s case.
And when children are involved, another whole system engages. Custody disputes in the context of intimate partner violence are where a well-meaning clinician can become a problem for their own client without meaning to, so understanding how child and family investigations actually work is not optional if you take these cases.
Here is what I notice about clinicians who work in this territory. They are usually carrying the legal exposure, the referral gaps, and the emotional load of it privately, and they assume that is just the cost of the specialty. It does not have to be that solitary. The clinicians in our community bring exactly these situations to each other, and having somewhere to put a case like that is a structural improvement, not a luxury.
Why Rural Access Is a Policy Problem, Not a Scheduling Problem
Because the barriers are infrastructure, and infrastructure is legislated. She chairs the APA Rural Health Caucus, and she described clients who live hours from the nearest safe shelter with no transportation to reach it, clients whose internet cannot carry a video session, and clients who take phone calls from parks and gravel roads because their own home is not a safe place to talk.
That last detail is the one I have thought about every day since. Most of us treat telehealth as the thing that removed the barrier. For this population, the video requirement is the barrier, and a phone call from a parked car is the accommodation. Broadband policy, shelter funding, and transportation are not adjacent to clinical care here. They are the clinical care.
The research is consistent with what she sees from the chair. Peek-Asa and colleagues (2011) found that rural women reported greater severity of physical intimate partner violence than urban women, and that rural participants lived substantially farther from the nearest intervention program. Prevalence is not lower in rural communities. Resources are. Worth noting alongside that: APA Council adopted a resolution prioritizing the behavioral health of rural populations at its February 2026 meeting, per the published draft minutes, so this is an area where the association has been actively moving.
There is also a way this gets expensive in the room. Reading a client’s phone-only preference as resistance, or inconsistent attendance as ambivalence, or reluctance to use a portal as a technology problem, are clinical blind spots dressed as clinical observations. The context is doing the work you are attributing to the person.
One more policy thread she opened that almost nobody is working: intimate partner violence follows people to work, at a cost to American workplaces that runs into the billions. Her clinical dissertation was a qualitative study on exactly that, built because a friend asked her what to do about an employee and the literature turned out to be nearly empty. CDC estimates place the combined medical, mental health, and lost productivity costs of intimate partner violence against women above 8.3 billion dollars annually (Spivak et al., 2014). Employers have no protocol, the research base is thin, and almost no consultant in that market has clinical training in the subject, which makes the clinician to organizational consultant pathway unusually open here.
Turning a clinical specialty into consulting or advocacy work requires a set of skills nobody teaches in graduate school, including how to price it, how to contract it, and how to talk to a director of human resources without sounding like a therapist. That is standing conversation in our community and part of what the certification tracks exist for, because a lot of clinicians want the second lane and have no map for building it.
What Does Any of This Change for the Client in Your Office on Monday?
Almost nothing, and I would rather say that plainly than oversell a policy story. Resolutions change funding, protections, and infrastructure over years. What changes Monday is what you do differently in the room, and this episode contains exactly one thing in that category, delivered in about forty seconds.
Never ask a survivor why they do not leave. She calls it one of the most harmful questions there is, and the mechanism is specific: the question induces shame, and shame makes it harder to leave. Which means a caring clinician asking it in good faith can move someone further from safety rather than closer. Watch the variants too, because they do identical work. What is keeping you there. Why do you keep going back. Have you thought about just leaving. Every one of them puts the burden of explanation on the person being harmed.
Her reasoning underneath it is worth adopting whole. There are millions of reasons people stay in relationships that hurt them, well beyond love, and she does not assume she knows which are operating in someone else’s life. She knows what she would want for herself. She is not in other people’s heads. So she starts from what the client wants, then mitigates what safety can be mitigated, then plans the transition if there is going to be one, and treats the trauma symptoms after that. Not before.
And this is where the training gap becomes impossible to ignore. She said the topic is not discussed in a lot of graduate programs, and LMB said out loud that two degrees, a masters and a doctorate, produced one look at the power and control wheel. Once. Set that against the prevalence: nearly 1 in 3 women and more than 1 in 6 men in the United States experience contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime (Leemis et al., 2022). Whatever your website says your specialty is, survivors are already on your caseload. Knowing when a case sits outside your scope of competence is one half of the job here, and knowing enough not to do harm inside your scope is the other.
If this material is going to become more of your caseload, plan for the cost of it deliberately rather than after it arrives. Vicarious trauma is a predictable feature of a trauma-weighted caseload, not a personal weakness, and the ratio is something you can decide on purpose.
The gap between hearing a clinical correction and reliably doing it differently at 4pm on a Thursday is where consultation earns its keep. That is precisely the kind of case our clinicians bring to each other, the one where you understand the principle perfectly and are still not sure what to say next. Understanding is cheap. Changing what comes out of your mouth under pressure is not.
How Can a Therapist Influence Policy Without Going to Washington?
