Becoming, and Being, a Psychotherapist

A psychotherapist is one who practices or provides psychotherapy, so we need to start with a definition of psychotherapy.

Psychotherapy is the process of acquiring wisdom. Wisdom, in turn, is the knowledge of what brings deep happiness and fulfillment in one’s life. Accordingly, a psychotherapist is someone who helps people acquire wisdom.

Wisdom comes in three levels of specificity. The most specific is wisdom that applies only to a particular person (e.g. yourself). Less specific is wisdom that applies to a particular group of people (e.g. those of a particular gender, race, or ethnic group) and the least specific is wisdom that applies to all humans.

There are also three sources of wisdom: teaching from others, personal experience (in the external world), and introspection (in the internal world). Personal experience and introspection tend to reveal wisdom that is greater in specificity, while the teachings of others tend toward less specificity. Psychotherapists, like anyone else, can help people acquire wisdom by sharing with others what they themselves have learned from these three sources. What sets psychotherapists apart from most people who seek to help others acquire wisdom is their intention to facilitate deep introspection as the primary source of wisdom in those they seek to help.

Early in my life I was very curious about human behavior, including my own. Because of this I have often stated that I was a psychologist by the time I was 10, but it took me another 15 years to acquire the credentials to prove this to others. My curiosity about human behavior was greatly increased when I learned of the concept of the unconscious mind, perhaps when I was in my early teens, and then was further augmented when I was introduced to the concept of the collective unconscious a few years later. I have often heard it reported that people become psychologists, and perhaps even psychotherapists, because of a need to find a way to understand and relieve some of the psychological pain they experience as a result of early life experiences. I am sure that this is part of my personal story, but I believe that the larger part of my story is just plain curiosity, even fascination, with regard to human motivation and its resultant behavior.

Early on I became particularly interested in the spiritual dimensions of human motivation. I was born in Utah and raised a Mormon, so I got a close-up view of the power of the drive for deep spiritual experiences and how that drive can be misunderstood or distorted, leading to all kinds of needless pain and suffering being inflicted on oneself and on others. While my father was a Mormon, my mother was a polymorphous spiritual seeker who talked about a wide range of perspectives on spirituality and exposed me to the many spiritual books she read that further expanded these perspectives for me.

After leaving home I spent 8 years acquiring a B.A. and a Ph.D. in psychology from prestigious enough schools to give me credibility as a psychologist, along with exposure to a small number of interesting ideas and professors. My underlying interest in spirituality lead me to explore a number of extracurricular opportunities, including LSD. The combination of what I read in the scientific literature about LSD, along with my personal experiences, made me feel enormously fortunate when I was able to get a job working in research on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy right out of graduate school. While my graduate school experience was weak on clinical experience, I was thrown into the deep end when I started working with psychotherapy in conjunction with LSD. Around the same time I got into my first really serious personal psychotherapy because of a very complicated marital situation which included death threats from my wife’s ex-husband. That therapy connected me with the American Academy of Psychotherapists (AAP) and gave me an appreciation of the possible depth and power of psychotherapy and of the psychotherapy relationship. Working with LSD, being in my own psychotherapy at a depth I had never imagined, and being inducted into the AAP culture all served to transform me from being just a psychologist to being a psychotherapist whose academic training happened to be in psychology.

All of the forces that converged to move me to become a psychotherapist in terms of a profession also continue to influence me in an ongoing way in terms of my being a psychotherapist as my calling. As a profession psychotherapy has supported me financially, and as a calling it has supported me emotionally and spiritually. The 10-year old boy in me is still fascinated, and sometimes horrified, by human motivation and behavior. The psychotherapist in me causes me to continue to pursue every day the acquisition of wisdom as it was defined at the beginning this essay and to continue to do whatever I can to share that wisdom with anyone who is interested. Of course the person ahead of me in the grocery store line, my next-door neighbor, and the various heads of state around the world may not be interested in my brilliant insights regarding wisdom for them, so I am not inclined to share such wisdom with them without an invitation to do so. I continue, nevertheless, to be fascinated. I also continue to let my own behavior be guided by whatever wisdom I am able to grasp in the moment of what will bring me the greatest happiness and fulfillment.

John Rhead
3-26-20