Why I Became a Psychotherapist

The question I get asked most, by all sorts of people in all sorts of contexts, is, "Why did you become a therapist?" People are so fascinated with the field, in my opinion, because of its difficulties, many of which they know firsthand. While few of us know people who have developed a life-threatening physical health condition, the vast majority of us know someone with mental illness, so we tend to project our helplessness onto the individual who, we believe, has chosen to spend most of their waking hours in the throes of that feeling.

Undoubtedly, there is no singular path to becoming, or wanting to become, a psychotherapist. But there seem to be trends. I think most of us have similar stories, which tend to be hidden by less vulnerable and, in our minds, more interesting ones. I used to tell people that I became interested in psychology when I read Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections. In Jung, I discovered a fellow seeker, someone who also struggled to fit into society and desperately wanted to make sense of the world, compulsively attempting to imbue it with cosmic meaning. Like me, Jung had difficult relationships with his parents, especially his demanding father. And, also like me, Jung was a dreamer, preoccupied with his fantasies, many of which were later recounted in his Red Book. Jung's love of philosophy, translating ideas about the inner workings of the universe into manuals for living, hooked me. I looked to him, as I did to other philosophers before him, to answer the fundamental question of existence: How can I make my life more meaningful?

But, this wasn't the entire truth. Yes, I was interested in the secrets of our minds and, by extension, of the universe. However, the pull toward psychology was deeper and much more compulsive. At bottom, the real question of my personal existence was: How can I make my life more bearable? I wanted to better understand psychology because I wanted to fix my broken parts, from my chronic and inescapable anxiety to my unsolvable resentment toward life. And, as significantly, I wanted to fix my broken family. In understanding the intricacies of the human psyche, I sincerely believed I could somehow wipe away a family history of personality disorders, autism, cynicism, mistreatment, sadism, and dread. As a child, you don't know what any of those things are, at least I didn't, having grown up in the '90s. At some point, I learned that my upbringing, with its inconsistent punishments and threats, mostly stemming from a man I no longer know, was abnormal. While others had their own familial problems, mine seemed worse. Until I read Jung. There were people just like me, I learned, and many of them were psychologists.

So, I thought they held the keys. If I could understand this or apply that, things would finally make sense. It was as though psychology was an elixir. Freud, Jung, Beck, Perls—these people all appeared to have known what they were doing; they were the masters of mind. They had, I felt, all of the answers. Beyond the intellectualizing, I became a therapist because I believed I could learn to fix myself and those around me. And while many of us became therapists for these reasons, we quickly discovered their foolishness. Aptly, Jung's Red Book ends unfinished, abandoned right near its end. While he wove insights from various strands of thought, he was no closer to acquiring some universal truth, nor did he make any significant contribution, in that book, to a cure for emotional suffering. And this is how I feel about therapy in general and my role in it.

I often tell my patients that the question of "Why me?" doesn't have a definitive answer. I just happened to have been born into a family with significant struggles. The "why" implies purpose, the belief that I'm being punished for some misdeed, thus the question remains unanswerable because my being placed in my family wasn't a punishment; it was just chance, with no cosmic meaning to it. On the one hand, this revelation can feel maddening; on the other, it can be liberating. From my own therapy, I learned that I could choose to respond to my circumstances better. These days, I try to accept people for who they are and look to my value system to ask myself how much I want to contribute to the life of someone who can't provide what I need in a relationship. I learned that there wasn't anything about me that warranted how I was treated, and that, despite my own mental health struggles, people still want to love me. I learned that my life was worth living. And, I learned that there was nothing to fix. This is merely life's diversity. Some of it just doesn't work for me.

Psychology helped me overcome my rigidity and my intense need for life to be exactly how I wanted and expected it to be; I felt less entitled to a revision of my childhood. It's taught me that answers, real and definitive ones, are rare, even in this particular science. Most of us, much of the time, aren't aware of our motivations, so how can we expect others to always be aware of theirs? For myself and for my patients, these realizations, when taken together, embody enlightenment. As the ancient proverb reads: "Enlightenment isn't wisdom; it's the feeling of lightness."