09/25/2025
Grad school gave me theory. It beat it into our heads, really.
It gave me overpriced textbooks, research articles, and a brain full of frameworks.
It gave me professors whose religiously driven approach to therapy felt disconnected from the way I want to practice.
What it didn’t give me?
✨The silence that feels like forever while you decide what to ask next.
✨The gut punch of hearing a client’s story that mirrors your own.
✨The trial-and-error of learning how to be with people, not just treat them.
✨ A manual on how to leave the hard stuff in the office instead of carrying it home.
✨ A guide for what to do when a client reminds me of myself.
✨ The confidence that comes from messing up and learning anyway.
✨The reminder that empathy, humor, and presence matter way more than perfect interventions.
The truth is, you don’t learn how to be a therapist from a classroom or a book. You learn it in the chair, session after session, with supervision and a whole lot of humility.
If you’re a new therapist feeling unprepared, you’re not alone. I, too, am a new therapist who often feels unprepared. I find it hard to believe that any of us walked out of grad school “ready.” What I am confident in is that my empathy, my life experience, trauma, history of anxiety, depression, addiction, etc. prepared me to sit with people in their pain without flinching. To listen without judgment. To hold space in ways a textbook never could.
Grad school gave me a jump start. Life made me a therapist.
