Insights into therapist training. A reflection on the journey of counsellor education.

Hello friends. Today I wanted to share some reflections on the unique experience that is training as a counsellor or psychotherapist. As many of you will know, I finished my integrative counsellor training a while ago and have since been and working in private therapy practice, having previously worked within a charity. A lot of people have asked what it’s like to train as a counsellor or psychotherapist so I thought I’d share some reflections.

The journey to becoming a counsellor isn’t easy. You’re told this when you sign up for any therapist training and, in fact pretty much any training where you’re learning to support others involves a whole bunch of unlearning around your ways of being in the world. Starting counsellor training wasn’t my first experience of this; I’ve trained as a meditation teacher, a space-holder in spiritual spaces and I’d had quite a lot of therapy myself over a number of years but I still wasn't quite prepared for the ways in which my counsellor training would change me.

Today, with the help of a couple of friends that I trained with, I’m sharing some insights into the experience of therapy training and what you might want to reflect on if you’re thinking of training as a counsellor.

Thanks to Phil of Just Allow Now and Jess of Sweet Chestnut Therapy (website coming soon!) for sharing their insights.

Why you might want to train as a counsellor or therapist

In the words of Simon Sinek, “it starts with why”. Your ‘why’ is your purpose and it’s underpinned by the values that drive you. However, as Laura Mae Northup explains in her wonderful book ‘Radical Healership’ we also have a ‘shadow why’.

"The shadow-why encompasses all the less altruistic, unconscious reasons for why you do this work. Th is is important to understand about yourself, because whatever unconsciously motivates you to do this work will influence how you do it... Healers frequently come into this work from our own wounding and that wounding often comes with very primal responses that can look like entitlement, rage, sorrow, denial, desperation, shame, terror, and self- loathing. As the saying goes: hurt people hurt people."⁠

My ‘why’ when I first started counsellor training, if I’m really honest, was a deep seated desire to unravel myself. As I mentioned above, I’ve had a lot of therapy over the years and this felt like a way of taking a deeper dive into myself, that could potentially result in a new career at the end of it all. At the time I started therapy training I was working full time as a photographer and I’d had a rough ride with work during the pandemic so this felt like an opportunity to pivot. It also felt aligned with some of the other work I was doing offering wellbeing workshops, meditation and sound healing.

Healers frequently come into this work from our own wounding

So that’s my ‘why’. What about my shadow why? As Laura Mae states above, healers frequently come into this work from our own wounding and that was certainly true for me. I’ve realise that, for me, the work I do has been driven by a desire to heal the parts of myself that felt impossible to heal. I don’t feel that way as deeply any more because a big part of this journey has been coming to a place of compassionate self acceptance, and acceptance of the idea that none of us are ever fully healed because we’re human. Having the wounds that brought me to therapy training triggered over and over again during the training, though, was hard.

Phil reflects on this aspect too: “make sure you know why you are considering this particular career path and how it will meet your needs and offer satisfaction. I’ve heard many share their ‘why’ as being a desire to “help people”. I’m sure that’s true, but without gaining the awareness and knowledge around the needs within yourself that have drawn you towards the psychotherapy profession how can you know for sure if this career will be what you need and want. For me, my ‘why’ was a need for meaningful contact, this profession offers me the opportunity to meet that need in a satisfying way that few others do”

And Jess reflected that many pride themselves on being a good listener and being empathetic, so they assume they’ll make a good therapist but there is a need to reflect on whether you have what it takes to take on working through your own traumas. There is also the possibility of accumulating new traumas due to not fitting neatly into the box that is the current mental health structure. You have to juggle all of this whilst supporting your clients who often bring struggles which resonate with your own.”

Training as a counsellor or therapist will change the way you move through the world

As Jess shared, “training as a counsellor will change the way you move through the world, as you notice how others relate to one another and the world around them. It really is like taking the red pill from matrix, which can be exhausting but also a super power.”

