How to Become a Psychotherapist

• Ensure that you come from a dysfunctional family with at least one parent who expects you to parent them (even when you are three.)
  

• Have an existential crisis that begins at puberty and goes on until your late 20’s, marked by a series of intense and ultimately doomed relationships.
  

• Develop an unnatural interest in all things melancholic, (unless CBT is your thing, in which case develop an irritating habit of telling people how to think and feel.)
  

• Make sure you are a middle child/eldest child/youngest child/only child and develop the appropriate neurosis. It’s important to be able to empathise with your clients.
  

• Develop a capacity for introspection that borders on just the right side of narcissism.
  

• Have therapy. Lots of it. And when you think you’ve had enough, have some more just to be on the safe side.
  

• Do not develop clinical depression, a life-long eating disorder or a psychotic illness. Clients need empathy. They do not need a therapist who is more fucked up than they are.
  

• Have children. It helps you to empathise with all the crappy parents you meet in the consulting room.
  

• Have a trust fund/find a very rich partner or resign yourself to funding yourself through 5 years of training and spending the next 10 years paying it off.
  

• Learn to be yourself. (And not by reading self help books.)