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Not sure whether or not to pursue marriage and family counseling
21/f
Hello,
I have been studying about marriage and family therapy for the previous four years. It has always been an interest of mine. I was planning on pursuing marriage and family therapy for graduate school and now since the time has come, I'm having doubts.
I was thinking about just going into regular counseling and just my LPC. But the classes for marriage and family therapy interests me more. The only thing stopping me is the risk of becoming a marriage and family counselor. Many people have asked and told me, "you're not even married. Who would want to go to you for advice? Who would want to get advice or see someone for help who has never been married before?"
That makes me have doubts. Should I continue to pursue my interests and take the risk of not getting any clients? Or should I just take the safe route and choose regular counseling which the classes don't interest me as much?
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the pitfall with their thinking about married people vs a non married person regarding better ablity to understand or teach marriage and family counseling is:
If you know any married people, the majority have someone they don't have a favorable marriage with. They have learned perhaps how to recognize trouble spots and problems and think their bad experiences qualify a person as more skilled to counsel. That's like saying a person needs to have experienced a major operation themselves before being able to translate what they learn in textbooks into doing actual surgery themselves. Without knowing what a surgery is like, they will not be able to be a good surgeon.
I remember being a naive 19 yr old, working full time at a large banking center and eating lunch with a couple of older married ladies and I was single. A topic regarding a relationship issue came up. I put in my two cents worth, as a female who'd yet never dated a guy, regarding a relationship issue, and it was the thing they needed to hear because one started with, thats the problem my husband and I have, I need to follow your advice. I had merely shared an opinion, now horrified to think about what I so calmly shared as a single not knowing the woman was in that actual situation. If I had known, I probably would have been too afraid to share what i did. So, yes, older married people can learn from a younger person. The issue is more with whether they can feel secure in your knowledge and get past how young you look. I know someone younger than my ex who in his twenties went bald already. Selling life insurance, he won the confidence of and sold to more people than my husband.The ex heard once that he was too young for them. When anything results in payment for a service, people want experience, so it may be hard to convince based more on how you look. So go for what you find most on your heart to so. Make a big effort to enlist professional wardrobe consultants, so you can look more mature and more business like without looking like you're a kid dressing up in Mom's business suits.
Hon, if you have a passion already for the subject of marriage and family therapy, it helps you to excell in the job because you are not just doing a job to collect a paycheck but take pride in helping peoople in any way you can, just as we all do here on Advicenators. Be very observant of other peoples relationships. You can learn alot from watching even strangers interact with their parterns because they aren't aware they have an audience and more likely to be themselves. Use what you see to compare with your studies as to what they did wrong and then remember the steps to resolve it. You can identify more with your book studies, and without personal experience but learning from watching others. I know people who vowed to raise their children the total opposite from how their parents did because the kids more or less had to raise their parents and seemed to have more common sense. So these people learned something important by observing others. They may not have had the perfect plan but it was certainly better avoiding at least all the parents did wrong. Go after what you want because relationships is one of the biggest problem areas. We as humans relate in some way to all the people around us or in our lives, the clerk at the store, the car repair mechanic, your family, your classmates or coworkers, and your significant other. If we could learn basic relating skills that pertain to all relation-ships, then we are ready to learn the finer points that pertain just to the particular type of relationship. If people knew perfectly how to relate to and converse with other people, there almost wouldn't be a need for Advicenators and all those professional counselors out there. After all, lake of being able to relate well to others, has led to misunderstandings and offenses taken that have led up to fights, sometimes started as two people, now spread to include many others warring as they take sides.
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Clearly you are passionate about counseling, and specifically the area of working with marriage and family therapy.
As you probably know from your own studies, it's natural for us to have doubts at times. Often these seem to pop up when we are getting really close to a particular goal.
Stop for a moment and think about it. You've come this far, you have a true passion and desire for this style of therapy, why shouldn't you pursue it?
There are many people out there working in this profession and others like it that are not married or have never been. If you are good at what you do, this won't matter at all.
It's kind of like someone saying you can't coach a sport because you never played it. Yet there are several successful coaches out there who where not athletes themselves but studied their craft and love what they do.
Go for it.
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Think about this for a moment. Catholic Priest's do Marriage and Family counseling as well as premarital counseling. They do this quite well and they have never been married. Neither do you have to know how to drive a car to be a great mechanic or know how to fly a plane in order to fix one in fact most aircraft mechanics cannot fly a plane.
My point is just because you have not experienced something does not mean you cannot be good at what you do. It is your training and your approach that people will come to your for. As the counselor you are the disinterested third party who is or hopefully able to see the forest for the trees and help these people chart a better ending to their problems. You are the voice of reason. You do not have to have experienced their life or their pain in order to know how to help them.
My advice is to follow the road that interests you the most. At some point you will know if this is the road you wish to follow as a life profession. IF it is not you can make changes as I'm sure some of the course for both regular and family counseling will be the same.
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