Why I love being a psychotherapist.
Few professions expose you to the full range of human experience like psychotherapy. A psychotherapist tends to meet with their clients weekly, at least at the start. With such frequent contact, there is so much information exchanged. Now, multiply that by the number of clients seen in a week, never mind years and even decades of practice, and you can imagine the wealth of information psychotherapists gain from their clients.
I love doing this work for a variety of reasons. I enjoy helping people to feel seen and heard, sometimes for the first time. Helping them figure out how to improve their lives is energizing. It is a joy to witness their growth when they start to recognize unhealthy patterns in their lives and work to change them.
It is rewarding to work with young adults to address patterns of behavior learned in childhood that are no longer healthy as adults. I help them stop people-pleasing and communicate more effectively with friends, partners, and their parents. I teach them the difference between a request and a boundary and when to use them. I help them to see their worth and to expect respectful treatment from others. Learning these skills in young adulthood allows them to build healthy relationships with clear communication and boundaries rather than repeating patterns that can lead to years of discomfort or pain. It is better to unlearn these maladaptive coping strategies when they are still learning to be an adult, rather than when they have had decades to solidify and become significantly harder to change.
Being a psychotherapist has helped me grow more as an individual than I think anything else could have. As a therapist, I still engage in my own therapy as needed to address specific issues in my own life. I am human, just like my clients are, and sometimes struggle with the very things I am helping my clients to navigate. Having my own therapist as well as my colleagues to process these things keeps me honest about how difficult it is to change.
When clients complain about their life partner, I reflect on my own behavior as well as my spouse’s to see if we need to adjust our relationship, too. When they talk about the little support they are getting from their parents, I look at what else I could be doing to support my kids. When they talk about issues I am less familiar with, I find a book or training to learn more about the issue and the person experiencing it. I am not a passive therapist. I am constantly learning and adjusting my own life to make it easier, happier, and healthier.
Therapy in the 21st century is a shared human experience. Therapy has evolved beyond the old image of lying on a couch staring at the ceiling with the therapist silent behind you, just listening. Therapists today, and I in particular, are much more casual, real, and human. Every client I meet brings a new perspective and reminds me how much there is still to understand about being human. Over time, I have come to see that being a psychotherapist is not just a profession; it’s a lifelong commitment to learning, self-reflection, and showing up as authentically as I ask my clients to do. And that, more than anything, is why I continue to love this work.