Related articles

• ‘So what made you want to become a therapist?’
  
  I’m only a year into my training, but the battered old piggy bank on my shelf would be full to bursting if I had a pound for every time I had been asked this question. Family, friends, work colleagues, passing acquaintances, the tutor accepting me onto my training course, the interviewers discussing training placements: all ask the same stock question. You would think that I would have the stock answer off pat.
  
  But I still don’t.
  
  When my fellow students and I were asked the question in an early workshop at the start of our counselling diploma last year I was able to rattle off the list of reasons I had already rehearsed for my own benefit: to find a career with more meaning than that which I had been following hitherto; to put my own experiences to use in ‘helping’ others (it wasn’t long before I found out about the classic ‘wounded healer’ archetype); to develop skills that will hopefully sharpen, rather than fade, as I grow older; to earn a living anywhere in the country while being self-employed… But even as I reeled them off, they didn’t necessarily all feel convincing. And my inner critic couldn’t help but detect a note of piety.
  
  Now, as I prepare to start the second year of my integrative counselling diploma, the question springs to mind again. It is perhaps natural, since although there may be only another year before I complete my diploma, there are three more years before the end of my MA. This is a long time and some students don’t last the distance. I have to check with myself that this is still worthwhile.
  
  The question has also been hovering at the back of my mind since my own therapist mentioned being curious about oneself a few weeks ago. It was one of those passing references that didn’t make much impact at the time, but it must have resonated somewhere within me for I found myself returning to it.
  
  The issue of self-knowledge has been an important one throughout all the work my fellow students and I have done during the past year, whether it be in the theory modules, the group work, the skills practice or personal therapy. The idea that in order to provide a safe space for the client one must first know oneself has never been far from the surface.
  
  But now I am starting to appreciate how much more there is to self-knowledge than being able to separate material that belongs to oneself rather than the client and to work with the counter-transference. For sure the overriding purpose of therapy is to help others. Yet if one of the guiding principles I am learning is to be congruent, and to be genuinely ‘present’ in the encounter, then surely the personal insights I gain along the way are more than just a by-product. They will stay with me long after my work with an individual client has finished. This is a thrilling yet scary prospect.
  
  This chimes with some of the mini-breakthroughs I have experienced in my own therapy. Being in therapy – a requirement of my course – has certainly at times helped me with personal ‘issues’. But I have also started to gain subtler insights into who I am and how I experience. Those shifts, those twists and turns in my own therapeutic journey, are more than just a means to a professional end: they are something to be treasured in themselves.
  
  As I learn to appreciate different ways of being, the different ways that I hear my own voice, that I experience my body, so the realisation is starting to sink in that this is a journey that has no end. Indeed this is part of its very essence if, as writers such as Dave Mearns and Mick Cooper have suggested, the therapist should be prepared to enter each therapeutic encounter in the knowledge that they may emerge potentially changed by it.
  
  To the experienced therapist this is clearly not rocket science. In a way it seems strange I have not really recognised this aspect of the work before. I suspect I would have dismissed it as being self-indulgent. I may even have been scared by the implications of what I might learn.
  
  But now the moment seems to have arrived to allow myself to be curious about myself and to acknowledge the drive of self-discovery. As I grant myself this permission, I add another answer to my list of responses to the question ‘Why do you want to be a therapist?’
  
  Doubtless the list will have extended again in a year’s time. But then that is all part of what makes this training so rewarding.

• Alex Erskine is a pseudonym.