A year in the life of a therapist

We’re all familiar with that giddy feeling of entering academic institutions with the quest to change the world. We’ve been there with our rose tinted glasses. But when we step out into our jobs, these glasses change shape and colour both, as we’re introduced to different realities that we didn’t see coming. Something similar happened to our therapist Naina Uppal in her first year of being a therapist. Read on as she spills the beans!

I graduated from my master’s degree in Counselling psychology last year with big dreams and high hopes. Like any journey, there were obstacles that I wasn’t prepared for. So it is not a surprise that it did not turn out exactly how I thought. I do believe the path I have walked has been crucial in making me bridge the gap between what we would read in theory and what would transpire with clients in the real world therapy room. Here’s everything I learned in the last year about being a therapist–?

# You will make mistakes and it's A-okay

Therapists are often expected to be “experts” and have all the answers– despite knowing we don’t, it’s not uncommon that we hold ourselves to that standard as well. So making any mistake can feel like a personal failure. What has helped me was advice from my old supervisor - You’re allowed to make mistakes, so make a lot ( just not the ethical ones)!

There are so many times when I’ve found myself? struggling to say the ‘right’ thing to my clients. But, as I go back to the words of my supervisor, I realize that when you give yourself the permission to make mistakes, you are also able to recognise, acknowledge, and more importantly take responsibility for them. You’re able to introspect, discuss and work through what you felt was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. And come to think of it, what is therapy, if not repairing these ruptures along the way?. So here’s my two bits- it is only human to not know it all and it is very ‘therapisty’ to remind ourselves of that.??

# Doubt and Imposter feelings can also be friends

For a long time, I thought that my self-doubt came from my lack of experience and if only I could get a lot of it, the doubt would go away. I thought with exposure and years of doing therapy would make these feelings fade away. While my experience did not magically eradicate my self-doubt, it did make me smart enough to know that these feelings are dynamic and often interspersed with periods of self-belief and even confidence. There are sessions where it feels like I’ve got the hang of things, sessions where insights are leading to those book perfect Aha! moments, and you can feel the shifts taking place. It definitely can be the high we live for as therapists. At the same time, on those same days, you’ll find sessions where you meet that nervous part of you again. These are those sessions where the inner monologue can sound like “what am I doing?”, “ I feel so out of my depth here”, “will I be able to help this person?”

Turns out, the key is to make friends with these feelings to progress and not reach a place where they don’t exist. This can often look like discussing these feelings in supervision, other times it can look like writing them down to get a different perspective. It might not be so bad to even let them take space in your head and reflect on how you'd like to deal with it. And I guess, when all else fails, there are a mountain of books to take inspiration from. So don’t try to push down that doubting voice, that’s a sure shot way of it jumping back up again.?

# Keep meeting new parts of yourself

“You can only meet your clients as deeply as you have met yourself.” This thought has never resonated more to me than it does now, after a year of practicing. Whether we like it or not, we bring a lot of our own thoughts, feelings, biases, and beliefs into the therapy room. And the more we grow and discover parts of ourselves, the easier it becomes for us to understand the different parts of our clients. By just becoming aware of these multitude of inner perspectives, we can enter the therapy space more intentionally with our clients. We can notice when the parts of us get reflected by our clients or even when certain parts get triggered.?No book has helped me as much as all that I have experienced and discovered about myself through new changes, relationships, or even obstacles. This first hand experience of our own life is so crucial for us to be able to sit and understand another human being.?

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# Therapy room can be a treasure chest of information

As students learning therapy, we can all remember being extensively trained in those ‘first sessions’ and the multiple domains that we need to cover to understand our client’s life. While that information is crucial even now, what I have found to be the most reliable is what happens in the here and now- how they communicate pain to me, how they respond when I validate and empathize or even when I confront them.?

My dynamic with my clients is something I have to keep reflecting on because what happens in the therapy room is likely what happens outside. This also means asking myself how I feel with my clients. Do I feel connected to them? Do I feel the same sense of stuck-ness as my clients? Bringing up our dynamic and working on it has made therapy a far more enriching and a connecting process than anything else.?

# Be there for yourself too!?

It is common knowledge that the work we do as therapists requires emotional investment from both ourselves and the client. We come together in therapy to take on some of the big questions? and work through difficult feelings clients may have never faced before. It is a journey we take with them. In the beginning, I remember wanting to do a lot for my clients and carrying their feelings outside of sessions too. At a point, it became difficult to remember who I was outside of being a therapist. A realisation that dawned upon me then was that I can be a great therapist with everything in my toolkit but I can’t sustain in this profession if I don’t invest in the social systems that are there for me and become proactive about self-care.

So over a period of time, with a mix of guilt but also relief, I started making time for myself. For me, it looked like laughing with friends, connecting with nature, and watching reality TV (yes, we all have guilty pleasures). While somewhere,? I knew this all along, what I learnt was to provide myself with these restful spaces with intention and discipline. It also had the added benefit of modelling the same for my clients. In this journey, there is hope that they will also learn the importance of taking care of themselves.??

On that note, I am getting back to making my weekend plans. How about you?