How to Know if You Would Like Counseling Psychology Graduate School
You’re probably on this blog because you’re curious about counseling psychology graduate programs. It’s hard to know if you’d really enjoy the program before you even have a taste of what it’s like. Here’s how you can get some ideas about whether this is the path for you, before you decide to make a huge financial and time commitment:
Firstly, as I have suggested previously, go to therapy as a client first. Find out if you like the experience of therapy in the first place. Think about whether you could really make a whole career out of talking to people one-on-one about difficult topics. You could even discuss the idea with your therapist. I’m not saying you need to talk yourself out of it, or analyze every single reason behind your want to become a therapist before you even set foot on the path (that can be done along the way, too), but I wouldn’t recommend starting graduate school to become a therapist before having even a single therapy session.
Read Becoming a Helper by Marianne Schneider Corey and Gerald Corey. Or at least flip through it. I would suggest reading the entire first chapter and thinking about the questions they offer. This textbook will ask you about your own motives for becoming a helper, have you think about how you would define the ideal “helper” or therapist, ask you about your values and what you hope to get out of the career, and offer a lot of suggestions, stories, and encouragement for beginner therapists. The Coreys suggest that you should take an honest inventory of your own personal strengths and weaknesses as a helper, not to judge yourself but just so you can be aware of these things. It’s also suggested to talk to professionals about what to realistically expect out of the career, what a typical week might look like or what challenges to expect. (You could also look up YouTube videos, therapist autobiographies, and forum/Reddit/Quora posts about this to try to get an idea of what the career is like.)
For example, say you want to become a therapist because you feel a need to care for others. The Coreys suggest that you may have grown up the caretaker of the family. That’s a valid reason to become a therapist but you’ll need to be sure that your wish to avoid unpleasant emotions doesn't interfere with your client processing their own emotions. Also note that being a caregiver, your clients won't take care of you, instead you must take care of yourself. They give the lovely example that an opera singer must care for their voice, a wood cutter must care for their axe, and therefore you must rely on your sense of self as your primary instrument and take care to preserve it so you can be effective with clients.
Other motivations for becoming a helper could include: the need to make an impact, the need to follow in a past therapist’s footsteps, the need for self-help, the need to be needed, the need for status or recognition in society, the need to provide answers, or the need to control others. You should examine all of these motivations/needs within yourself.
The Coreys also suggest listening to others if they are telling you not to get into the field, without getting too defensive. Ask questions to find out more and see if there is any truth to what they are saying.
Just a note, this is a textbook so yes, it is more expensive than a self-help paperback, but you could try looking at your local public library, undergraduate school’s library if you’re still in undergrad, buying a used copy if you can find one, borrowing from a therapist or graduate student that might have a copy, or (cough cough) finding another way to read it, if you know where to look…
Speaking of paperbacks, some other (more affordable) suggested reading:
Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child discusses how patterns from your childhood can repeat themselves in your private practice unless you take the time to explore them and fully feel your feelings as an adult. Miller stresses how necessary it is to process your developmental trauma and develop compassion for your younger self so that you don’t unwittingly inflict unhelpful patterns upon others as a therapist. It can be a difficult read, but it’s important to realize the scope of the personal work that lays ahead of you if you want to be the best therapist you can be. Are you willing to dig deep into your own “shit” and face it head-on?
Similar to the Coreys’ point about needing to be a caretaker, Miller also dives into this idea of making sure that you are not meeting your own needs at the expense of your clients. You need to be sure that you can take care of yourself while you are being a helper/giver, and that are you are okay with your clients never reciprocating and meeting your needs. You need to be sure you are not secretly fulfilling your wishes through your clients, or looking for a substitute parent in them.
Irvin Yalom’s The Gift of Therapy includes some great tips for beginner therapists and some wonderful anecdotes from Yalom’s private practice. I just love this book and reading it made me so excited and hopeful about becoming a therapist! I also felt very comforted by Yalom’s gentle, encouraging approach towards beginners, which is similar to the Coreys’ compassionate writing style in my mind. Hopefully you get the same warm, fuzzy feelings. Not all books about becoming a therapist are depressing!
