Last spring, I told my therapist I wanted to become a therapist. He suggested I become a coach instead, like him. Now, to be clear, my therapist, whose name is Peter Carnochan, is indeed a therapist. He has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, trained as a psychoanalyst in the tradition of Freud and commands high fees from clients in San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge at his own magnificent home under the redwoods.
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Carnochan has been my therapist for over a decade, a privilege for which I am grateful on two accounts. First, the surging national demand for therapy has so outstripped supply that it can be hard to find a good therapist anywhere, but especially in San Francisco. Second, working with Carnochan has been so healing that I have come to see psychotherapy as a beautiful profession and Carnochan as its beau idéal — deeply learned, emotionally present and capable of moving in a single conversation from D. W. Winnicott’s theory of the false self to Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay,” from infinity in the Lotus Sutra to the ecstasies of backcountry skiing.
I knew Carnochan did some other form of talking to people one on one — coaching, that is — because I once told him that I worried about money and career. Carnochan responded by mentioning that he sometimes helped company executives on professional matters and could work with me in the same spirit.
I recall this feeling odd, as if I’d confessed to my priest that I wished to marry and he counterconfessed to moonlighting as a matchmaker and might know someone. Still, a not-insignificant part of me very much wanted a life like that of a tech executive. So I said, in effect, “Yes, please, do not ever hold back on career advice.”
That’s the context in which Carnochan informed me that becoming a therapist in today’s regulatory environment would be too costly in money and time, especially given my age (I am 56): years of expensive graduate school typically followed by many more years of interning under licensed therapists for a pittance or nothing at all.