Pathways to becoming a therapist

My Path to Becoming a Therapist: From Researcher to Coach to Counselor Category: Personal Story Reading time: 7 min Author: Jonathan Forney I did not set out to become a therapist. For most of my adult life, I thought my calling was understanding conflict — specifically, the kind of conflict that pulls men into militias, gangs, and wars. I trained as a political scientist. I wanted to contribute to solving the perennial human problem of violence. What I did not anticipate was that the path toward understanding conflict among people would eventually lead me to the question of conflict within them — and toward a career that feels like my true calling. Sierra Leone and the Accidental Therapist In 2010, I traveled to Sierra Leone to conduct doctoral fieldwork about civilians who had joined community-defense militias during the war that had raged there from 1991 to 2002. Over the course of a year, I learned the local lingua franca, Krio, and s...