Posted by Penny on August 20, 2003, at 8:10:23
In reply to Re: therapy for mental health professionals... » Penny, posted by allisonf on August 18, 2003, at 22:26:23
Thanks for your encouragement of my plans to become a therapist! And good luck to you too!
I did ask my therapist last night if she'd ever been in therapy. Actually, what I did was tell her what my pdoc said and then sort of changed the subject, and then she said, "Was there something else you wanted to say on that topic?" so I said, "Well, I was going to ask you if you've ever been in therapy, but then I decided not to..." Anyway - the answer is yes, she's been in therapy. We also talked about therapists in therapy and she helped me to understand that I don't have to wait until I'm 'finished' with therapy to become a therapist. I asked her about the different dynamic that must occur when the patient is also a therapist, and she said that in her experience, therapists in therapy are probably quicker to realize that important work is going on and quicker to pick up on any mistakes, but the relationship is still essentially the same.
So - she's very supportive of my desire to become a therapist, as is my pdoc, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that it might be just the thing for me. My T actually said that it was when she was in therapy that she got the idea for becoming a therapist! I think that is probably pretty common...
I am worried about what will happen if I don't get into social work school. I don't have an undergraduate degree in psychology, so it would probably be even harder to get into grad school in psychology, though that was something my first therapist mentioned to me as a possibility.
P
poster:Penny
thread:251832
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20030814/msgs/252433.html