March 2025
On being "qualified," spooky stuff, and other good things.
Image above: me 5 years ago at the start of the COVID pandemic and the start of my counseling grad program, playing animal crossing. Clearly very qualified for most things.
On being qualified
This month, I officially passed my Marriage and Family Therapy exam and became a fully licensed therapist. I’ve been working towards this goal for the past 5 years so I knew it would be rewarding to finally get here, but the feelings that surfaced after the relief and excitement are not quite what I expected. While I thought that the linear growth, knowledge, and wisdom I acquired would transform me into a real “professional” lady who has her shit together, the reality has been more of a full-circle moment. Although I’ve learned a ton, after this whole journey I’m still myself, grappling with the same insecurities and feelings of what it means to be “qualified” to do anything.
I began this journey out of a combination of curiosity and burnout. After a decade working as a product designer I had become jaded by the tech industry and was looking for a more meaningful way to spend my days. My own mental health struggles and the experiences of people close to me led me to start exploring the mental health field, initially through energy work and somatic practices. I was interested in traditional “talk therapy,” but to me mental health felt physical in a way that often felt larger than words. I trained in and practiced Reiki (a form of energy healing) and though the work was interesting, rewarding, and all in all magical, a voice inside me said that I could never feel truly qualified to offer those services professionally.
Say what you will about the practice of Reiki (it’s definitely not for everyone!) but reflecting back on this feeling, I’ve realized that my insecurity was less about the work and more about my view of myself. At the time, I told myself that Reiki was too stigmatized and “mysterious” for me to feel confident to explain and offer it to others; though I saw and experienced it’s benefits, I simply couldn’t believe that someone would pay me money for this service. I see now that I was 100% devaluing my time and energy, but at the time the decision didn’t feel connected to my self worth at all.
I decided that a more “legitimate” path would be to explore the regulated field of psychotherapy. Since becoming a therapist would require a master’s degree and state licensure, I was sure I would feel highly qualified to offer these services once I completed the journey. So, honestly without giving it too much thought, I began a master’s in counseling program and started diving in to the “hard science” behind healing. Unlike Reiki, this world was based in neuroscience and documented diagnoses; rather than drawing on a body map where and how a patient’s energy was centered, I wrote papers detailing a patient’s symptoms and the theories and interventions that are likely to be effective to treat them.
The more I learned about mental health, however, the more I learned that the science was anything but set in stone. It seemed every 5 years or so a new theory or revolutionary technique would surface, causing the field to adjust and reimagine the origins of and treatments for troubling symptoms. I learned that even psychotropic medications were just best guesses and that top scientists weren’t sure of the reasons behind the most common mental health ailments. It seemed that the more I learned, the less I knew for certain.
Things only got more muddy when I began practicing therapy with patients. I arrived at my first session (a tween suffering from major depression, self harm and suicidal ideation) with a toolkit of evidence-based interventions, only to find that this client had no interest in my worksheets or therapy-speak and instead wanted to play with the dollhouse that was in our shared office space. Nervous and overwhelmed, I dropped my professional act and began to play with them. Over the next few months, our play turned into processing and eventually to helping them work through deep intergenerational trauma, not through a highly researched 5-step process but through genuine connection and presence. By the end of our time together, I had stopped bringing my packet of DBT worksheets with me and instead prioritized taking time for a brief meditation before our sessions to ensure my energy was calm and warm for our sessions (ensuring “good vibes,” if you will).
Fast forward to today: after thousands of hours of practice, dozens of trainings and intensives in “evidence based” techniques, and hundreds of hours of supervision from various experienced professionals, in many ways I’m right back where I started. Of course it’s important for all helping professionals to be appropriately trained and to stay up to date with the latest research and updates in the field and I do think I’ve learned more than I ever imagined, but I’ve realized that the most important part of my practice is still simply being with another person and energetically sharing a space. For me, it took these years of committed training and practice to finally feel qualified to share this work with others and, more importantly, to understand the value of what I can bring to a space. Just like with anything, I had to actually do the thing (a lot!) to feel that I could do the thing. Whereas at the start of this journey I thought that my school would bestow some critical knowledge on me that would cause me to shift into feeling like a qualified professional, it really was the doing that caused the shift.
This shift in self-worth and valuing what I bring to the table has also crept into my creative life. Even though I’ve been making art my whole life, I’ve always felt like an imposter because I have lulls where I don’t create as much and because I don’t make art for my profession. I’ve always hesitated to sell paintings or to fully put my work out there because I’ve never felt fully qualified. Reflecting on this shift in my professional life is helping me to remember that no singular moment is ever going to make me feel like more of a “qualified artist” and that my work and experience are inherently valuable. Reminding myself of the experience, intention, and the energy I bring to every space is the key to feeling confident and qualified in my work, and this realization gives me the reassurance I need to let being myself be enough.
How about you? Do you feel qualified to do the things you do?
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Some Little Pictures:
(from top left to bottom right)
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Image above: I love looking at old weird spiritualist photography
March Playlist: Spooky Shit
This month I’ve been listening to lots of spooky (Spooked, Rattled & Shook, etc) and paranormal (Otherworld) podcasts to counteract the constant onslaught of depressing real news that’s been flooding the airwaves. What even is reality, right? Anyway, if you have any spooky or paranormal shows or episodes you love, please send them my way! I need more.
P.S. please let me know if you were a member of your school’s GATE program, for research purposes. Thank you!
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Image above: my new-to-me gigantic easel. You may ask: why so big? In addition to being able to hold large canvases or two smaller canvases at a time, this guy is wayyy more sturdy than the dinky one I’d been using— nothing worse than a wobbly easel!
Recent Work: Creating space
One of my goals for the year is to try painting large again, and I realized something that has been holding me back is not actually having a space to do this (my walls are notoriously covered in shelves and objects), so this month I finally went for it and invested in a gigantic sturdy used easel. I’ve always been of the mindset that you should do the thing before investing in more tools to do more things, so this was a hard investment to make but I’m hoping that creating this intentional space to make things inspires more making. TBD!
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Some Other Good Things
This post has really been getting me through— I watch it whenever I need a little reality check.
BEST IN SHOW 3 aka the best art show of the year is coming up on April 5th at Crisis Club!
I swear I’m really trying to buy less but I really do want/need all of these cord organizers/hiders ok??
Finally just started reading Oliver Burkeman’s new book Meditations for Mortals and I’m already very into it— I’ve already started using little bits I learned in therapy sessions (the kayak-ship analogy in the first section is so good!). Here’s a quote I underlined from the intro:
“Resonance depends on reciprocity: you do things — you have to launch the business, organize the campaign, set off on the wilderness trek, send the email about the social event — and then see how the world responds.”
As someone who constantly wants to do all the things and then ends up doing none of them, I’m maybe putting too much hope into this book changing my life. Again, TBD— will keep you posted!I’ve been patching up knee holes in my jeans and needed to brush up on my sashiko skills— this youtube video is short, straightforward, and pretty. Highly recommend!
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Thanks for reading – see you next month!