How to become a good therapist

I train psychotherapists. It’s my job.

It’s an honorable profession. And most days I love what I do.

I am, however, constantly uncertain about how best to help my students transform themselves into the therapists that they want to become.

This is a strange and tender art. It is a path of heart.

You can’t hurry a baby into being born.
You can’t hurry a therapist-in-the-making into becoming one full.

Yet still, I am tasked with this.

If there was singular advice to give on how to become a great therapist, it would go something like this:

Suffer greatly.
Survive.
Learn to love again.

These are the people who make the best therapists.

The ones who have suffered
and learned to love again.

So, use the gateway
of what has happened in the past
as the fuel to ride you through
to sharpen your eye
to open your heart.

And love again.

This is what I have come to know.

Photo credit:  Kristopher Roller @ Unsplash