So... I'm a therapist now?

Musings on an ending and beginning.

Yesterday at 12:20pm an email arrived in my inbox. The message (an unexpected all caps-congratulations, underlined and in bold) from the course records administrator confirmed that, at last, all my academic and clinical work had been approved. As of yesterday, I am a qualified psychotherapist.

I pictured this moment many times over the last four years. I imagined I’d jump for joy, ecstatic about the enormous achievement, reaching for a bottle of champagne I would’ve thoughtfully bought and cooled in advance. I imagined myself gathering friends around a table in a small, intimate restaurant, thankful for the friendships that survived this intense personal process and for the new ones that found me in the in-between. I thought I’d feel anything but the feelings that actually washed over me when I saw the email.

After reading the news about my graduation, I cried and took a nap. I texted my parents and friends. I saw my clients in the afternoon. And then I went to yoga and cried throughout the whole session.

Well done.

As I was sitting in the hot studio, Laurence Hillman’s words from a few weeks ago came back to me: everything happens at the right time. I felt moved that, despite my ardent efforts to get my qualification before the end of 2024, the administrative delays made it so that the confirmation came right before the new lunar year and the first new Moon of 2025, in the deep belly of winter.

Grieving

What am I feeling? Well, I think the best word might be grief—I know, not what I expected either. The call I followed five years ago when I quit advertising to move to the mountains and meditate, retrain, and figure out who I am has materialised. I had left behind my life in London with a few jumpers and a suitcase filled with books. Three months became a year and a half as I got trapped in the mountains by Covid lockdowns and my own inertia. I lost a partner, the best friend I thought I was going to do this whole thing with, for life. I lost our home. I began this transpersonal psychotherapy training, having been an atheist for most of my life. I went into a process I could never anticipate or even fully explain to anyone else—reading, writing essays, drawing my inner life, sitting in over 160 hours of personal therapy, expanding my capacity to feel both my despair and my ecstasy, and learning how to actually be with others. And now that process is formally done.

Encuentro by Remedios Varo, via here

It’s exposing to talk about these feelings. As therapists, we’re often expected to be blank slates—empty vessels to be filled by the client’s projections, unconscious complexes, and feelings. Over the last two years of practice, I’ve been a priest, a shaman, a prophet, and a healer. I’ve been the charlatan who takes the money but withholds the cure. I’ve been the life-denying, cold, devouring mother and the Great Mother whose endless love can hold the entire world’s pain. I’ve been the idealised lover, the seductress, the trickster, and the magician whose words can break through lifelong illusions that keep one trapped in a spell. I’ve been the hated object and the bad breast and I’ve been the keeper of hope when there’s nothing left but utter despair.

I’ve done my best to be a good therapist—arduously studying, analysing myself, letting myself make mistakes and take risks, and allowing my heart to crack open when technique or knowledge meant nothing to the person in front of me. I’ve held powerful archetypal projections that sometimes threatened to consume me. I fought hubris—so tempting in this line of work. I got traumatised by meeting levels of suffering I had been privileged enough to never experience before. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I lost myself a bit in this process.

I sit now with a complicated mix of grief: partly for the end of this initiation; partly for the unlived life over the last five years as I isolated myself from the world; and partly for old versions of me that feel like extra baggage for the road ahead. It very much feels like a chapter of my life has ended while the other hasn’t quite begun—a strange feeling to have at only 35. The feeling-tone is deeply psychedelic, like the dark, quiet void of nothingness you succumb to after the ego dissolves. I’ve been there often enough to know that this is not entirely it—that releasing all resistance to this space actually feels good. It’s calm. It touches the depths of soul and the inherent tragedy of humanity. And it’s also where the first flickers of light appear when the time is right. The place of death is the place of new beginnings.

But I’m not rushing there, not now. As I feel into this fullness of grief in my belly, I’m thankful of the greatest gift this training has given me: an expanded capacity to be with my own feelings and therefore others’, without a need to resolve them.

Eve tempted by the serpent, by William Blake, via here

Eros

I’m also thinking about my fascination for the darker aspects of the psyche (shadow, evil, scapegoating, narcissism, which I’ve explored here in depth), and the way all the literature points to one thing: eros. While our minds might immediately go to sexuality, the invitation of eros is in fact for a deep involvement with life. It’s about love—of one’s clients, of fellow humans, of nature, and of one’s fate (amor fati). It’s about letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves, as the poem goes.

Eros is a tricky thing, as the Greek myth of Eros and Psyche shows us. In the uninitiated and naïve, Eros’ arrow can be tragic, even deadly. It can swallow us into old, childish complexes, dimming the light of consciousness and making us act compulsively. But it’s also a powerful awakener to the depths of soul. After all, Eros is an alchemical agent of transformation—our love for others forces us to face our defences, to rewrite our morals, and to learn to love and hate simultaneously without falling apart. It challenges us to grow up. Is that why we fear it so much?

So as I’m sinking into the grief of this ending, I also recognise the need for eros. Couple’s Therapy’s psychoanalyst, Orna Guralnik comes to mind, with the most profound lesson I learned in these last four years: that to be a good therapist, you better have a full life outside of therapy. Ironically, the isolation of knowledge, skill, analysis, and supervision isn’t enough. Friendship, art, community, relationships, and other entanglements with fellow humans are where we truly grow. After four years, I’m actually seeing the truth in this.

And perhaps there’s grief in this too—in putting (some of) the books down and allowing my own humanity to flourish once again. Wish me luck.

We are dealing here with the fundamental problem of human development per se, with the difficulty of remaining open and vital all one’s life. This is the theme elaborated repeatedly by Jung: individuation.

Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig - “Power in the Helping Professions”

Thank you for reading. I’ll use this opportunity to let you know I’m opening a new 8-week dream group from 18 February—if you’re curious to explore your dreams in a safe, confidential, and creative space, send me an email. Lots of magic happens in these circles. I also have limited availability for new psychotherapy clients—you can read about my approach here.