This definitely resonated with my experience. I’ve changed more in the last three years than I’ve changed in my whole life. Therapy training felt like walking through fire at times. I remember vividly one particular lecture where a huge number of my class were in tears as we contextualised what we were being taught in terms of our own experiences. There were other lectures like that, along with conflicted ridden professional development groups and, alongside the learning aspect, you start to see clients.

As Jess mentioned above, you often find clients in front of you whose struggles strongly resonate with you. I’ve had clients speak words that could have come straight out of my brain. There is an adage in the therapy world that you always get the clients you need and what isn’t often talked about is the fact that you might be supporting someone to explore the very thing that you’ve struggled with in the past or that’s present in your life in the here and now. It’s an absolute privilege to be able to do that but when you first start seeing clients on placement, even within supportive structure of clinical supervision, it’s a big adjustment.

All of this also shines a light on anything that might be unhealed within you or your relationships. Anecdotally, counsellor training has been dubbed ‘the divorce course’ and there’s no doubt that it impacts relationships for better or worse. I worked through a lot during the training and came out of it with a new understanding of myself, my needs and my boundaries. There were times where I was wildly dysregulated by the experience of training, though, especially because of my neurodivergence and the lack of accommodations within the counselling world. I experienced microagressions from one of my placements, I burned out to the point of having to be signed off for a while and I had to ask for extensions on almost all of my assignments as I tried to manage my energy and balance everything that needed to be balanced as a result of studying for two days a week and trying to fit work in around it.

Congruence is everything when you’re training as a therapist

If you’re about to embark on therapy training that incorporates a person-centred perspective, get ready to hear the word congruence thrown around a lot. Carl Rogers believed that a counsellor being genuine and real is one of the most important aspects of the therapeutic relationship. This means being open, honest and real when working with clients. To achieve this we need to be in contact with our own experience, including (and perhaps especially) the difficult aspects of it.

Having your own therapy is a requirement of therapy training and this, alongside clinical supervision, academic learning and presenting cases in group supervision, were some of the mechanisms for identifying the ways in which our own ‘stuff’ might arise when working with clients. You also develop a unique relationship with your peers which is based on bonding over a shared experience, while learning about fragments of their wounds. The whole experience leads to shifts and changes that mean you become more congruent as a human.

As Phil shared, being a client before being a counsellor is an important part of the process.”I had a plenty of experiencing of therapy as a client prior to choosing to train in the career myself. In fact it was my own therapeutic journey with my therapist that lead me to considering a counselling career. I often found myself grateful throughout my training for having an embodied experience of being on the other end of the theory. I’m pretty confident that had I not had that experience the theory and knowledge I was learning would not have landed and made sense to me in the way I often found it did. Not to mention that you simply can’t take a client further along the therapeutic road than you have travelled yourself.”

This idea that you can only meet your client as deeply as you have met yourself really resonates with me. My own journey towards knowing myself is an ongoing process and as I shift and change I see the way I work with my clients shifting and changing along with me.

Jess reflects on this from an attachment perspective: “attachment wise, I’ve learnt a lot, from beginning to experiencing ‘I-thou relating’ more consistently. Your friends on the course/ lecturers do become some of the most important people in your life. This is precious and pivotal for anyone who’s experienced a little too much relational trauma. It’s liberating in so many ways, if you’re ready to confront the walls you’ve developed to protect yourself

Inclusivity and counsellor training

I should start by saying I thought my training was excellent, however it wasn’t without its problems. These are systemic issues that exist in wider society. As someone who’s autistic and adhd, I found counsellor training incredibly neuronormative. I have a neurodiverse clinical supervisor now and they’ve helped me to unpick some of the ways I learned to be a counsellor that didn’t resonate with my own experience or the experiences of my adhd and autistic counselling clients.

As Jess also explains, “the profession still has a long way to go to make it genuinely more inclusive and safe for anyone who can’t be shoehorned into “normal” aka Eurocentric, cisgendered, able-bodied, neurotypical, heterosexual… If you have aspects of your identity that lead to marginalisation, you’ll have to be prepared to advocate for yourself like never before. This eventually taught me to believe in myself and strongly desire to advocate for my clients because I really care for them.”

