Make Room for Growth
When I look back over the last decade of being a therapist, the biggest difference between then and now is not that I finally figured everything out, but that I slowly learned to make room for mistakes!
As a newly graduated therapist, I remember how disorienting it felt to care deeply, think critically, and still constantly wonder if I was doing it right. That early cognitive dissonance, the gap between who I thought I should be and who I actually was in the room, felt unbearable at times and definitely also created some moral distress too… I asked myself all the familiar questions like, “How do I take care of myself as a therapist without losing my edge? How do I know if I am making the right clinical decisions? When do I reach out for supervision? How do I create good boundaries without becoming rigid or self protective? What I did not realize then was that these questions were not problems to solve.
While exploring this questions helped, I hadnt didnt realise that I needed to lean into uncertainly instead of trying to “figure it all out” and this went on for the first few years of being a therapist (which now doesnt seem so long but at the time- it felt like ages!).
So when I say “leaning into uncertainly”, obviously, I am not referring to not being prepared or unethical mistakes in therapy, but more about mistakes that are embedded in the learning curve as therapists, the ones that are not always explicitly stated or taught. What changed things for me was embodied listening, noticing when my body tightened in sessions and getting curious instead of critical. Over time, I learned to ask whether that tension came from the clinical material or from internalized narratives about competence, perfection, or needing to please. Many of those narratives were not just professional. They were personal, and they needed space in my own therapy.
Confidence did not arrive through certainty. It grew through reflection, clear charting goals, community, supervision, and mistakes that were metabolized rather than hidden. Supervision became a place where my therapist identity could unfold, not be evaluated. Growth required support, permission to be human, and the courage to stay in the discomfort long enough to learn from it.
