Clinical Psychology Why I Chose Clinical Psychology

Clinical Psychology

Why I Chose Clinical Psychology as a Profession

Clinical psychology was not an immediately clear academic or career path for me, not that it was unappealing in any regard but simply that it took some time to come to my attention as an area of focus that was particularly interesting. Studying psychology as an undergraduate definitely piqued my curiosity and engaged a passion for application and interpersonal engagement with what I had learned and had started to experience, yet it still took several years following my undergraduate studies for me to develop a true understanding of what clinical psychology involved as both an academic and a practical/professional discipline. Several more years of semi-professional inquiry found me increasingly drawn to clinical psychology largely because I enjoyed the challenges presented in terms of interpersonal skills and especially in terms of the mental puzzles one was routinely confronted with in anything but a routine manner. Seen in this light, I suppose I can trace my aptitude for clinical psychology back much further than my interesting the field.

Since my childhood, I have been a tenacious puzzle-solver. Logic problems, word problems, complex games that require both strategy and finesse to reach a positive outcome -- these were the hobbies and pastimes with which I occupied myself. I enjoy being able to tackle a problem, and while I greatly enjoy the ability clinical psychology afford to help people it is the specific manner in which this helping occurs in a clinical psychology setting that truly draws me to its study and profession: clinical psychology is full of complex problems that require real and practical solutions, and reaching these solutions typically requires a dedicated mind and a willfully engaged spirit or drive -- not in any sort of esoteric or religious sense, but simply in the sense that there must be some passion and enjoyment on the part of the practitioner in engaging with the problems presented.

That I possess the capacity for this enjoyment might be a somewhat odd assessment of my character, especially given the pain and often misery that clinical psychologist must help their patients confront on a daily basis, and I am not suggesting that I approach the concepts and practice of clinical psychology with utter mental detachment and logical bemusement. Yet to deny that there is enjoyment in the mental aspects of solving each patient's puzzle and helping to alleviate their pain and misery would be to deny what to me is one of the most fulfilling aspects of a clinical psychology profession. Not only does this enjoyment of the mental aspects of the profession stir me more specifically than does the ability to help people -- again, helping people can be accomplished in many ways, some of them more direct and far easier than practicing clinical psychology -- but I believe it actually helps me to become more effective at my chosen area of study/profession and thus more effective at helping people. I am dogged in my attempts to track down pieces of information that I feel can be useful, following lines of inquiry until their real conclusions, and finding new angles from which to view old or ongoing problems as routine manners of beginning to address a problem. This is the type of work that captivates me in the truest sense of the word -- it completely absorbs my attention and my effort in an enjoyable manner, such that there are few things I would rather be doing at any given time and nothing I would rather be doing during practice itself. Few people can say this about their professions, and I am glad to be one of them (soon).

All of this puzzle-solving enjoyment does have a downside; without careful planning and attention I can become bogged down by details and "fail to see the forest for the trees," and this can also impact the way I work in groups. In my much younger days, I had a habit of trying -- not entirely consciously, but trying nonetheless -- to take control of groups and could not easily tolerate methods of inquiry or problem solution that differed from my own. This is a problem that diminished both through age and through conscious effort on my part once I recognized this tendency, and I am now able to appreciate a diversity of perspectives and personalities in group work and project environments as individual pieces of a larger solution to every problem the group encounters. Rather than simply perceiving problems from new angles that I come up with, I welcome the new angles that I could never have dreamed of.

This does not mean that diverse groups are without their challenges, and one of the most significant challenges I have encountered is communication. It has been said (by whom I'm not entirely sure) that all problems are communication problems, and while this might be overstating things a bit I think this maxim is very often applicable. Communication problems can range widely, from varying levels of comfort or approachability limiting the actual communication attempts to take place to misunderstandings or varying usages of vocabulary and syntax to derive different and divergent understandings from the same communication event. That is, two people can hear very different things when the same thing is said, and this can crate severe problems when it comes to working together as a team.