Matt's Story: How I Became a Therapist

I came to therapy through a search for what it meant to do good in the world

Years ago, I used to say I came to therapy through politics. While this is still true, I also realized, more recently, that I came to therapy through a variety of experiences. More than just electoral politics (though I volunteered for my first of many political campaigns at 13 years old), I am interested in political activism and social justice, which is what initially drew me to social work and my work with foster kids.

In college, I struggled with the question of what it meant to do good for the world and what sort of life, looking back decades later, I could be proud of as having given to humanity. It wasn’t until after college that I reconciled with that question when I moved to Chicago and began working at Kaleidoscope, an African-American-run child welfare agency known for its pioneering work providing “wraparound” services aimed at helping foster children and families remain with or return to their families. I learned that what was right for me was finding people in need and working hard to help them as much as possible. Working with children and families, I could see children feel better, make friends, get along better with parents or foster parents, return to their parents’ homes, manage hurt feelings more productively, learn to read, laugh, and stay out of the psychiatric hospital.

If I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives, I needed to learn as much as possible about building relationships that could heal

When attending grad school in social work at Columbia, I planned to learn everything I could to help these kids more. It seemed clear that if I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives, I needed to learn as much as possible about building relationships that could become opportunities for healing. This meant clinical practice.

Along the way, I also decided to pursue a master’s in Special Education at Bank Street College, concurrent with my clinical social work studies. This seemed like an extension of prioritizing clinical practice. Education, particularly special education with its attention to learning and emotional difficulties in and around school, is largely grounded in relationships and emotionality. Initially working in both private and public schools in New York, my learning shifted, as my expertise in psychotherapy grew, to a focus on working comprehensively with young people who had both learning disabilities and emotional and behavioral problems that affected their performance at school and their ability to learn. I also began working with young people with autism, Down syndrome, and dyslexia.

I make use of these influences not as a roadmap, but as inspiration

Regardless of the path to licensure (whether social work, psychiatry/medicine, psychology, or marriage and family therapy), grad school alone does quite an insufficient job of preparing graduates for clinical practice, particularly the intense, hard-to-master work of psychotherapy. While there are several paths to advancing skills, psychotherapy institutes are the most common for those serious about moving toward advanced clinical practice.

I was attracted to a training program in a methodology that called itself “anti-epistemological,” which is an overwrought way of saying that it’s non-dogmatic. New York has long been a town dominated by psychoanalytic (Freudian and neo-Freudian) practice. While I did (and still do) see this as a meaningful practice, it felt out of touch with the people I most wanted to help and seemed to leave behind people with many different kinds of pain. At the same time, the alternatives to Freudian methodologies were the so-called evidence-based, behaviorally routed practices (behavioral therapy, cognitive therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy), which seemed devoid of an appreciation of how unique each person’s therapy needs to be and how impossible it is to create deep, lasting healing when applying a set of so-called scientifically valid principles. In truth, I wanted nothing of the dogma of either camp, which has disdain for the other. What bothered me more than the particular dogma was the intensity of the dogma itself, which seemed to have little to do with creating significant change in the lives of people in pain.

While I didn’t realize it at the time, my experience in a training program with an absence of dogma and emphasis on therapy as a co-created activity was a grounding from which I discovered more and more the sort of therapist I wanted to be. I made use of not only what I’d learned there, but also my experiences with philosophy and theater, my studies in grad school, and my work with foster kids. Perhaps ironically, in the years since, my approach to therapy has been increasingly informed by both Freudian and behavioral approaches. Because I became interested in these (and other) approaches through a non-dogmatic path, I use these influences not as a roadmap, but as inspiration. They are ways of seeing human life and change without compromising my rigid commitment to providing therapy that continually reinvents itself.

My work with patients is the primary influence on how I understand what it means to help people 

As Tribeca Therapy has grown since its start in 2009 and expansion into a group practice in 2011, we’ve added therapists with expertise in art therapy and family systems approaches, who have changed dramatically how I work. As I do more and more training and supervision, I am excited about what other therapists bring, especially newer therapists, and it’s exciting to help them discover how much they have to give. Cultivating one’s skill as a therapist is incredibly difficult, but there are life experiences, personal struggles, intellectual interests, and creative skills that are surprisingly relevant to the practice. I offer emerging therapists guidance on discovering their way of practicing therapy, while I continually rediscover, with each patient, the collective (therapist + patient) way of helping that patient at that moment in time. In this process, I am also impacted.

Ultimately, my work with patients has had the most influence on how I understand what it means to help people. I’ve worked with hundreds of patients at this point, many of whom come to me with “similar” issues. And yet, no two courses of therapy look alike. People are unique, and I am continually growing to create new ways of doing therapy with my patients.