What makes therapists want to be therapists

I know it is the case with a lot of therapists that they chose to become one because of their own struggles. I am a psychology student and have always wanted to be a therapist because of my eating disorder (primarily, as well as other issues). Have you ever asked your T why they chose to do what they do? What was their response?

I have asked my t. She told me, in detail, why she wanted to be a therapist. I believe that my therapist has her own issues (although she did not tell me about herself), but anyway... she told me that she has a history of mental disorders within the family, etc. and that she had always wanted to help people in some way, and because of her exposure from an early age to mental disorders, she was interested in that field.

im a social worker getting ready to go back to school to become an mft. i ended up in this field because i was an office manager in a mental health office and i gained so much experience helping others but was limited without a degree to do more and i wanted to do more to help others. i admit i started out in the mental healht field by taking lots of psych classes trying to find out what was wrong with me though.

My T says it's ultimately about wanting to feel better about himself and his own problems. He is a very caring person who wants to help others but he ultimately does that for himself, not out of pure selflessness.

Fine by me. I say watch out for the ones who claim to be saintly and selfless.

My t said she was an English major and her professors suggested that since she was interested in the relationships between the characters, maybe therapy would be a good field for her. I think she is good at it and it seems as if there must be more she could say about her reasons for getting into it, but that's all she told me.

Right now I am not working in the field though I am thinking about a career change. My most important motivation is that I am an INFP. I have the heart and soul of a healer and an intuitive ability to figure people out.

I would never be a technical or doctrinal expert in the field of psychology, my approach would always be the soft, idealistic way, backed up with formal knowledge and analytical abilities.

usually it's a curiosity about what makes people tick. And then a bit of wanting to help people. And a bit more of wanting to make a decent income.

I'm also a psychology student, changing careers. Some of it is my own experience in therapy and how amazing that has been. But the real change happened when I volunteered on a hotline. The power of human connection just amazed and thrilled me.

My own therapist made a commitment (in the hippy days) to be a decent, compassionate force in other people's lives. He was going to be an astrophysicist so this was a big switch. The only thing in common is that both fields require curiosity. I think if you don't feel fundamentally curious, you just won't last long in the field. It is not my primary focus but it is a quality that is important and keeps people going.

Well, in January of this year, I decided that I wanted to be a therapist. I told my T a couple months later...I was scared to tell her that I wanted to do this. I usually don't have a problem talking to my T, but my T knows everything about me. Also, she is an excellent T, a supervising T, and a Clinical Director. So, her opinion meant a LOT to me. I wanted to be a T because I had such a great experience with my T. She helped me come back from the brink of death to thriving, and I want to help others do the same. When I told my T this, she was very excited and told me that she became a T because she sought therapy when she was young. Her T walked alongside her and helped set her free. She said that she was glad that she could do the same for me.

So, there are two of us in this story who became/are becoming Ts because we had other Ts help us heal from the hurt and go from barely surviving to thriving!

This happened to me as well.

I would actually really love to be a T - I'd especially like to help children. But I can't afford to retrain!

I have an interest in psychology and perhaps going to back to school for psychology. I most recently went to a workshop on IFS, Yoga and anxiety. The majority of the people there were therapists. Through the exercises in the workshop I've learned that T's are just as 'screwed up' as the rest of us and have there own baggage. That has what lead them into the field of helping others. One T I met had a very traumatic childhood and was a trauma therapist who was very dedicated to his clients. He also realized that because of his trauma he was able to really show compassion for his clients.

Something that is also a motivation for me is that throughout my time in treatment I always wished more of the staff I have worked with have had some of the same issues I was in treatment because I feel like that helps a lot. So I am going to become an eating disorder therapist so that I can say to someone else 'I went through the same thing and came out the other side'.

When a person has been mistreated, the person can learn I am not important. Someone else is important. That thought (conscious or unconscious) can influence every decision in life.

