Why I Became a Psychotherapist

It wasn't just about helping people.

I think when people ask me why I became a therapist, they expect me to say something like “I wanted to help people.” But that would only be part of the truth. 

The truth is, like most major life decisions, becoming a therapist was a compromise between disparate parts of myself, and while compassion or altruism played a role in that complicated psychic negotiation, I was also working out a way to meet my own deep-seated needs. Let me explain.

I was twenty years old. I had just returned from a three month trip to India, which I’d spent staying in ashrams, visiting temples and holy sites, drinking chai, and writing in my journal. Back at college in northern California, I found myself at loose ends. I was taking summer classes to catch up after the semester I’d taken off to travel. Every morning, I woke up, smoked cannabis, and laid in bed for as long as possible before driving to a local coffee shop to grab a latte on my way to drawing class, for which I was routinely late. 

It’s a good thing I wasn’t an art major. In fact, I had somehow ended up in the Religious Studies department. When I tell people I majored in Religious Studies, they usually assume I was some kind of pious altar boy, preparing for a career in ministry. And they would be wrong. 

In fact, the real question is how I, a long-haired, tattooed, weed-smoking nonconformist, came to study religion, and the simple answer is that the Religious Studies classes were the most interesting ones in the course catalog. Religious Studies is an academic discipline that takes an interdisciplinary approach to religions, encompassing anthropology, sociology, philosophy, psychology, and history. In studying traditions like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sufism, I saw myself as being on a quest for spiritual truth and enlightenment.

But I didn’t really know what I was doing. I chafed at my college’s general education requirements and doubted the path I was on. I wanted to travel and write, and I wasn’t sure school was where I was supposed to be.

By the end of the summer, I was depressed. I also knew the weed wasn’t helping. Although I enjoyed smoking, it just seemed to sap any and all motivation I might have had to do something productive. Getting up in the morning was a struggle. Doing my homework was a struggle. Even grocery shopping felt like a struggle, at times. What’s worse was that I had tried a few times to quit–even throwing my stash and my favorite water pipe into a river–and each time, I promptly relapsed. 

As the fall semester approached, I registered for one of the more popular classes in our department: Religion and Psychology. A friend loaned me his copy of one of the required texts: Carl Jung’s memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections. It would become one of the seminal books in my life. (I still have Jamie’s copy, which now features both of our marginalia).

Jung’s work appealed to the rational part of my mind, that was trying to understand religion and spirituality in a way that was compatible with a modern, scientific worldview. But what impressed me most about Jung was his deep, personal engagement with the psyche. He had taken his own dreams seriously enough not only to study them, but to follow where they led, and to create a life that was an authentic expression of his own, sometimes conflicted inner nature.

Maybe, I thought, there was something to this psychology stuff. Maybe, in fact, I should talk to a therapist. Alone in my apartment one evening, I dug out my previously neglected copy of the Yellow Pages and started dialing numbers.

Royal Alsup was a bit of a maverick, even in the wild and wooly world of humanistic and transpersonal psychology that emerged out of California in the 1970s. With shaggy hair, a biker mustache, and a home office that was completely lined with books, Royal immediately set me at ease. He had studied with some of the pioneers of the field, including Carl Rogers and Rollo May. A lifelong activist, his work included advocacy for children from local Native American tribes. At one time, he’d even had a public-access TV show called Rapping With Dr. Royal. Later in his life, when I knew him, he was also a dedicated student of Tibetan Buddhism.   

In our first sessions, while we analyzed one of my dreams, I realized that I was using cannabis to self-medicate my depression, which stemmed from a lack of purpose and meaning in my life, as well as unresolved grief over my parents’ divorce a few years earlier.

Once we started addressing these underlying issues, I naturally smoked less and less, until I (mostly) stopped. I started rebuilding my relationships with my parents on new ground, as an adult. I started to find more meaning in my studies. I worked with Royal for three years, until I graduated from college. While I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life at the end of those three years, I had an inkling that maybe, someday, I could help others in the way that Royal had helped me.

