My Path to Becoming a Therapist: From Researcher to Coach to Counselor
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.
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 spoke with more than 150 former combatants, most of them men. I was collecting life narratives of wartime experience. What I did not fully understand at the time was that I was also, in some cases, helping people process wartime trauma.
At the end of each interview, I would ask whether there was anything else the person in front of me wanted to share. Several of the men thanked me in ways that felt embarrassing at the time. They expressed gratitude because I was prompting them to tell stories they did not feel they could share with friends or relatives — stories of violence, grief, and shame. I listened without judgment, with no pretense of fixing anything, and asked questions born out of genuine curiosity.
I was an accidental therapist. And I loved nearly every moment of it.
Reflecting on that year, I have come to understand that I was close to something essential in myself. It was deeply satisfying to learn a new language, build trust across vast differences of experience, and hold space for stories that had rarely been told. There was also something more personal happening. Sitting with former militia members, in the mirror of their trauma, aggression, and search for respect, I was beginning to explore my own.
Over the decade that followed, I benefited enormously from individual and group therapy, as well as life coaching. Increasing my self-knowledge and self-compassion allowed me to shift from a heavily defended exterior to a place of greater openness, emotional availability, and authentic expression. I became less burdened by self-doubt. I wanted to share that with others.
About two years before returning to school, I began offering life coaching. I did not seek out clients — women around me started asking if I would work with men who were important to them. When I asked what they were seeing in me, they said I embodied a masculinity that combined solidity and strength with compassionate softness — something that made them feel held, appreciated, and safe. I was honestly reluctant at first, but I said yes.
Life-coaching, because it is unregulated and entrepreneurial, allowed me to dive immediately into the vocation of helping people with their personal issues. After nearly 400 hours of coaching, I clarified something important about how I wanted to help people. I realized that many of my coaching sessions were de facto therapy sessions. Conversations that began with a focus on motivation or accountability would move swiftly to questions about what was blocking motivation, or why internal commitments seemed so hard to keep. I found myself far less interested in problem-solving and optimizing, and far more interested in helping people explore deeper fears and the wounds underlying counterproductive patterns of behavior.
I did not want to be a coach. I wanted to be a therapist. And I was willing, at age 40, to step away from a PhD and an established career as a researcher and evaluator to pursue that.
When it came time to choose a degree program, I was drawn to an integrative and systems-focused approach to therapy. I had personally benefited from an Internal Family Systems (IFS) approach in my own therapy, and I wanted to learn how to bring an understanding of family systems into work with individuals, couples, and groups. I was also interested in approaches that go beyond the "talking cure" — in my own experience, somatic dance practices like 5 Rhythms and Ecstatic Dance have allowed me to access and process emotions that were harder for me to metabolize while sitting in a chair.
I enrolled in the MEd program in Couples and Family Counseling at Virginia Commonwealth University. The LMFT pathway felt right for several reasons: it is a pathway similar to that followed by the originator of IFS (Dick Schwartz); MFTs use a systems lens and focus on relational healing; and the LMFT credential would allow me to work with individuals, couples, and families.
I also want to be clear about paths I considered but did not choose. I thought about doctoral programs, especially because my own therapist has a PhD, as do many of my therapist-role-models. But, my first career was in research. That would feel like more of the same. For me, a part of this career switch is about putting people at the center of my work in a way that often does not happen when one is focused on methods, analysis, and producing publication-worthy research. The added time investment of a PsyD or PhD also seemed daunting. I know that I have the mind of a researcher and the heart of a teacher and so it is probable that I will want to do both in the future. It has been helpful to know that I can still go on to a PhD in counseling if I want to do academic research, and there are also many opportunities to do applied teaching as a licensed supervisor (without needing a doctoral degree).
I believe my greatest strengths as a future counselor are curiosity and focused presence. Curiosity comes naturally to me, and I have developed it further through nearly 18 years as an academic and applied researcher. Living and working in different parts of sub-Saharan Africa has given me a deep appreciation for difference, a more conscious awareness of my own prejudices, and a high tolerance for the discomfort of cross-cultural misunderstanding. Six years of daily meditation practice has helped me cultivate the ability to be deeply present — to focus empathic attention on another person while maintaining awareness of what internal judgments, tangential thoughts, or sensations may be pulling me away.
I am particularly drawn to working with men who have experienced violent trauma — in military or police service, in violent families or peer groups, or in humanitarian settings. I hope that relational healing work with men can contribute, in some small way, to the formation of masculinities in which vulnerability and authenticity are possible — where intimacy does not require control, and respect does not require dominance.
That aspiration connects back to what I was seeking in Sierra Leone, and what I have been pursuing in my own inner life ever since. The vocation of counseling/psychotherapy feels like coming home to a central passion that I had glimpsed but not yet fully explored. I am nearly done with my MEd program and internship. I could not be happier with the choice I made.
I hope the resources on this blog will help you find your way.
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