When I was in law school, one of my classmates was married to a clinical psych graduate student. Soon there was a fairly substantial group of us that included a few law students, but mostly people studying to get their PhD's in clinical psych.

These folks were just like everyday people. They were smart and interesting and fun (much of the time), but they also had trouble with intimacy and committing, cheated on their partners, and otherwise were no better at relationships than anybody else. I did prefer them as a general rule to most of the students at my law school, who tended to be soul-less @sshats.

Oh, and the faculty in the clinical psych department-- totally insane-- left their wives for graduate students (repeatedly), swapped wives with each other, were sexually inappropriate at department parties, and regularly had silly little spats with their colleagues. Not exactly models of mental health and stability.

I think just because you may be good at therapeutic relationships doesn't mean that you are good at intimate relationships. You might think that my lawyerly training would make me "good" at arguing with my spouse-- I should be logical, linear, avoid irrelevant arguments. I wish, I am just as much a dirty and disorganized fighter as the next person. My H is a distinguished professor in the child development field-- that doesn't make him a perfect father. He's a great father a lot of the time, but sometimes he engages in bonehead parenting moves where I want to say, "do you in fact KNOW anything about children?"

The list of the divide between the personal and the professional goes on and on. The law school dean who has written books about morality, charged with unethical behavior. A research expert on marriage who has been divorced 4 times. A cardiologist who smokes cigarettes. A physician who studies hostility and who rages at everyone in his path who displeases him.

Anne