There was almost no content in my training around working with aspects of identity, or intersectional aspects of identity, that can lead to oppression. I’m committed, as a therapist, to decolonizing my practice and offering an affirming space that is LGBTQIA+ affirming, disability affirming, neurodiversity affirming, anti-racist and fat-positive but the learning around this aspect of the work is something I had to take on myself, which feels unacceptable. It should not be the responsibility of individual therapists to educate themselves about systemic oppression, it should be the responsibility of every training programme.

On my training we also didn’t cover trauma informed practice, which is something else I’m really passionate about. To my mind, understanding trauma, the nervous system and safety should be one of the first things trainees learn. Again, developing this area was a priority for me post-qualification and I now hold a certificate in somatic trauma therapy which is an integral part of my work. It genuinely blows my mind that we were never taught how to recognise and work with trauma based nervous system dysregulation.

I also wanted to touch briefly on the cost of therapy training. As well as your training fees, which in the case of my course were nearly £5000 per year (although covered by a student loan), there’s also the cost of books, personal therapy (my course required 40 hours @£50 per hour), clinical supervision (2 hours per month @£50 per hour), travel to and from placement, BACP student membership and insurance to name a few things. Spending two days per week either studying or on placement plus independent study and assignment time means you don’t have a whole lot of time for paid work. Some of my fellow students were managing to work full time alongside our course which also blows my mind.

It’s widely acknowledged that counselling has an accessibility problem and these are just some of the ways that problem shows up.

You don’t need to be fully self-actulized to be a counsellor or therapist

There can be a misconception in all aspects of the healing, wellbeing and mental health world that the people that are holding spaces for healing have their shit together, or that you can only hold space for others if you are fully healed. I reflected in an Instagram post a while back that the idea that we are broken and we need to heal can be counter intuitive. At some point we have to learn to be ok with ourselves in this moment. Counsellor training, along with the ways of being that support me to live a more embodied life (yoga, meditation, connection with nature, connection with community, my spiritual beliefs etc) has helped me to find peace with where I am in there here and now. I’m a human and therefore I’m messy and flawed in many of the same ways my clients are.

Phil shared a similar perspective: “I’m glad, when I started the training, that I didn’t believe that I had it all sorted. My time as a counselling client had taught me that there is no end destination, there is no ‘sorted’, it’s a continuing journey. To me the peers that seemed to have the most challenging personal journey whilst training appeared to be the individuals that had come to some form of conclusion that they resolved all their interpersonal and intrapersonal conflicts. They had put themselves on a pedestal with a possibly long fall as their training tested their belief. Which nicely returns us to my point about being a client before you’re a counsellor. Before you start to attempt to understand yourself through the lens of psychotherapy, simply learn to understand yourself as a human being, that within itself is a constant never ending journey.”

Should you embark on counsellor or psychotherapy training?

Only you can answer that. It’s hard to put into words the profound impact that training had on me. I was so pleased when it had finished and I could get on with being a counsellor but now I’m contemplating taking another training, because I kind of miss the intensity of the very unique experience that training gave me. Should I spend some time integrating that experience and focus on working with my clients, while expanding my skillset through continued professional development? Probably but writing this made me feel weirdly nostalgic.

That said I absolutely love working with clients. I had a session today where I felt very connected to gratitude for what I’m doing. A core value for me has always been leaving the world a softer place than I found it and this is an expression of that value. It’s also nice to reflect back and feel proud of myself for the journey I first embarked on at the end of 2020. I qualified with a distinction, having navigated bouncing back from the pandemic, a bereavement, complicated relationship stuff and an autism and adhd diagnosis during the training. On second thoughts, perhaps I don’t miss that intensity after all..

If you’re thinking of training as a counsellor or psychotherapist I hope this post has been a helpful reflection on my experiences. Thanks also to Phil and Jess for their contributions.