As a therapist, one can readily and professionally say I am not important. Someone else is important. Thus the job of therapist, or of helping person generally, can fit very well with the underlying thought created by the mistreatment.

The person who becomes a therapist may not be able to escape the belief in their unimportance, but they transcend it. The person finds a way to become and feel important--by learning how best to make others important. The person becomes important and unimportant at the same time. And heals.

I think it is because most were not good at math but wanted indoor jobs.

I think you are totally right! When I found out my former pdoc couldn't spell but had wanted to be a physicist, I asked him if he got in the wrong line to sign up for his major!

Interesting. I'm so grateful to my t for helping me on with my backpack, and he'll say something like, yeah it makes me feel useful. So there's a deeper meaning to that.

My T was a history major and probably wanted to actually get a job...lol

Edited to add: My T also said that he had a transformative experience riding public transportation for months and striking up conversations with a lot of older people who had either been in the war or in concentration camps and was so moved and honored to bear witness to their stories.

My T told me she was a nurse, and worked in the medical field for 25+ yrs before someone told her she needed to be a therapist. She said she was always helping and giving advice to others, so why not get paid for it? And she said that there needs to be more therapists out there who are in the business because of the people, not just the money. And she added that I would make a great therapist. I have been considering about majoring in Psychology for 3 years now, because I can relate so much to the field, and the medical aspect of it fascinates me!

Actually when I was in a psychology training program, we had to be pretty good at math to do advanced statistics and other tests and measurements course work. It wasn't conceptually difficult like pure math, but still it was detailed and really elaborate. I mean who can really care about having things to the 4th decimal point? Drove me crazy.

The ones I see are awful at math and have admitted it. I was really just joking about the math thing - even though watching the one I see try to do math in her head is extremely painful to watch.
I really think most of them want to be therapists because of their own issues and needs. It is not all that hard and it is indoors.

You don't see room for a more altruist motive? Being decent and compassionate as a human being, for instance.

I believe that may well be what therapists and people who want to be therapists tell themselves and others, but no, I do not believe it as a significant motivator for most people who decide to do it. It may, in some instances, be not untrue that a therapist/want-to-be is also reasonably decent and compassionate, but I do not believe in any way that is what makes someone at the core reason, want to be a therapist nor do I think it is any sort of requirement to actually becoming one.

You may well be right about a vast majority, but I'm pretty sure that my therapist made a commitment like the one I briefly described back in the 60s when socially engaged and thought that there were people suffering precisely from the lack of decency and compassion in their lives so if he could show that there are human beings who can sustain that attitude that would be a positive, potentially restorative effect.

He is remarkably free of neurotic tendencies or personal issues. True he's had to undergo his own analysis, but his issues even there were pretty minimal from what he's related.

I've had other therapists/analysts who are not like him so I know that there are people out there like you describe, and I might be one of them so I'm not saying you are wrong. But I also have a Buddhist background that informs my career shift so it's not black and white. There is a mixture of different strands in my motivation to become a therapist.

In fact the most compelling thing was volunteering on a hotline. I don't think that there is room on suicide hotline for selfish reasons. If you think that way, the training pounds it out of you. And the actual work leaves no room for it. You have to give yourself over to the crisis moment and to the other person. I have experienced the power of just connecting in a humane and decent way with people who are on the edge of being. I really am not an optimist nor do I think highly of human nature, but I do believe that it is possible to be motivated by things larger than yourself.

stopdog you may be surprised to hear that there ARE people who WANT to be in the helping professions to...help. I've thought on and off for years about doing something along the lines of art or recreational therapy, but just can't make up my mind if i actually want to be a T. I am also a preschool teacher, and genuinely like and want to be a part of these kids' lives and help them learn and grow.

Not to say there aren't selfish motives like money (we all gotta live, and im pretty sure its not so lucrative anymore), and most everybody has issues of their own, so of course it is going to direct them into their line of work. T's are not an exception.