Success in Arkansas offers hope and optimism to all MFTs
Any licensed marriage and family therapist who has been through the agonizing black hole years of the post-master’s test-taking, supervision, logging hours, and licensing process, has been aware of one thing: if you want to go to another state and be able to work as an LMFT, you’ll have to go through some sort of agonizing process, again.
Perish the thought, right?
So, like other licensed professionals in the United States, from lawyers to medical professionals, the MFT has been geographically trapped in their careers because of licensing rules.
Getting licensed
Once you get that license, after so much work and jumping through the numerous hoops required and money spent, it’s pure relief and freedom. Who can forget the feeling of getting their MFT license?
I got mine in 2006 in Texas. As an Arkansas native, I was a single mom who had moved to San Antonio to marry a Texan in the 1980s. After eight years, we divorced. I went to graduate school to become an MFT a few years later and turned my eye toward possibly moving home to Little Rock once my children were raised, about 2008. Most of my biological family lives in Little Rock, including my mother, who was in her 90s and needed more help than ever.
So, as all of us contemplating a move out of state do, I checked the Arkansas licensing requirements for licensed MFTs in good standing in other states, and my heart sank.
“No, not possible right now,” I said to myself. “It’s too expensive, time-consuming, I’d have to take a couple more graduate school classes, sit for an oral exam before their board, provide a manifesto listing every theory I might ever use in my work, take extra courses to get certifications in things I was already doing in Texas without certifications, like neurofeedback, hypnosis, and telehealth.
I kept working in my bustling private practice in Texas, and now and then would check back to look at the requirements in Arkansas, ever hopeful they had been loosened. They hadn’t, and I shoved the idea aside once again. Too much, too complicated, too expensive. And yes, I told myself, these requirements are ridiculous, unnecessary, and stupid. Why could I be so thoroughly qualified to see clients in Texas, and not in my home state? What difference does a state border make in the scheme of things? Why wouldn’t a state want to make it easy for people interested in helping people to work there? Nothing about this long list of requirements made sense.
Of course, I kept my eye on license portability, which AAMFT has been working on through the years, and made it a point to follow their progress. “License portability was a great and necessary idea,” I thought, “I hope they succeed, it’s long overdue,” but just like the MFT being able to accept Medicare, where we waited for years and years, portability also seemed like a dream for the distant future. The bottom line for an MFT with a need or longing to move out of state was to take a deep breath and put their dreams aside, or start the slow, expensive process as required by whatever state.
The impetus
In 2011, I was flying to Arkansas to visit my mother when my daughter called as I was changing planes in Dallas. “What is this?” I thought. I just saw her at home about three hours ago. Walking down the jetway with my carry-on to get on the plane to Little Rock, I heard her say, “Mom, there are two Marines at our front door.” I dropped my bags, screamed, and fell on the floor. A flight attendant ran up to me and asked what was going on.
My son, a Marine Lance Corporal and scout sniper, Benjamin Whetstone Schmidt, was serving his second deployment in Afghanistan. It was a Thursday in October, and I had just talked to him on his battalion’s satellite phone the previous weekend, where he told me they had to go do “some work.” With the Marines at my front door, I knew he had been killed.
There are no words to describe this experience.* It is agonizing, gut-tearing, brain-numbing, and fog-creating—so much that I wasn’t even close to feeling like myself for quite some time. I felt the urgent need to be around people who cared about me, who knew and loved my son and were grieving, too, and I wanted to go home and be near my family.
But for that damn license, I could and would. It was the only thing keeping me in San Antonio. I had started dabbling in knocking off some of the requirements a year or so before Benjamin died, with a want to, but not a sense of urgency. Now, I was obsessed with going home and looked toward the licensing requirements with a must-do-now attitude. Unbelievably, my Arkansas oral exam, which took eons to schedule, was set to take place on the same day I was supposed to fly to Dover to witness the dignified transfer of my son’s remains. I canceled the interview and went to Dover.
The next month, I went for that rescheduled oral interview, where each board member asked me a question about theories or ethical dilemmas. All I could think of was how insane it was that I was talking about that when I had already taken and passed too many tests in my MFT education, and all I was capable of doing was thinking about my son. But I wanted to come home, and so I did what I had to do to facilitate that. I still get emotional thinking about how hard that was.
After almost 18 months of working on getting an Arkansas license, spending at least $10,000 on travel, classes, certifications, and sending out school transcripts, I finally got licensed in January 2012. I was so burned out and angry when I finally finished that I sat down and wrote the AAMFT about it, and that’s how they found me as a potential advocate for any sort of license portability law opportunity that might come to Arkansas.
When in 2025 the opportunity came to change the law in Arkansas for a fully licensed MFT in good standing to get licensed via a simple application process, I was all in. HB 1187, known as the MFT portability bill, had to pass the committees in the legislature and state senate, and then on to the governor’s office. The AAMFT asked me, along with one other MFT, Dr. Kelly Roberts, an associate professor and program director for the Master of Science in human sciences program from Oklahoma Christian University, located near the Arkansas border, to testify.
The point of portability is to stop the nitpicking details between states about who has done more or less and welcome licensed MFTs from all over.
Lawmakers wanted to know things like if one state requires 2,000 hours of supervision and Arkansas requires 3,000, should an MFT have to make that up to have parity? Hoping to eliminate things like this, I asked the legislators not to quibble over the number of supervision hours we have done. I prefer that they consider how many hours any private practice MFT has worked. For example, I have worked an additional 25,000 hours in private practice beyond my intern years. It won’t hurt my feelings to welcome any licensed MFT to Arkansas who only had to do 2,000 hours after their master’s when I had to do 3,000—I say, come on in! The point of portability is to stop the nitpicking details between states about who has done more or less and welcome licensed MFTs from all over. Whatever state is getting a new and experienced MFT, who will often be working in underserved areas, will be better for it.
The bill passed both the legislature and the senate with only one vote against, a true success and win for MFTs and Arkansas. Gov. Sarah Huckabee signed it into law, and within a few months, it will be implemented. To say this was a relief was an understatement. I played a small role in this, and so many others made it happen and deserve all the credit. Still, there are many human MFT faces like mine across the USA with a need or longing to leave their state and continue their practices, and the lack of mobility has been an obstacle and handicap for most of us. When fully licensed MFTs in good standing check the Arkansas licensing requirements in the future, they will smile.
Thanks, AAMFT, for this fine advocacy on behalf of all of us.
