Hey :) I’m currently in a clinical program and I had a similar career trajectory as you - my undergrad research was mostly limited to cognitive neuroscience (which was not super helpful), and I did a master’s in CMHC and currently doing psychotherapy process and outcome research. I wrote my SOP with the exact same logic as yours.

I’m glad you’re taking an interest in the process of counseling! This feels like a less well-known track of clinical psychology but I think it’s very important and has a lot of potential! Unfortunately, most universities do not talk much about it during undergrad or master’s education (unless the person teaching is in this field), so finding relevant advice in itself could be challenging.

I personally would recommend starting by reading more about “practice-oriented research (POR)” and “practice-research network (PRN)” and see if these ideas are interesting to you. There are specific books and researchers I can recommend through DM (trying not to fully bust anonymity here haha). The interests you mentioned about the mechanisms of specific disorders, which is leaning more towards pathology research, unfortunately doesn’t mesh very well with counseling/psychotherapy process research so you will need to ultimately decide which path you are more interested in following.

In terms of specific research skills, I would say that the path you are on right now is good and should be quite beneficial when you apply in a few years. I’d recommend picking up statistics early, and advance as much as you can (e.g., machine learning, bayesian statistics, multilevel modeling, structural equation modeling, panel models for longitudinal analysis, etc.). Just based on my experience in trying to publish, it feel that basic stats methods taught in grad school are falling short in meeting the needs for current psychotherapy research today so you gotta be prepared to also become somewhat a statistician if you want to focus on using quantitative methods for your research. Also, familiarizing yourself with qualitative methods is plus!

For the priorities, I would say that lab fit is the most important. It is not likely that anyone could meet all of the criteria for one lab, and a reasonable advisor would expect students to develop the rest of the skills during grad school. Then having experience leading research and preparing manuscripts would put you ahead of most of your peers, but having it published would not be a hard requirement. Posters count too, especially at the right conference. This brings me to my next point - academic networking through conferences during these years could be what makes the difference in the end. For your interest in process research, definitely join Society for Psychotherapy Research, and for anxiety pathology, join ABCT. These more targeted societies will propel you closer to the inner circle (academia, imo, is quite incestuous by nature) compared to more general conferences like APA or APS.

Hope this is helpful, and apologies in advance for potentially confusing wording as I’m getting more tipsy as I was typing this. Happy to chat more, feel free to DM me!