By talking to the person who is already going. That is the practical answer and it came straight out of the recording: LMB said she is not going to get on the phone with a senator, but in Minnesota she might be able to talk to Dr. Shannon, understand what is happening, and have downstream impact from there.
So the concrete version of the ask is small. Find out who represents your state or your division on Council. Find out what your state psychological association is putting forward this year. Tell that person what you are seeing in your caseload, because a Council representative building a new business item needs exactly that: specific, credible, clinical reality from working practitioners. She said her heart lies with advocacy and that she is grateful to do it, and people like that are generally not hard to reach. She published her own contact information in this episode.
There is a version of this that requires no committee work at all. Say the true thing publicly, in the places clinicians can hear it. Naming a structural problem out loud is advocacy, which is most of what why therapists need to be leaders is about, and it is how conditions that everyone privately tolerates eventually get changed. The reason toxic mental health internships persisted as long as they did is that early career clinicians had nowhere safe to describe them.
And the one she modeled without naming it: procedural courage. Someone noticed that the roll call rule was making people vote less honestly, and instead of complaining about the culture of the room, moved to change the bylaw. That is a transferable skill. Most institutions that feel immovable have a rule underneath them that somebody wrote.
Everything in this section is easier with company and nearly impossible without it. Nobody sustains professional engagement alone on top of a full caseload, and the clinicians in our community are the reason the ones who do keep going. If you have been meaning to get involved in something for two years, the missing piece is usually not motivation. It is one other person who is also doing it.
Why Reading This Isn’t the Same as Having a Seat at the Table
I want to be straight with you, because this is the point where a policy article usually congratulates the reader and ends. You now know more about how our profession governs itself than most of your colleagues. That is real. It is also, by itself, going to change absolutely nothing, and I would be doing you a disservice if I let you close this tab thinking otherwise.
Here is the shape it usually takes. You read something like this. You feel a jolt of something between interest and indignation. You think, I should find out who my Council representative is. Then Monday happens, and there are six sessions and a cancellation to fill and Friday’s notes still unwritten, and by Thursday the whole thing has quietly filed itself under things you will look into eventually. I am not describing a character flaw. I am describing the default outcome for information that arrives without a structure attached to it.
The structural reason is not a mystery. Graduate school gave us cohorts and supervision, and then handed us a license and a great deal of silence. Almost nothing about private practice is designed to keep a clinician connected to the field beyond their own caseload, which is the real engine underneath therapist isolation. It is very hard to stay engaged with your profession when your profession, functionally, is you and a room.
What actually works is boring and specific. Somebody in a group chat mentions their state association meeting and three people look it up. Somebody posts what passed at Council and a colleague explains what it means. Somebody says out loud that they have wanted to do advocacy for two years and has not, and somebody else says come to this call with me. Almost none of my own professional growth came from reading. Nearly all of it came from other clinicians.
That is the entire reason the Therapist Growth Collective exists in the shape it does, with CEU training and a room of practicing clinicians instead of a video library. If this article landed on something, the next step is not another article. Come see what it is like week to week and decide whether it fits where your practice is going. No pressure, and nothing to have figured out first.
Come See What It Is Like →Where This Conversation Keeps Going
The guest is the easiest place to start, because she offered. She builds custom trainings on intimate partner violence, gender-based violence, and the neurology of trauma, she teaches online through the People Incorporated Training Institute as an adjunct instructor, and her direct recommendation to clinicians was simply to reach out so she can point you toward the right resource. She asked us to publish her contact information and she meant it. It is in the guest section below, along with everything else she offers.
LMB also gave an explicit plug in the recording worth repeating here, to APA Division 13, the Society of Consulting Psychology, which both she and the guest are affiliated with. The appeal of Division 13 in this context is scale: psychologists working at the organizational level, where change reaches more people than any individual caseload can. If the workforce thread in this episode caught your attention, that is where that community lives.
And if what you want is not a training or a division but simply other clinicians who are paying attention to this stuff, that is the thing I can offer directly.
The Therapist Growth Collective is where this kind of conversation continues after the episode ends, with CEU training attached and colleagues who are three years further into it than you are. Connect with colleagues who get it, and come see what a week actually looks like before you decide anything.
Closing
Shannon, thank you for this. I asked for ten minutes about industry trends and got a civics lesson about my own profession that I needed.
And to everyone reading: we all have considerably more influence than we think we do. That is the thing I want you to keep.
XO,
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
Required safety resource. If you or someone you know needs immediate support, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788. Support is free and available around the clock.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby is a licensed psychologist, licensed marriage and family therapist, board certified coach, and the founder of Growing Self Counseling and Coaching. She is the author of Exaholics: Breaking Your Addiction to an Ex Love, and the host of the Love, Happiness and Success podcast and Love, Happiness and Success for Therapists.