I was still a long way from becoming a therapist. First, I had an inner conflict on my hands: I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t know how to earn a living doing that. I thought maybe I could become a therapist, but it felt like a huge responsibility–how was I going to travel when I had a practice full of clients who depended on me to be there? I longed for freedom, and yet, by this time, I also had a young daughter that I needed to help support. And I knew I couldn’t just keep working minimum wage jobs in bookstores and tea shops forever. 

In the end, it may have been my love of the psyche that kept drawing me back in.

After the Religion & Psychology class that had introduced me to Jung and inspired me to go to therapy, some classmates and I had the opportunity to learn from our professor in a private dream group. As part of this group, our professor introduced us to the work of one of her teachers, Dr. Stephen Aizenstat, the founding president of Pacifica Graduate Institute. When my friends and I heard that Dr. Aizenstat was going to teach a workshop on his Dreamtending method, three of us decided to take a road trip, all the way from the Humboldt redwoods down to the Carpinteria foothills outside Santa Barbara to attend. 

The workshop made a deep impression on me. First, Pacifica’s campus was beautiful, nestled in the hills among native oak trees, with a view of the Pacific ocean. Then there was Dr. Aizenstat’s approach to dream work, which treated dreams as living images–not to pin to a setting board and dissect, but to relate to. Watching him work with volunteers on stage, I thought, I want to be able to do that. And as we paired up for the exercises, I got a chance to do impactful work not only with my own dreams, but with a partner’s, as well. It was my first experience being in the therapist seat. Not only did I enjoy it, I felt like I could be good at it.

During the time I worked with Royal and attended the dream group, I had a powerful series of dreams about snakes. Some of them were terrifying. Others had a numinous quality. The snake is one of humanity’s oldest symbols, associated with death and rebirth, sexuality, energy, and healing. I had the sense that there was some potential inside me that I wasn’t fully realizing. 

While I wrestled with the question of what to do with my life, I had another snake dream:

I was walking in the gardens at Pacifica. Everywhere, among the trees, flowers, and shrubs, I was surrounded by slithering snakes. It was unnerving, to say the least, but I walked on. Eventually, I came to a cafe in the middle of the garden. On the menu board were only snake-based dishes: grilled rattlesnake, fried kingsnake, cobra curry with rice. Confused, I turned to a beautiful girl who was sitting there, reading a book while eating her lunch. She looked up at me and explained, “You have to eat the snake that bit you.”

Strange as it may seem, that dream played an important role in my decision to become a therapist. I had been bitten by the snake of my own psychological suffering. That suffering had drawn me into the field of psychology and psychotherapy, both through my work with Royal and my own studies. I’d become fascinated with the teachings of depth psychology, and I’d seen a glimmer of my own potential to become a skilled therapist and to help others. Maybe it was time to absorb that snake into myself.

Ultimately, I decided to apply to grad school at Pacifica. Although I still felt uncertain of my path, I knew I would never feel 100% ready–I had to put one foot in front of the other and begin the journey. And it has been quite a journey. I’ve now practiced therapy for over 10 years, and worked with hundreds of clients. Sometimes, as I sit waiting for my next appointment, I think about Royal and the sad, confused young man who first walked into his office. Or the bright, enthusiastic one, driving for two days down the length of California to visit Pacifica for the first time. And although my decision to become a therapist was a complicated one, I’m grateful to my younger self for having the wisdom to make that choice.

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Note: This essay is one I’ve been working on as part of Write of Passage, the writing course I’m taking. For the next five weeks (and possibly more), I’ll be sharing a longer, more substantial essay each Wednesday. If you don’t want to receive these essays, you can scroll to the bottom of this email and unsubscribe from them, while still receiving Mindful Mondays each week. That being said, I’d love it if you stick around and give these a read.

Thank you,

Chris Cordry, LMFT