Is it ok to see a trainee psychotherapist?

When you’re searching for a psychotherapist, you want someone who can help. Seeing ‘trainee’ on the therapist’s profile might give you pause since trainees aren’t yet ‘qualified’. I’m still a trainee, or more precisely an ‘advanced trainee’, so what does that mean?

Training in psychotherapy is a rigorous process. At the Gestalt Centre, where I am doing my training, it takes a minimum of five years to qualify as a UKCP accredited psychotherapist. Other institutions take a little less time, but we do individual and group psychotherapy training at the same time and get a double qualification. I have completed all five taught years of the training programme, including the master’s degree, and am now doing the final pieces of work required for UKCP accreditation, including the required clinical hours, and awaiting feedback on my final case studies.

The training institution does not authorise trainees to see private clients unless they meet their standards. In my case, that meant that I had to achieve the master’s degree, have the approval of two tutors and support from my clinical supervisor. Whilst a trainee, the supervision requirements are strict, so I spend time with my supervisor every other week to discuss my current caseload. Supervision is where I can, in confidence, discuss my work with a senior practitioner who has done extra training in supervision. I get support and time to reflect on what’s happening in my client sessions. Every client is different, even if they come with the same ‘issue’, so having therapists supporting each other in this way helps us to develop our practice and better support our clients.

On the psychotherapy course, we spend hours in our training groups working on skills and testing how we communicate with each other. We also do a lot of reading about and discussing psychotherapeutic theories and techniques before submitting written work several times a year. The standards for written and practical work are high: no trainee can just coast through the process. For example, some institutions accept extracts from client sessions as ‘exam’ pieces, whereas I have had to submit entire sessions. I don’t get to pick the good bits. Our teachers want us to do well by working hard.

Irving Yalom wrote that every session with every client is new therapy. I read that when I began my training and I have it as one of my touchstones for how I work with my clients. Of course, as a new psychotherapist, there are situations I will never have encountered — but even the most experienced therapists are new therapists when a new person comes through the door. Psychotherapy is kind of a mystery because it happens in the relationship between two strangers in a room. That’s also what makes it beautiful.

Choosing a therapist, trainee or not, means finding someone you can talk to. I might be that person, or you may prefer someone else because we don’t vibe. Whoever you choose, the relationship you forge with your therapist is what really matters. Our techniques are just techniques. So will I ever have finished training? I think that if I said ‘yes’ I would not be a very good therapist.