How to be a psychotherapist, in 6 steps
The psychotherapist profession is a work option that attracts thousands of people year after year, being the psychology career one of the most requests for income in most Spanish-speaking countries.
However, just as all the people who start learning in this field discover sooner or later, the path to professionalization in psychotherapy It is not the simplest. Knowing how to train in the best possible way is crucial to bring to our experience the differential factor needed to stand out, have clients and be a psychotherapist both in theory and in practice.
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How to be a psychotherapist: towards a viable professional career
Next we will review several basic tips about how to be a psychotherapist , knowing how to choose well where to invest time and efforts so that they bear fruit effectively.
1. Choose a good university center
This must be clear: to be a psychotherapist, you must obtain a university degree in Psychology, and in many countries it is not even enough to take this step. The training in Psychology offers the theoretical and practical basis necessary to know how to orientate oneself in this area of knowledge and applied science, although to specialize it will be necessary to continue studying.
How to choose a good university center? It is very important that you inform yourself about your work methodology to verify that it is based on scientifically validated paradigms, and ensure that they offer both training in the traditional format of readings and lectures, and through hands-on learning with training materials, laboratories and real workplaces or simulations of this. The option of doing internships in external organizations is also a requirement that you should consider mandatory.
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2. Choose your area of expertise
Psychology is a very broad field, so sooner or later you should choose what type of content to focus on .
In the case of psychotherapy, it is also possible to specialize more and direct efforts to train towards more specific topics: eating disorders, anxiety disorders, etc. You do not have to limit yourself to only one of these areas; the ideal is to choose three or four. In this way, you will have expert knowledge but at the same time you will not have such a degree of specialization that it will cost you to find work.
3. Learn on your own
Limiting oneself to passively internalizing the contents taught at the university offers a very limited scope of learning, especially considering that in Psychology, novelties appear very often . That is why it is necessary that you also learn on your own and that you keep up to date with the latest research in your areas of specialization of interest.
That means reading articles from scientific journals, especially, and although popular science books are also interesting and useful for discovering new ideas, they should not be your only source of information.
4. Keep learning by courses and Masters
The Masters are the type of training programs to specialize for excellence, so they allow you to learn new content but, above all, apply them in contexts very similar to those you will find in consultation . For this reason, it is important to take advantage of this type of experience as the prelude to what you will do alone in your practice when you have become completely professional.
Some Masters, in addition, have the ability to offer practices not only in environments similar to those of a psychology center, but in a real one. For example, it is the case of the Master in Integrative Psychotherapy of the Mensalus Institute, which offers both practices with real cases and viewings of real therapies in their own facilities, under the supervision of therapists-tutors.
In other training programs, the institutions have collaborating centers to which customers can go, and although they are not a bad option, they lack the same control standards. In any case, it is fundamental to be able to apply what has been learned so that the day of offering the first consultation does not arrive and we do not know what to do.
5. Surround yourself with people who know
This is an idea that often goes unnoticed, but the difference between training alone and doing so by having frequent contact with other students or professionals in the field of psychotherapy, contributes a lot to our progress. It is a way to run into doubts that have never occurred to us and try to solve them , to learn about the state of the profession both in its contents and in its most circumstantial aspects (regulatory and labor market issues) and, why not, forge interesting friendships.
6. Keep in mind the deontological code
In the profession of psychotherapist not only have to know how to do it, you also have to know what is right to do and what is not. Because, Find out about all the details related to the deontological code of psychotherapy, which among other things will help you to leave doubts about the ethical implications of your work and to keep in mind how what you do affects other professionals, your clients and patients, and the people in your environment.
