Memoirs of A Healer/Clinical Social Worker: Autobiography of Bruce Whealton

Section Four: My Career Journey: Toward Becoming a Psychotherapist

This section of the book covers my career journey toward becoming a psychotherapist. My path toward being a psychotherapist involved working in allied fields working directly with people who have a variety of needs for support. The goal was always to help others to achieve their own goals and not the goals that someone else might have for them.

This section of the book will cover the period up to the point when I was able to call myself a therapist or a psychotherapist. The next section will cover being a therapist.

This section is about the journey, the education, the training, which in many professions like Clinical Social Work is on the job and in other settings. It's about accomplishments and success.

I wanted to be a psychiatric social worker and I took the steps necessary to achieve this goal. Those steps included but were not limited to, volunteer work, internships, graduate school, continuing education, post-graduate training, membership in professional organizations, and leadership roles in local branches of professional organizations.

There is no shortcut or substitute for hard work in pursuit of a goal. Having competent and skilled mentors also helps a great deal. All of this will be revealed in this section of the book.

We will back up a bit from where we left off with the family life that I created which was described in the last chapter. Those stories serve as the background for the work I was doing to build a successful career. I would prove those who doubted me wrong. I would demonstrate that I could build a successful private practice in a saturated market.

Those who advised me not to go into private practice had good intentions. However, I had a dream, a set of goals and aspirations. Join me and see what happens...