Why I want to be a psychotherapist

Why on earth would anyone want to be a therapist? It’s a fair question — and one I’ve found myself asking more than once. Holding space for other people’s pain, week after week, isn’t exactly an obvious career move. But for me, the path to this work was long in the making. It came from lived experience.

While I am already a qualified counsellor, psychotherapy training goes deeper, exploring the roots of emotional distress in greater depth and over a longer timeframe. Both are valuable, but where counselling tends to be shorter-term and focused on present concerns, psychotherapy often works with unconscious patterns shaped by early life experiences. This piece speaks to what first led me down this path — and why I’ve stayed on it.

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In 2004, I wrote a letter to my estranged father that I had placed in the ground alongside his ashes. I told him that I forgave him.

It had taken me a few years of growing up and nearly a year and a half of therapy to put a decent amount of perspective on our wrought father-daughter relationship; to view the once formidable, secretive and often violently hateful figure of my father as just a painfully flawed human being who was capable of redemption.

 He died, both estranged and a stranger to me; the very secrets of the life that made him ‘him’, lost forever too. And while I wasn’t about to expend any time or energy tracing his past or contacting relatives who knew nothing of my existence because I needed closure, I speculated that a severely troubled past – childhood or otherwise – must’ve led him to become the fearful and angry man I once knew.

What level of rejection or violation of trust must he have faced as a child from those who should’ve loved and protected him the most? What atrocities had he seen when he fought in the war? What path did he tread that made him see and expect the very worst in people first, before seeing good? I saw vulnerability and loneliness, and – for the first time – I felt empathy for him. 

That was when I became truly interested in matters of the mind; the subject of my fascination as close to home as it could ever be. And through simply being his daughter, I learnt many positive things about what I yearned for and expected to find in my own life partner. I also knew the high benchmark for parenting that I would set myself, as I became a mother too.

I grew up a shy, introverted and a bookish girl but what this made me become, very early on, was a keen observer and listener of people. I would sit on the periphery of action and just watch. Perhaps that was where my fascination with people, their behaviour and the untold stories behind each and every individual was seeded.

I have proactively, and for pleasure, read books like Why Love Matters by Sue Gerhardt and, at university, whilst doing a module on Women’s Studies, I became fascinated with Freudian theory and its relation to feminist thinking. I may not have agreed with some of the thoughts I read, but it made me consider life, society and relationships in a way that I would never have thought of before. I furthered my interest in human behaviour and behavioural economics reading everything from Freakonomics and Thinking Fast and Slow to The Marshmallow Test, The Examined Life and a compilation of letters to and from the unorthodox agony aunt, Sugar, in Tiny Beautiful Things.

I very much believe in the power of therapy; in its ability to purge hidden hurt from deep within, and of its ability to heal. My own experiences of therapy have given me resilience, grit and a commitment to always embark on a continuous lifetime programme of self-improvement. I don’t mean that in the sense of losing weight or getting better hair; but to always find new ways of becoming a better and happier person for myself, my family and for all those I may meaningfully encounter. Going on an Emotional Intelligence course at mental health charity Mind was, for example, something I wanted to do for myself, and so I did it.  

As much as I was interested in psychology, I never did pursue it at degree level. For a long time I had my heart set on being a journalist, which is what I had trained to be. Subsequently, I have been working in the media now 15 years; two as a journalist and 13 years as a PR Consultant to a range of businesses and personalities – from a stocks and shares platform for private investors to a high profile sex therapist and everything in between. I mostly enjoyed what I did, but I never really felt that what I did had ‘meaningful’ purpose. My job was to help people sell more stuff. And, for the last five years, I have become increasingly more bothered that what I do doesn’t contribute to society in a meaningful way – certainly not in the way doctors, teachers, nurses, human right campaigners etc. do. I’d like to change that.

I reflect on some of the darkest moments that have defined my life, even before I was born into the world – from the father who left my pregnant mother to give birth to me alone and homeless; to my formative years being brought up practically impoverished in rat infested social housing; to going to Britain’s worst school on a council estate and being the only brown child in the class. Therapy enabled me to gain control over emotions and issues invoked by circumstances over which I had no control. The fact that, one-to-one, within enclosed walls, there was someone who was unequivocally there listening to me, accepting me, supporting me and encouraging me to be my authentic self without fear of being reprimanded or judged was a welcome relief. The process, painful as it was, enabled me to eventually tackle life and the future with determination and passion, hope and gratitude.

For me, training as a psychotherapist would be, in a sense, about giving something back to a system that I once needed and relied upon; it’s about doing something positive, with real purpose. To be trusted with something so precious and burdensome as someone’s innermost secrets is no mean feat. But to be able to potentially play an instrumental part in alleviating another’s mental and emotional pain so that they may go on to live a happier and more fulfilling life would be something I regard as both rewarding and a privilege. And I think it is something I would be happy to do for the rest of my working life.