Explore Professional Training

Becoming a Therapist: A Play in Three Acts

By Jan Morris, Ph.D., ABPP, CGP, F-AGPA  ·  July, 2026

Prologue

Sitting in a training group many years ago, the leader told a story about intervening with a very disturbed patient in a hospital. Struck by the genius of what he said to that patient, I immediately got self-critical and said, “I will never be as brilliant as you.” He looked at me with kindness in his eyes and said, “You need to become comfortable having all your thoughts and feelings and learning how to use them.” I looked at him blankly, and all I could think was, “What is he talking about?”

Act I: “What do I say?”

When I graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology, I had one question as I began working with people: What do I say? Give me the script. If I can just memorize what experienced therapists know, maybe I’ll become one too.

Graduate school gave me a broad range of knowledge and theory about psychopathology and a good taste of how to talk to clients, but all of that education wasn’t very helpful on a day-to-day basis when you’re spending hundreds of hours with clients without someone right there to tell you how to think and what to do, minute-to-minute.

It did not address the everyday challenges of starting a private practice or managing anxiety about finding clients; dealing with clients who don’t pay or forget their appointments, clients who sit in silence, clients who disappear from sight, clients who threaten suicide.

It did not address my tendency to lie awake at night worrying about someone, feeling bad that I said the wrong thing, feeling bad about how I felt about some of my clients, feeling devastation when someone left therapy declaring it wasn’t helpful.

It did not help me talk about how scared I was to start a group or how scared I was to receive someone’s feelings, especially anger.

Act II: Finding Myself

Flopping around in the sea of uncertainty, I eventually realized I needed two people: someone to help me understand my clients, and someone to help me understand myself. I found myself a supervisor and I found myself a therapist. Both helped me enormously in those early years. My therapist helped me become better acquainted with all of the layers of who I was. My supervisor, who told me it takes about ten years to feel like you know what you’re doing, helped give me confidence and understanding about what to say and why.

In 1994 Lou Ormont came to Austin for an AGPS conference. I remember one sentence as clearly today as I heard it that afternoon:

“Every great therapist combines a solid theoretical foundation with their unique personality.”

That simple statement illuminated two ideas: I needed better theoretical understanding and a better sense of how to use myself in the work. Ormont inspired me to pursue study in modern analytic theory and technique at the Center for Group Studies in New York.

My training from that point forward led to a major discovery: what is possible when you travel in packs. Training groups, therapy groups, study groups—all of them had something incredibly valuable to teach me. With my eyes locked on my group leaders, I watched not only what they said, but how they recovered when they stumbled, how they received criticism, how they remained emotionally present when someone was angry with them. My fellow group members became teachers too. They offered support when I was discouraged, challenged blind spots I couldn’t yet see, helped me discover my own gifts and talents, and gave me emotional sustenance when I wondered whether I belonged in this profession. I was learning to tolerate uncertainty, to learn from my mistakes, to receive anger without retreating, to notice and use my own emotional reactions without becoming ruled by them. Those capacities weren’t separate from the work—they were the work.

Looking back over four decades, the early question, “What do I say?” has evolved into the more enduring question, “Who am I becoming while I do this work?” Every hour of supervision, every therapy session, every training group, every difficult client, every misstep, every conference, every article, every conversation with colleagues has quietly shaped me and my practice life.

Act III: Using Myself

Propelled by my training, I wanted to teach others. In Austin, Texas, I began doing so in the safest way I knew, passing along the teachings of those who most inspired me. I faced my fair share of challenges as I stepped into the world of teaching, and I leaned on my therapist, my group leaders, my fellow group members, and my supervisors to get me through it. Many of my greatest teachers weren’t mentors at all. They were difficult clients, disappointed colleagues, misunderstandings, ruptures, and moments I wished I could erase. They taught me humility, resilience, and the courage to repair relationships rather than avoid them.

Somewhere along the way I stopped trying to sound like my teachers. Their voices had become part of me, but I gradually discovered that my own voice was emerging. Instead of, What would Ormont say? I found myself asking, What do I think? Instead of believing that all the wisdom lay outside of me, I began to discover that some of it had quietly taken root within me.

Epilogue

The therapists who flourish aren’t necessarily the brightest or the quickest learners. They’re the ones who remain curious about themselves. They keep seeking places where they can continue growing. They keep asking difficult questions. They have enough humility to be changed by the people they meet. They understand that becoming a therapist is a lifelong pursuit.

The therapist we become is shaped less by the answers we learn than by the experiences we are willing to have.

That is one of the greatest privileges of this profession—that while we spend our lives helping others grow, we are continually invited to grow ourselves. This is what that training group leader meant all those years ago: “You need to become comfortable having all your thoughts and feelings and learning how to use them.”