That said, this is a great learning opportunity. The truth is that unless you are in solo PP and never need referral sources, this is something you are going to have to deal with on an ongoing basis from here on out. The soft skills of getting along with colleagues and working as part of a team are likely to be more useful to your career than being the best clinician in the world.
Can't emphasize this enough! Unless somebody had a career and entered psychology later in life, internship is likely the first time one has been in a full-time career role that wasn't augmented with school or something else major.
I learned a ton clinically during internship but just as much about myself as a professional and how I want to try to carry myself in this setting (self-confidence, developing good working relationships with colleagues, figuring out how to have fun at work when it's appropriate, work-life balance, etc). I also saw/experienced stuff at my VA internship that I thought was ridiculous and incompetent and had to figure out how to deal with that appropriately and not let it negatively impact the other 95% of my experience.
I also don't know them well enough personally to say they're just sucky people overall.
Perhaps this can be an opportunity to challenge yourself to get to know them more as people, regardless of whether peer consultation will ever be used well for clinical cases or if you'll reach out to them during informal times for consultation.
In my experience, when people make comments in professional contexts such as "Oh Dr. X is just so great!", it has very little to do with their clinical acumen because most will hardly ever going to be in a position to truly judge another's clinical work directly. Instead, it's all about the soft skills
@Sanman mentioned such as friendliness, helpfulness, commitment to their job, humility, joy vs bother to be around, etc.
I simply have no idea, because the time allocated to be learning such things is not being used to do that and myself and the other intern are outvoted on the 'lets discuss cases' front.
I can definitely relate to the frustration of having structured things during training feel less than valuable. However, in my current job, I would
kill to have regular downtime to just hang out with colleagues and talk about our kids/pets, what people did last weekend, a new show somebody started watching, etc because mental health work is super stressful and having good bonds with your co-workers is really important to decompress but also to know that you have a group of people to turn to if an all-hands-on-deck kind of crisis arose.
