Becoming a Therapist After 50: A New Look at Career Change

In early 2014, I made what turned out to be a fateful trip to the office of a friend, then the dean of the University of Chicago’s social work school. I had been mulling the idea of becoming a therapist and wanted to know if it made sense to change careers at this stage in my life. I was a little over 50 at the time, and I’d had a professional life that appeared to contradict writer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous lament that in America, there are no second acts. 

My past lives, however, never seemed to amount to a natural stepping stone toward clinical work. Rarely did anyone mention the potential value of my earlier work in child and family policy research, documentary film-making, and least of all French pastry, to my potential new career as a social worker. That day in the dean’s office, I was seemingly staring at a total career restart in my mid-50s—which by any standard would be a daunting prospect. Or was I?

The Power of Second Acts

Although history has noted examples of so-called second acts—for example, Winston Churchill’s rise to political power after the disastrous World War I battle at Gallipoli, or farmer-turned-folk-artist Grandma Moses—they’re typically described as re-inventions or start-overs. They’re not usually described as a cumulative process of integrating and re-integrating old and new. 
On the other hand, let’s take the so-called “second act” of best-selling writer and Princeton professor Nell Irvin Painter, who decided after an illustrious career in academia to enroll in one of the most rigorous arts schools in the country to pursue a career as an artist. 

Reviewers of Painter’s memoir, Old in Art School, referred to this career move as “forging a new identity in the autumn of [her] life,” and “starting from scratch” in a “different vocation.” Sometimes skills and perspectives that were regarded as assets in one area of life may, one reviewer noted about Painter, be considered liabilities in another. 

But was it actually really starting over for Painter? Or for that matter, was it starting over for the sea of future psychotherapists who greeted me on my first day of social work school? Whatever corner of the professional world all my new classmates came from, we were largely united in seeing ourselves as complete novices. We were rank beginners at the profession of alleviating human suffering.

Changing the Conception of Career Change

The sheer number of apparent career changers I met while in social work school made me think back over a decade to my first day of pastry school. The head instructor there also welcomed a sea of career changers, all of whom were also apparently open to resetting their professional lives. These at once seemed like similar and yet starkly different welcome ceremonies, and together they made me wonder about the whole concept of career change. Were my classmates in both arenas really changing their careers, or was our concept of a career itself actually what changed?

Could it be, instead, that there was actually something fundamentally flawed about our entire idea of career change, especially for psychotherapists? What if thinking about these changes in our professional lives in a different way was actually an essential way of thinking? We’re often instruments of change for our clients, and if we see our own paths as fragmented and discontinuous, it can make it more difficult for us to help our clients summon the confidence to meet change in their own lives. We can help clients—and ourselves—view change as something that builds and fortifies us, rather than weakens or discards us. 
Developing and maintaining a basic sense of psychological continuity is central to our mental health. Disruptions in these feelings of continuity can often be dangerous, as with diagnoses like PTSD. For people who seek our help because they feel stuck in their careers or other facets of their lives, continuity and change exist in uneasy tension with each other. Helping our clients navigate change while still recognizing their core selves is central to our work as therapists.

Embracing the Tension of Change

In my practice, I’ve had clients often tell me that they sought me out precisely because I seem to enjoy a kind of comfort with change that was elusive to them. People who read my bio saw that I started my career in historical research before shifting to non-profit leadership—before leaving that as well for pastry. That somehow led me to filmmaking, and ultimately to my current clinical work. 

My path couldn’t be further from the post–war—and perhaps gendered—paradigm of steadily increasing responsibility and moving up within a single organization. In the past, it often made me feel uncomfortable, if not fraudulent, when someone celebrated all these shifts in my professional life. I papered over my anxiety with the quip that I hadn’t really changed at all: I had only moved from a career focused on alleviating suffering to one focused on bringing pleasure. 

It wasn’t until I began contemplating social work that I realized there was some real truth in that glib response. I remember thinking when I left the research world for a non-profit focused on children’s social and emotional learning that I hadn’t so much abandoned my interest in the well-being of disadvantaged children so much as I had embraced the megaphone over the pen as a leverage for change. 

When I began to consider becoming a therapist after 50, I saw more clearly that I didn’t leave that position because I had moved on from the mission. Rather, I felt more equipped to help children and families on an individual level, rather than the systemic one. In social work, guided by a “person in environment” paradigm, I fortunately didn’t need to make that choice. 

Continuity, Not Change

As I shifted my way of thinking from change to continuity, I started thinking about my stand at Chicago’s Green City Market, where years ago I sold the French confections I learned at pastry school. I used to think of my time in pastry school as a kind of sabbatical—one that I had given myself after a decade in the public policy arena. 

Thinking about my subsequent transition to counseling reminded me of perhaps the most famous food stand from my childhood and its proprietor, Lucy—the self-styled dispenser of psychiatric advice in the Charlie Brown comic strip. I thought about the customers who often spent a good part of the morning hanging around my stand talking about the past week’s events. I remember feeling a bit like Lucy, a counselor without a portfolio.  

Thinking in terms of continuities rather than change gradually helped me connect other dots in my own professional path toward clinical work. In pastry school, our instructor gave us a frank lecture about managing the interpersonal conflict that had bubbled up in our class. He underscored how important it is to be open to the diverse range of kitchen staff that any modern kitchen would have, and how valuable that openness would be—maybe even above technical ability. This is a lesson that I relished then, and continue to hold dear in my clinical work as well. 

Fitting the Pieces Together

With these early years now more distant in the rear view mirror, I think F. Scott Fitzgerald wasn’t altogether wrong about second acts. Not because American society doesn’t tolerate failure, but because there’s a more useful way to think about the circumstances that drive the desire for a second act, or a third or fourth. 

Nearly a decade into my own second act, it seems clear to me that the concept of a second act may itself be flawed. A second act, like becoming a therapist after 50, may not be so formidable if we look at it less as a distinct act, and more like a single point on a complex and continuous helix of development. 

If we can think of these moments in our lives this way, we’re never really starting over, but rather consistently learning—both about ourselves and about the world. Everything we do contributes to this development, and this is especially true for therapists who enter the profession later in life. 

Mary Catherine Bateson, the anthropologist, writer, and celebrated chronicler of women’s lives, once remarked that “often continuity is visible only in retrospect.” In her book Composing a Life, Bateson described her own struggle to discern the continuities in her life as “a sort of desperate improvisation“ in which she was “constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements.” Perhaps in thinking about life changes both for ourselves and our clients, it would be more useful to think, as Bateson does, of life as a quilt where all the pieces are needed—and ultimately hang together. 

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