It’s a question I’m asked often. How, praytell, did a 40-something former marketing and journalism gal become a therapist?
It was a gradual move. In my previous career, I was in marketing and content writing. When my kids were small and I was moving around the country as a military spouse, I shifted to freelance writing. I wrote mostly for military publications and websites and it was great having the flexibility and ability to work from home (wherever home happened to be at the time) and around my kid’s schedules.
Then a funny thing happened. My kids started getting older and the pull to go back to work became stronger. In my writing world, though, I realized something: I was writing features and interviewing tons of people around the country on different topics. And they’d all tell me lots of stuff. Private stuff. The article topic wasn’t even discussed and people I’d talk to, mostly strangers, and usually on the phone, are telling me about their affairs, abortions, family problems. I remember distinctly one phone conversation where an enlisted soldier in Virginia, who had gone well over our 30-minute allotted phone interview time, said to me, ‘Gosh, you are just so easy to talk to. You really listened to me.”
Something clicked for me. I knew that I was easy to talk to – I’d been told that all my life. Moving around the country as a military spouse kinda forces you to talk with different people from many walks of life – in my case, Upstate New York, the Pacific Northwest and finally the Texas Hill Country.
But obviously there’s more to it than that.
I knew a fellow military spouse, an RN who also was pursuing her LPC that was in my book club at Ft. Hood. I spoke with her and asked her a ton of questions. How is the program? What do you have to do? She was completely encouraging and I’ll never forget her telling me this: “Girl, you have to do it. You’ll be great.”
So one year later, I find myself at 6:00 p.m. a Monday night in a classroom in downtown San Antonio, sitting in my first (of many) 3 hour graduate night-school classes for my Master’s in Counseling at UTSA. I had applied for and received a $4,000 grant from the Army (thanks, Uncle Sugah) towards my studies. For the next two and a-half years, I spent a minimum of two nights a week and two summers in class, pulled many late-nights writing papers, completed 400 closely-supervised clinical counseling hours, took two big national certification exams and graduated.
And I loved it. I counseled groups of teens at a Juvenille Justice Academy in downtown San Antonio. I did in-home case-management with at-risk youth and their families on the west and east sides. I worked at a crisis center, detox, and IOP. I visited clients in jail and detention centers. And now, 7 years after starting this journey, I have my own private practice.
I’m finally able to say, at age 46, that I love what I do – and that journalism degree? Well, I get to use my marketing and writing skills on a daily basis, just in a different way – to promote myself and market my own business, and of course, write this blog.
At the end of the day….even the most challenging of days (and believe me, there are many) here is what I know, and the answer(s) to why I became a therapist:
I became a therapist to help others.
I became a therapist to listen to others.
I became a therapist to learn from others.
I became a therapist because I know, from personal experience, that therapy works.
I became a therapist because I can’t imagine doing anything else.
Every time someone walks through my door and sits down in my office, I know what a privilege it is that they’ve chosen me to help them. That is never lost on me. My job, while demanding at times, is fulfilling in a way that no other job has been for me.
There is no better feeling than when a person tells me that I’ve changed their life, or helped them stop using, or made their relationship with their spouse/parent/child better.
So that’s why this former marketing girl is now a therapist. I plan to continue working in this field until I retire. And as long as people want to tell me their stories, I’ll continue to listen.
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