My mother's penchant for putting me in therapy (she got it for a dollar) before I was three was surely a factor in my career choice, not that I had a jolly good time there, mind you. My worst moment occurred when my Freudian child psychiatrist locked the door in her office so I couldn't escape and then made scary interpretations about my unconscious desire for my father's penis. Penis was not even a word that was spoken aloud back then, not to mention that I was probably all of seven.
My best therapist, a clinical psychologist I saw in high school was kind and empathic, the first adult man who had ever truly listened to me with attention and respect. But he was clueless about the family events that were fueling my problems like my mother's cancer diagnosis (shrouded in the silence and secrecy of the time) and my father's dishonorable behaviors. Therapists back then focused narrowly and exclusively on the internal conflicts of one "problem-person" in the family, in this case, me.
I think I had the fantasy early in childhood that being the therapist would magically protect me from the bad ones-and that, in the role of therapist I could fix something not only in myself and my family, but in this whole screwed-up business of "treatment." It's no accident that my major contributions to the academic field have been to widen the lens beyond individual patholology and to replace dispiriting interpretations with more positive, empowering conversations that help people change.
The "forgiving" nature of doing therapy also shaped my career choice. You can make a lot of mistakes in my field that you can simply correct along the way, no harm done. Just recently I said to a client, "I was thinking about our conversation last week about your sister, and I realized I was way off base. In my attempt to be helpful, I think I may have made things worse" Clients value such disclosures and even learn from them. Folks who pay for your services will be far less forgiving of your foibles if you are a concert violinist, pilot or neurosurgeon.
Given my free-ranging "cognitive style," I don't belong in any line of work where the stakes are high around a screw-up. I came upon this insight as soon as I was old enough to have any capacity for self-observation and reflection. My parents and big sister have always been orderly, precise and perfectionistic. Due to some mystifying scramble of the gene pool, I'm the opposite.
Any career demanding perfectionism and stead unwavering attention, or even a confident knowledge of the difference between north and south, was definitely not for me. I wanted a line of work akin to cooking a big pot of vegetable soup and not at all akin to baking a soufflé where one small mistake causes the whole thing to collapse. I realized early on that I needed to be in a vegetable-soup line of work. Clinical psychology fit the bill.
In truth, the reasons why people "really" choose a particular line of work matters less than you think. You can choose a career for all the wrong reasons-to conform or rebel from family expectations, to make money fast, to live out a parent's dream, or to one-up your big brother. Or you can just fall into your line of work by accident. I have a terrific, dedicated, optometrist in Topeka, Kansas, Dr. Charles Beier, who loves his work like nobody's business. When I asked him how he got into it, he said something like, "Well, I was working for this guy one summer and he was an optometrist and I didn't know what to do and so I thought, maybe I'll try that..."
What matters is whether you ultimately come to love your work, whether it builds on actual talents you have (rather than requiring talents you don't have) and whether, over time, it suits you. You can enter a line of work for all the "wrong reasons" or for no good reason at all and end up doing something you love.
No doubt my deciding to become a clinical psychologist when I was only a few years out of diapers speaks to something quite peculiar in my nature. No matter. I love my work.