As for whether you’ll actually like the process of school:
How did you feel about your undergraduate program? Graduate school is a little different but it’s still academia. There are less midterms and more reflection papers but you’re still going to be attending lectures, contributing to class discussions, doing research, writing papers, and doing group work. If your favourite classes in undergrad were group discussion-based seminar courses then you will probably like counseling psychology graduate school because there is a lot of group discussion mixed in with the lectures.
How did you feel about the suggested reading I already posted?
If those types of books don’t really excite you and you don’t regularly read psychology books out of personal curiosity then do I ever have news for you… I was assigned chapters of those readings in my actual courses this year. That is exactly the type of reading you will be doing, and you will be doing a lot of it.
Do you feel like you could read books like that as your full-time job? And then also spend hours taking notes on them and discussing your views with like-minded others? Great, then you probably should apply for graduate school.
Check the curriculum or course map for the program you are applying to. Look up all the individual course names and if you can, look up past syllabi and assigned readings. Do the courses and readings interest you? See if you can check out some of the books from your local library to get a taste of what you’re in for. If none of the courses on the list actually excite you, you are in for a long few years… And you should probably look for a program that does make you excited instead.
Attend as many information nights and open houses as you can for the programs you are interested in. I attended multiple information sessions for the program I was applying to and met different professors and students each time to get a feel for what my classmates and professors might be like, and what the overall vibe of the school might be like. I’m glad I did because I knew pretty much what to expect when school started. You might even be able to ask about sitting in on a class.
Check out reviews online for the programs you are thinking of applying to. See if you can talk to a former or upper-year student about their experience.
Also, try as much as you can to understand the overarching career plan you will need to work toward. You need to know what you’re really in for from the very beginning. You will be expected to work for free, during your practicum and possibly also during your internship (you need a certain number of hours after your degree is finished but before you are licensed). Does this fit into your life plan? Can you afford to work for free for a couple of months/years? Do you have another way to support yourself? How will you balance work and school? Family and school?
The fact is, you’re never going to know exactly what your graduate school experience is going to be like until you start. One of my professors mentioned this past term that even with explaining everything and trying to get proper informed consent, it can take roughly around 1-2 years before clients fully realize what they’ve committed to doing in therapy, before they understand the type of therapy that’s happening and how it will actually affect their lives. It’s the same with signing up for school. It’s only after you’ve done it for a while that you can see retroactively how your life has changed and what you really committed to.
Seeing this long list of suggestions (and they are really only suggestions, you have to do things your own way), you might get the feeling of “ugh, I just finished my undergraduate degree (or I’m really busy with work right now), and I’m busy enough getting my application ready for schools, I don’t want to worry about all this extra stuff.” That would be a valid reaction. But I also think it’s important to wade through some of these questions beforehand. Some people in my program became disillusioned in the first few months, partly because they didn’t do a lot of research beforehand and felt unpleasantly surprised by the cost of tuition, the idea of an unpaid internship and the amount of therapy “role-play” or dyad work we would be doing as students.
You also have to be ready for your life to change in unexpected ways throughout the program. Yes, this is impossible, but just know going into it that a lot of people go through a major transformation during these 2-3 years. You might move, you might change partners, you might change jobs, you might even change program streams, and you will definitely change (or at least be much more aware of) unhealthy patterns in your life. Once your eyes are opened from your dyad work, your readings, your reflections, your new friendships, your experiences with clients and your personal therapy, you will not be the same.
When people tell you that the first six months of your counseling psychology graduate school program are a special and hectic time, they are not just talking about adjusting to the workload and the amount of reading you are expected to do - I think everyone is aware there will be some adjustment to your new ‘job’ of being a student - but what you might not be aware of is this intense personal transformation that is ahead of you (or, at least, should be ahead of you, if you are in a good program). Are you ready to deal with your triggers instead of running from them and using your usual coping mechanisms? Are you ready to be vulnerable with your therapist, yourself, your professors and your classmates? Are you ready to feel all of your feelings like it’s a full-time job? Are you ready to read hours upon hours of technical and heavily emotional material? Are you ready to be so tired of feeling and reading and reflecting all the time that you have no choice but to slack off sometimes and rest, thereby having to face your perfectionism and harsh inner critic?
I think you are ready. You probably wouldn’t be here reading if you weren’t. So go get ‘em, tiger. :)
