So You Want to Be a Therapist?
There’s usually a moment, sometimes it’s in a grad school info session, sometimes after your third friend says, “you’re really easy to talk to”, where you wonder, could I do this for real? Tucked underneath that is the scarier question: what am I actually signing up for?
Let’s name it plainly: becoming a mental health therapist is not just “I like to listen to people.” It is a choice to enter into environments where difficulty is expected, where people bring you the parts of their lives other people have mishandled, and where your own nervous system suddenly becomes part of the clinical tool kit. If that sounds intense, it is. And it’s also one of the most quietly beautiful jobs available to us right now.
The work is about the whole person, not the behavior that bothers someone else
One of the quickest lessons new clinicians learn is that most systems (schools, families, workplaces, even some community agencies) are used to treating the obvious, surface-level thing they can easily point to, aka, “the outburst,” “the shutdown,” “the repeated marriage fight.” But sustainable therapy asks, “what’s underneath this?” who is this difficult to? And “what conditions made this make sense?” That shift, away from symptoms and toward the individual nature of the person, is the beginning of real practice. You start at the root, even if everyone around you wants you to prune the leaves. That also means you’ll spend a good chunk of your early career saying some version of, “I can’t know everything about this person yet, so I have to stay curious.” That humility is not a personality quirk; it’s a clinical stance and a commitment to high quality practice. If you want a deeper, real-world look at what this job asks of you, books like On Being a Therapist and The Gift of Therapy make excellent early-career reads.
A good supervisor is not optional
If you remember nothing else, remember this: your supervisor will shape your learning, structure and support around the work you will be doing. Pick someone who is clinically solid and emotionally regulated, someone who doesn’t just throw theoretics and modalities at you but can be with you while you track a client.
Examples of a good supervisor:
helps you name countertransference instead of pretending you don’t have any,
shows you how to document so insurance doesn’t make off with your paycheck,
and protects your pace so you don’t take on 25 trauma cases in week three.
A mediocre supervisor leaves you alone with material you’re not resourced to carry. I know where I would put my money.
Get trained early, but don’t marry the model
You will feel pressure… sometimes from agencies, sometimes from social media therapy culture, to pick a branded approach and pledge allegiance. EMDR, IFS, ACT, somatic experiencing, psychodynamic, couples modalities, it’s all “the thing” somewhere.
Here’s the secret from inside the room: approaches eventually start to look like different dialects of the same language. They are useful, they give you structure, and they help you justify your choices, but the client is the curriculum. Don’t fall so in love with exterior pressure or aestheticized therapy that you stop seeing the actual human in the room. If you want to know my roadmap, I did the following: got training focused on skills work (in the form of DBT), got trauma-trained, dissociation-trained, and received basic crisis skills as soon as the doors opened. That training bought me the freedom I enjoy as a clinician now. For something practical to look at, and to share with clients, I have used the Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Skills Workbook countless times.
You are the tool, so you have to maintain the tool
This part almost sounds corny until you start carrying six different people’s grief within a single Wednesday: if you do not maintain yourself, you become clinically unsafe. That looks like:
having your own therapist or consult group,
protecting your sleep like it’s part of licensure,
having an “enough” number of clients and not betraying it just to look hardworking,
saying no to cases that are outside your current scope.
Therapy asks us to stay empathically available without dissolving into the session. That is a practiced, muscle you need to train up to mastery. Your capacity today is not your capacity five years from now, you need to protect it at all costs and be fair to your long term professional. Every day you are a clinician is a day you need to be thinking about your own well-being. Without your resources in a good place, you will leave yourself vulnerable to breaking down, and burning out. Taking care of yourself is not selfish, it is the best thing you can do for your work. If you want a more guided form of how to think about this, and to think deeper on yourself, check out the journal I came out with for this very purpose.
Communication standards will save you from burnout later
New therapists often over-promise availability because they want to be “good.” They give out their cell, respond at 9:37 p.m., and then quietly resent every ding.
Set your system up on day one:
“I return messages within 24 business hours.”
“Here’s the format to send me info.”
“Here’s how we handle emergencies when I’m not in the room.”
That’s not cold; that’s clinical containment. It tells the client, “your care is real, and it lives inside a structure.” It also means you don’t have to negotiate boundaries every single week.
Systems are part of the job
Nobody becomes a therapist for the notes, the billing, or the fight with insurance over a 90837. And yet, here we are. If you’re going to take insurance, you will need to document well enough that a third party doesn’t get to say, “we’re not paying you for that hour you spent in someone’s deepest pain.” That’s not selling out; that’s protecting your labor. “The importance of systems, templates, and efficiency” is not MBA talk, it’s how you preserve the energy to keep seeing people. A future you will be so grateful you built those foundations from the beginning.
You will meet your own stuff in the room
No one tells people this loudly enough: therapy is a mirror. Clients will arrive with themes you’re currently living… parents, faith shifts, partnership ruptures, masculinity/femininity scripts, even health concerns. You will sometimes think, “I should be paying them.” That’s where countertransference becomes a compass instead of a shame spiral. If you can say, “something just got activated in me,” you can choose your response instead of acting it out. That’s part of a healthy, detached perspective - close enough to care, far enough to think.
Crisis is part of the landscape, not a failure
If you work in certain settings, universities, community mental health, hospitals, even private practices now, you will encounter suicidality, self-harm, and people whose lives are structurally unsafe. That doesn’t mean you chose wrong; it means you chose reality. Helpers often feel undertrained and still end up being the first person a struggling human talks to. That’s therapy too. So you get trained, you use protocols, you consult, and you remember: crisis response is a form of care inside a system of safety.
The philosophy underneath it all
Underneath the notes, the CEUs, the supervisor signatures, there’s a stance: I do not get to fully know another person, so I will stay curious and confirm, not assume. That stance is what keeps the work humanized. It’s what stops us from turning people into diagnoses or into “that case at 2 p.m.” It’s also what keeps empathy culturally relevant, because there will always be people for whom empathy is not reflexive, and we need to keep the language alive for them, too. If you’re still in, here’s the good news… You get to be a creative unraveller of difficult knots, except now you’re doing it on purpose, with supervision, within a structure, and you’re getting paid to do it. You get to witness people become more themselves. You get to learn over and over that people are not their hardest moment. And you get to build a practice culture that refuses to treat humans like problems to be fixed. Because people aren’t broken. They’re patterned and conditioned. Our job is to help them see the patterns, choose what stays, and lay down to rest what doesn’t. If that sounds like the kind of work you want to do, welcome. We need more therapists like that.
