Beginning the Journey: What Motivates Therapists to Join the Profession?
5.3 Entering the Field of Psychology
5.3.4 Personal experiences
During the interviews, the participants shared various personal experiences that influenced the decision to take up the helping profession. This sharing poured in after more factual data were related in the interview. As therapists eased into the interview situation and started going back in time, they began relating personal stories of relationships and experiences. These narratives included life changing events, personal experiences of psychological distress, receiving professional help and instances of family members undergoing psychological distress.
Life changing events and personal distress
Personal life crises or experiences were viewed by a couple of therapists as deter- mining their trajectory of professional choice. Sheetal shared the story of her mar- riage break up and subsequent distress, as a life-changing event that led her to seeking the career path of a therapist. In contrast to Sheetal’s relationship crisis in her thirties, Dirghayu’s losing his eyesight, followed by a lung infection, at the age of about 18 years was a deeply personal crisis. His frank and open sharing of his pain as he saw his life slipping away before him stayed with the first author through the interview.
…The turning point for me was around the age of 18–19, when I lost my sight; and for me that was a huge turning point … and the second turning point came for me around the same time, around ‘98 when I had a lung infection and I almost died. So, when you actually get so close to those experiences, then it kind of shapes you in a different way. I think these experiences were what made me…these experiences change the way you look at life, the way you look at how you spend a life and radically changed a lot of things for me. So partly it was somewhere inside me right from childhood but these events more acted like precipitating factors… and yeah that’s what really made me get in this.
(Dirghayu)
Though Sheetal and Dirghayu mentioned life events as crises that facilitated the movement to being a therapist, their stories drew out how these crises were fraught with personal distress and pain, and led to soul searching and looking for purpose
in their lives. In the same way, Ameesh discussed his childhood experiences, the subsequent ensuing pain, loneliness and sadness and the searching for something meaningful that would lead him to a better place, making him seek the profession.
Ronnestad and Skovholt (2003), through their discussion of themes relating to psychotherapist development, suggest that personal lives of psychotherapists influ- ence their development at all stages including the selection of work. In a survey of 238 psychotherapists in Ireland, Bager-Charleson (2010) identified ‘own child- hood’ as the foremost reason for joining the profession, followed by ‘later life cri- sis’ and ‘interest in people’. Early experiences of childhood loneliness, isolation and introversion (Barnett 2007) in the lives of professional therapists are drawn out by research as factors responsible for pursuing the therapeutic profession.
Barnett (2007) pointed out that even though counselling was a solitary profes- sion, it allowed the practitioner the possibility to obtain human contact, which may compensate for the loss of the same during childhood or adulthood. Bager- Charlson (2010) found that 75 % of the 238 participants, when asked about their motivations to train as a therapist, reported personal experiences, mostly crises.
Orlinsky and Rønnestad (2005) addressed the motivational aspect by asking therapists ‘To what extent do you feel that your development as a therapist has been influenced by the motivation to explore and resolve your personal problems?’
In response, 48 % of 3,577 respondents answered ‘much’ or ‘very much’, indicat- ing that many therapists in their diverse sample were explicitly aware that their choice of career was at least somewhat a function of experiencing personal distress.
Receiving professional help
Both Dirghayu and Sheetal went through crises in their lives during which they sought professional help. The fact that they found therapy helpful in tiding over the crises motivated them to become a helper, and support those in need of psy- chological help.
As indicated by the literature, personal experiences in therapy provided a boost for the practitioners in the present study to enter the field of therapy. Beatty (2012) found that 60 % of trainee counsellors who had experienced personal therapy prior to their counsellor training reported it as being a factor in their career choice.
Roles adopted within the family
Hina discovered her motivation for joining the profession during her personal ther- apy. It was during her own sessions with her therapist that she discovered that she had taken on the role of counsellor very early in life, in response to family crises and stress. She shared how her maternal uncle was diagnosed with schizophrenia and there was a considerable amount of stress and disturbance in her family as she grew up. With marital conflict between her parents leading to a chaotic family envi- ronment, and with an anxious father, she found herself taking on the role of caring
and nurturing almost unconsciously. During her personal therapy sessions she began making connections about how playing a supportive role in her family, as a child and adolescent, perhaps made her take up the helping profession, as an adult.
On similar lines, Sheetal discussed that her experiences as a first born child in her family required her to adjust and accommodate, and not make demands from others; this, she suggested, was a factor that contributed to her joining the pro- fession. Sheetal recalled that seeing distress in close quarters, within her family, resulted in her becoming ‘parentified’, wherein she played the role of a parent, despite being a child. She mentioned that her being a parentified child had con- tributed to her coming into psychotherapy as a profession, as was often found amongst those in the helping professions.
Jurkovic (2014) in his book Lost Childhoods: The Plight of the Parentified Child details how therapists often shared stories of functioning in parentified roles within their families. He dedicated an entire chapter to document the narrative of a mar- riage and family therapist who shared how her parentification as a child impacted boundary issues in therapy with her clients in practice, and for which she con- stantly sought supervision. Jurkovic (2014) cautions that if this was not adequately addressed, it could create personal and ethical concerns for the therapist; however, at the same time he mentions that what cannot be discounted is that the dynamics in the family in some way prepared the therapist to be in the helping profession.
Murphy and Halgin (1995) compared the motivations of clinical and social psy- chologists and found that those in clinical practice were more influenced in their career choice by experiences of psychological distress in themselves and in their families of origin, and by their desires to resolve personal problems, than their social psychologist colleagues.
There has also been a discussion about the wounded healer hypothesis, i.e.
whether therapists who had undergone psychological distress themselves were at an advantage or disadvantage to be a therapist. Burton and Topham (1997, as cited in Barnett 2007) propose that the processing and integration of the experiences was critical, if they had to be useful for the therapist in any way. For therapists who have had such experiences, personal therapy during training became impor- tant, as it then helped them to resolve personal conflicts and integrate and assimi- late them in ways that would help them become better therapists.
Richardson et al. (2009) opine that though prospective students who want to pursue a career in psychology might think that personal life experiences that they have had would qualify them to enter into the profession, it is not necessarily so.
Richardson et al.’s data from 92 psychotherapy and counselling training provid- ers in Australia indicated that while personal life experience helped understand the complexity of life, and provided a foundation, it was not sufficient to allow one to be a good therapist. For the experience to be useful, it needed to be processed and integrated after self-reflection. Recognizing variations in personal experiences was important, as also was understanding the need to adapt, and change on the basis of the personal experience.
Zerubavel and Wright (2012) underscore a critical issue in terms of psy- chologists’ perceptions of and responses to wounded healers. They mentioned how stigma from peers and seniors in the same profession and self-stigma could
influence wounded healers’ level of comfort in disclosing their wounds. While there is a trend to advocate reflective practice amongst practitioners, what would be required is to bear in mind the inhibitions or barriers in such self-disclosures.
Zerubavel and Wright (2012) further propose that the relative absence of dialogue in the field regarding the experiences of those who may be wounded could be fur- ther encouraging secrecy and shame among the wounded. This atmosphere could be thereby preventing access to support and guidance. They recommend that the professional spaces promote greater openness and provide unconditional support to those who may be wounded, and in turn help to develop a safe space to promote individual resilience and post-traumatic growth.