What Advice Would You Give to a New Psychotherapist?
Stepping into the world of psychotherapy can be as challenging as it is rewarding, so we sought advice from seasoned mental health professionals to guide newcomers. Highlighting the wisdom of Registered Psychotherapists and Licensed Clinical Psychologists, our compilation starts with the importance of prioritizing growth and self-care and concludes with a call to focus on client-centered compassion. Here are eight invaluable pieces of advice for new psychotherapists entering the field.
- Prioritize Growth and Self-Care
- Embrace Active Listening and Supervision
- Preserve Self-Efficacy and Balance
- Practice Self-Care and Patience
- Identify and Train in Therapeutic Modalities
- Use Emotions as Informative Guidance
- Continuously Learn and Broaden Perspectives
- Focus on Client-Centered Compassion
Prioritize Growth and Self-Care
I would recommend a check-in on the following areas and prioritize them within your growth plan. Play with the words and sentences that describe your passion in the field. Use that for your elevator pitch to attract your niche group. When you are unsure, pick two to three areas to focus on. Connect with associations and communities to build your support system. We are stronger together. Understand the business of working independently. Find a great bookkeeper and learn how to manage your finances. Understand your relationship to money and track your energy and workflow to build a schedule that promotes a balanced lifestyle. Create a safety plan for burnout and know who your support system is. As well, create a list of self-care activities that elevate decision-making and encourage you to stay in your flow and follow your own advice. You chose this field from a place of passion and desire to help. If you want to fulfill that goal, taking care of yourself is of the utmost importance.
Embrace Active Listening and Supervision
As a new practitioner, it's easy to doubt yourself and wonder whether you have enough experience to help someone with an issue you may not have experienced firsthand. This doubt often comes from a desire to provide the best possible support.
I learned in grad school that simply listening is an intervention. By building a strong therapeutic alliance—a collaborative relationship between practitioner and client—and being an active listener, you can trust that you're doing your best. Don't be afraid to seek supervision or additional training when needed.
It's okay to not have all the answers, and it can actually be an asset! Bringing a beginner's mindset to your work can open you up to fresh ideas and perspectives. With this mindset, you'll continue to evolve and refine your skills, making a real difference in the lives of those you serve.
Preserve Self-Efficacy and Balance
Entering the field of mental health requires you to preserve your own self-efficacy and maintain balance away from the profession. As health care professionals, we need to remember to cultivate our own self-care routines, increase self-awareness, and maintain skills to self-regulate well. Our work can increase compassion fatigue, burnout, and trigger our own personal stressors. Stay aware. It's also important to remain educated that patients are the experts about their own lives as you work with them, always use supervision wisely, and brand yourself. New mental health professionals need to stay curious about what field in this profession interests them, what environment, and what population they want to be involved with. Also, don't be ashamed or have any guilt about what salary is comfortable for your own quality of life. We get choices too.
Practice Self-Care and Patience
You must first and foremost give yourself time and compassion as a new psychotherapist. As a beginner, it's important to remember that this is new. All the education and professional experience prior to this has helped to prepare you, but you're still a novice—that's okay! Don't expect yourself to be great at this immediately. Like all jobs, it takes time. What this job requires more than most is self-care, reflection, and community. You can implement these immediately and maintain them whether you're just beginning or have been in the field for decades. Create good habits, trust yourself, and remember the reason you chose to be in this field.
Identify and Train in Therapeutic Modalities
I recommend reflecting on which therapeutic modalities resonate most with you. Once you have identified which modalities are aligned with your approach as a therapist, read all the books you can, network with therapists who practice those modalities, and, if accessible, become trained in those modalities.
Furthermore, I highly recommend identifying a therapy niche. These are the specific mental health concerns or populations that you are especially interested in working with.
Just like how people think differently from person to person, the same goes for therapists. This is a moment to allow your interests, passions, and creativity to blossom into the therapeutic approach you will take as a therapist.
Use Emotions as Informative Guidance
I would let a new psychotherapist know that feeling intense emotions or even having traumatic memories arise when working with clients is very normal and natural. The work therapists do is inherently emotionally intense, and it's not just a 'boundaries issue' if you have intense emotions in the face of this. I would encourage them to see their emotions or trauma resurfacing not as a 'failure' but as information.
As therapists, we get a unique opportunity to role-model the use of healthy coping skills in the face of intense emotions. Therapy teaches us how to cope well with emotions rather than avoiding discomfort in life, as this isn't possible. I would encourage them to practice the skills of the therapy model they use with clients, i.e., Dialectical Behavior Therapy or Internal Family Systems. I'd also encourage them to seek support with a therapist themselves for extra guidance as needed and trauma healing, such as with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). There are absolutely boundary issues as a therapist, such as working too much or feeling responsible for a client to change (this is their process), but feeling intense emotions in emotionally intense work is not one of them!
Continuously Learn and Broaden Perspectives
It is hard to narrow down all the advice I would give to a new psychotherapist entering the field into one piece of advice; however, I think the most important piece of advice I could give is to never stop learning. Graduate school is great in giving you foundational knowledge and skills to provide psychotherapy; however, there is so much more to learn, even beyond the required CEUs to maintain licensure. Be willing to learn new and alternative evidence-based interventions, learn from supervisors and colleagues who may have different perspectives than you, and challenge things you were taught in graduate school to broaden your perspective and knowledge to better serve your clients, especially those from different backgrounds than yourself.
Focus on Client-Centered Compassion
Focus on the client, not your "performance" or paperwork. Many mental health professionals spend time in their heads going over techniques and therapeutic modalities, forgetting that what creates change is genuine positive regard and care for the client. Radical compassion and active listening are critical therapeutic tools, perhaps more important than specific theoretical approaches or diagnostic impressions. The ability to stay fully present with a client, holding space without one's own interfering thoughts and impressions, takes experience and self-awareness. I suggest all mental health professionals participate in therapy or coaching themselves to maintain a level of self-awareness that prevents transference or other interference with their objectivity as professionals.
