I find that a lot of people don’t understand all that goes into becoming a therapist. As I reflect on how I got here, it’s striking to me how long I’ve been working toward it! Here’s my story:
While I didn’t always know I wanted to be a therapist, I can say I’ve pretty much always had a passion for connecting deeply with others and for working toward the greater good. I’ve always been a good listener, and early on, I noticed that I felt my best when working with people to help solve issues.
As a teenager, I had a lot of strong emotions and didn’t know what to do with them, so I asked my parents if I could go to see a therapist. I eventually worked through what I was dealing with, but unfortunately my experience in therapy wasn’t ideal. This, in part, is what inspired me to become a therapist myself. As a teenage girl, I needed to feel seen and heard, and I found therapy to be an invalidating, unhelpful process. My experience made me consider just how many people might be reaching out for help at their most vulnerable state and not getting the support they need.
After high school, I attended college at University of Wisconsin. During my sophomore year, at age 19, I took my first social work course and the material really spoke to me. Counseling is great, and some of my best friends were trained as counselors, but I’m grateful for my education as a social worker. To me, the difference with social work was its emphasis on the ways we as individuals are impacted by our environments and by the systems we interact with on a daily basis. No other area of study seemed to acknowledge this complex dynamic of human behavior in the way that social work did.
As a junior, I applied and was accepted into the University of Wisconsin’s School of Social Work and began graduate school coursework as a senior in college. In my first internship as a social worker at age 21, I worked at a small community center that provided supportive services to the Latinx community in Madison, WI. Not only was this my first social work-related job, it was the first time I had ever worked in a capacity that required me to speak Spanish 75% of the time! It was quite the learning experience. While there, I worked on a team to start the very first support group in the area for LGBTQ+ folks who also identify as Latinx. This project and this team will always hold a very special place in my heart.
If you’re wondering if I can still speak Spanish fluently, the answer is unfortunately: no. You truly do lose it if you don’t use it. However, I continued to have a keen interest in working with and supporting the Latinx community throughout my career.
After graduating University of Wisconsin with a Bachelor’s in Social Work, I moved to Chicago to serve a year as an AmeriCorps volunteer. As a volunteer in the AmeriCorps VISTA program, I was placed at non-profit called Year Up to help build capacity in their programming. During my year of service at Year Up, I recognized a need to more adequately serve the Latinx community, a largely underserved population in Chicago. In response to this realization, I led an initiative to increase engagement with this group. That year, the Latinx enrollment in the Year Up program more than doubled as a result of my efforts.
Following my year of service, I moved to St. Louis where I attended the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University. I never intended to stay in St. Louis long-term, but in a few short years it became my home. After graduation from Wash U with my Master’s in Social Work, I worked in community mental health settings for several years before opening up my own practice is 2020. To date, I’ve worked as a social worker serving children as young as 3 and adults as old as 75. I’ve worked in schools, homes, neighborhoods, community agencies and psychiatric hospital settings. I’ve worked with people of various races, ethnicities, and gender identities.
Today, I call myself a licensed clinical social worker, or simply: a therapist. But as you can see, it’s hard to capture all that I’ve accomplished thus far with a simple job title. Being a therapist is truly a part of who I am as a person. In a lot of ways, it feels like I’ve been growing into this role for my whole life. It’s a honor to be able to say I’ve made it this far, and I can’t wait to see where this journey takes me in the future.