HE SHOULD KNOW –
March 2025 – The aspiration of becoming a great or even just competent psychotherapist is, at its root, somewhat paradoxical. Over the past 15 years of daily practice I have learned that psychotherapy is not about mastery, not about “fixing” people, and certainly not about discovering truth.
If anything, it’s about constantly evolving, unlearning mastery, tolerating uncertainty, and embracing the often irrational and patently absurd complexity of human beings. The path to greatness in this metier is littered with counterintuitive situations and if you are in search of clarity this may not be the ideal profession for you.
Here are 36 things I wish someone had told me before I became a psychotherapist:
1. Once you start working you will quickly realize that much of what you learned in school is inapplicable, useless, misguided or wrong. Most graduate programs in psychotherapy are like sweatshops without the sweat. The supervisors in your associateship or internship teach you everything worth knowing.
2. 130 years ago Freud called psychoanalysis “the talking cure.” Today, psychotherapy is better understood as “the listening cure.”
