How to be a psychotherapist, in 6 steps

The profession of psychotherapist is a job option that attracts thousands of people year after year, being the Psychology career one of the ones that receive the most admission requests in most countries Spanish speakers.

However, as all the people who start training in this field sooner or later discover, the road to professionalization in psychotherapy It's not the easiest. Knowing how to train in the best possible way is crucial to contribute to our experience the factor differential necessary to stand out, have clients and be a psychotherapist both in theory and in practice. practice.

• Related article: "History of psychotherapy and clinical psychology"

How to be a psychotherapist: towards a viable professional career

Below we will review several basic advice on how to be a psychotherapist, knowing how to choose well where to invest time and efforts so that they bear fruit effectively.

1. Choose a good college

This must be clear: to be a psychotherapist, you have to obtain a university degree in Psychology, and in many countries it is not even enough to take this step. Training in Psychology offers the necessary theoretical and practical basis to know how to orient yourself in this field. field of knowledge and applied science, although to specialize it will be necessary to continue studying.

How to choose a good university center? It is very important that you find out about their work methodology to verify that it is based on scientifically validated paradigms, and to ensure that they offer both training in the traditional format of lectures and master classes, as well as through hands-on learning with training materials, laboratories and real workplaces or simulations of it. The option to do an internship in external organizations is also a requirement that you should consider mandatory.

• You may be interested in: "10 reasons why psychological therapy may not work"

2. Choose your area of ​​expertise

Psychology is a very broad field, so sooner or later you will have to choose what type of content to focus on.

In the case of psychotherapy, it is also possible to specialize more and direct the efforts to train towards more specific topics: eating disorders, anxiety disorders, etc. You don't have to limit yourself to just one of these areas; the ideal is to choose three or four. In this way, you will have expert knowledge but at the same time you will not have such a degree of specialization that it will be difficult for you to find a job.

3. Learn on your own

Limiting yourself to passively internalizing the contents taught at the university offers a very limited scope of learning, especially considering that new things appear very often in psychology. That is why it is necessary that you also learn on your own and that you keep up to date with the latest research in your areas of specialization of interest.

That means reading scientific journal articles, especially, and although popular books science are also interesting and useful for discovering new ideas, they should not be your only source of information. information.

4. Keep learning by courses and Masters

Masters are the type of training programs to specialize par excellence, which is why they allow you to learn new content but, above all, apply them in contexts very similar to those you will find in consultation. For this reason, it is important to take advantage of this type of experience as the prelude to what you will do alone in your office when you have fully professionalized yourself.

In other training programs, the institutions have collaborating centers that clients can go to, and although they are not a bad option, they lack the same control standards. In any case, it is essential to be able to apply what has been learned so that the day of offering the first consultation does not come and you do not know what to do.

5. surround yourself with people who know

This is an idea that often goes unnoticed, but the difference between training alone and doing it having frequent contact with other students or professionals in the field of psychotherapy, contributes a lot to our Advance. It is a way of coming across doubts that had never occurred to us and trying to resolve them., to find out about the state of the profession both in its contents and in its most circumstantial (regulation and labor market issues) and, why not, forge interesting friendships.

6. Keep in mind the code of ethics

In the profession of psychotherapist you not only have to know how to do it, you also have to know what is correct to do and what is not. That's why, find out all the details related to the code of ethics of psychotherapy, which among other things will help you clear up doubts about the ethical implications of your work and keep in mind how what you do affects other professionals, your clients and patients, and the people in your around.

Do you want to train in the practice of psychotherapy?

The Master in Integrative Psychotherapy of Mensalus It is a very good way to learn from professionals who spend most of their time caring for patients. It is a training program carried out by the team of one of the main psychotherapeutic care centers in Barcelona; It lasts one year, is aimed at graduates or graduates in psychology and can be done both face-to-face, online or mixed (mix between online and face-to-face).

This Master's Degree is a University Degree from the Nebrija University of Madrid, it is aimed at professionals who want to specialize in the Clinical Practice of Psychotherapy with an integrating theoretical position and its start date is the 26th of September.

The Master's methodology is eminently practical, and the viewing of therapies is worked on real, and students practice with real cases acting as therapists with their own patients.