About this episode’s experts
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson, PsyD, LP
Dr. Shannon Goecke-Watson owns SGW Psychological Services in Minnesota, where she works exclusively with survivors of domestic violence and intimate partner violence, offering both individual and group psychotherapy. She earned her doctorate at Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, and she came to psychology after a first career in commercial real estate. She represents Minnesota psychologists on the APA Council of Representatives and chairs the APA Rural Health Caucus. This year she was a mover on three new business items, including the resolution on intimate partner violence and gender-based violence developed with the APA advocacy office and her co-authors to support the next reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. She is an adjunct instructor with the People Incorporated Training Institute and is affiliated with APA Division 13, the Society of Consulting Psychology. She builds custom trainings on intimate partner violence, gender-based violence, and the neurology of trauma, and welcomes direct outreach from clinicians and organizations.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
Licensed psychologist, marriage and family therapist, and Board Certified Coach. Founder of Growing Self Counseling & Coaching. Author of Exaholics: Breaking Your Addiction to an Ex Love. Host of the Love, Happiness & Success podcast (15M+ downloads) and Love, Happiness & Success for Therapists. Her work focuses on the professional development, leadership, and sustainability of mental health clinicians and the practices they build.
Questions therapists ask about APA governance and advocacy
It is the policy-making body of the American Psychological Association. Members are seated by state and territorial associations, APA divisions, and Canadian provinces. Council meets twice a year, debates, and votes on the resolutions, policy statements, guidelines, and bylaws of the association.
Twice a year, in February and August. The February meeting is always held in Washington, DC. The August meeting travels with the APA convention.
A new business item, often called an NBI, is the mechanism by which a Council member proposes new association policy. A member moves the item, it may be referred to relevant boards and committees for review, and Council votes on whether to adopt it as APA policy.
Hill Day is the day before the February Council meeting, when Council representatives meet with their own legislators’ offices in the House and Senate to discuss APA advocacy priorities and the resolutions Council has passed.
No. A resolution is association policy, not legislation. Its function is to give the APA advocacy office and Council members a document carrying the weight of the profession, which can then be presented to legislators who are drafting or reauthorizing actual law.
Contact the Council representative for your state or division and tell them what you are seeing clinically, because representatives building new business items need specific practitioner reality. Participate in your state psychological association. Speak publicly about structural problems in the field.
VAWA programs were most recently reauthorized in 2022 with authorization running through fiscal year 2027, which means the window for shaping the next reauthorization is open. VAWA funds shelters, training, forensic exams, and services clinicians refer to.
A caucus within the APA Council of Representatives focused on rural behavioral health. Its concerns include access to care, distance to services, broadband limitations affecting telehealth, and the distinct clinical realities of practicing outside metropolitan areas.
Rural survivors often live hours from the nearest shelter without transportation, and limited broadband makes video telehealth unusable, so sessions happen by phone from cars or public places because home is not private. Research indicates rural prevalence is at least as high as urban prevalence while services are farther away.
Never ask why the person does not leave, in any variation. The question induces shame, and shame makes leaving harder, which moves a client away from safety rather than toward it. Start instead from what the client says they want.
National CDC survey data indicate that nearly 1 in 3 women and more than 1 in 6 men experience contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime. Earlier national data found an average of 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner.
Sources cited in this episode
- American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Council of Representatives handbook. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/about/governance/council/handbook.pdf
- American Psychological Association. (2026). Council of Representatives, February 20 and 21, 2026: Draft minutes. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/about/governance/council/minutes-february-2026.pdf
- Congressional Research Service. (2023). The 2022 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) reauthorization (Report No. R47570). Retrieved from https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47570
- Black, M. C., Basile, K. C., Breiding, M. J., Smith, S. G., Walters, M. L., Merrick, M. T., Chen, J., & Stevens, M. R. (2011). The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2010 summary report. National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
- Leemis, R. W., Friar, N., Khatiwada, S., Chen, M. S., Kresnow, M., Smith, S. G., Caslin, S., & Basile, K. C. (2022). The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2016/2017 report on intimate partner violence. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/nisvs/documentation/NISVSReportonIPV_2022.pdf
- Peek-Asa, C., Wallis, A., Harland, K., Beyer, K., Dickey, P., & Saftlas, A. (2011). Rural disparity in domestic violence prevalence and access to resources. Journal of Women’s Health, 20(11), 1743–1749. https://doi.org/10.1089/jwh.2011.2891
- Spivak, H. R., Jenkins, E. L., VanAudenhove, K., Lee, D., Kelly, M., & Iskander, J. (2014). CDC Grand Rounds: A public health approach to prevention of intimate partner violence. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 63(2), 38–41. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6302a4.htm
Additional resources mentioned in the episode: SGW Psychological Services (sgwpsych.com); People Incorporated Training Institute (traininginstitute.org); APA Division 13, Society of Consulting Psychology; APA Rural Health Caucus.
Required safety resource. National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788. https://www.thehotline.org/ — free and available 24/7.
