How to become a Psychotherapist – Key Basics

About the role

Psychotherapy is a way of helping people to overcome stress, emotional problems, relationship problems or troublesome habits. Treatment can be provided in a range of settings or formats including on an individual, group, marital or family basis to:

Understand and address the client’s thought processes, feelings and behaviour
Find ways to deal with, and alleviate, the client’s distress

Typical daily work activities include:

Leading a number of one to one sessions with a client. These sessions, typically 30 – 60 minutes, once or twice a week, a few months or several years, are used to assess need, explore issues and build a trusting relationship
Encouraging the client to talk about and explore their feelings and behaviour
Conducting group sessions with people undergoing therapy in a clinical setting
Conducting group sessions in a training capacity for other professionals, such as social workers, nurses and teachers, who are interested in learning more about how groups work and how they function within them

EMPLOYABILITY

To become a truly effective psychotherapist requires many skills that you would not initially think about. For example, if you are a perfectionist this profession is probably not for you because a neat and tidy closure for the patient may never be possible. Other skill sets required include:

Massive tolerance, ability to listen to yourself as well as the client
The ability to separate their own feelings and emotions from those of the patient, with the resilience not to be overwhelmed by the clients’ problems
Excellent inter personal skills such as self awareness, sensitivity and empathy to bring out of the patient those issues that are truly bothering them

CAREER ENTRY

All NHS psychotherapist positions are post-graduate training posts that require a good honours degree and successful completion of the Graduate Basis for Chartered Membership (GBC, previously known as GBR). Courses are normally part time and take four to six years to complete. They include theory, supervised clinical work and clinical seminars.

Training in an established institution will almost always include undergoing personal therapy and not all training programmes necessarily give clearance to practise as a psychotherapist, so it is important to thoroughly check course content and final qualifications.

EMPLOYERS AND SALARIES

There is a limited number of training posts in adult psychotherapy in The National Health Service (NHS) offering varying degrees of financial support in exchange for clinical practice, usually at an NHS site.