Your own treatment
Many, many therapists have never been in therapy. Most aren’t currently in therapy. As far as I know, no state or federal licensing body (I'm writing in, and mostly about, the United States; I'm not so familiar with the situation elsewhere) requires therapists to engage in their own treatments, as patients.
I think this is unfortunate. Worse than unfortunate. Disastrous.
I urge you, if you want to be a therapist, to spend considerable time in your own treatment. I’ve been in four-day-a-week psychoanalysis for over two decades of my adult life (I’m 54 at the time I’m writing this). That’s surely extreme, and, while I think it would be great if every clinician had the opportunity to be analyzed, I’m more realistic than that. So if you can, yes, I do recommend that you get yourself a 3-, 4-, or 5-day-a-week analysis with a classical analyst. That’s my bias. It’s not quite my theology, but it’s close: I’m a big believer in the power and value of psychoanalysis, and I strongly encourage it for almost everyone.
As I said, though, I’m aware that not every clinician will get analyzed. If I were in charge, though, of the licensing and regulatory bodies, I would require that every clinician be in their own treatment.
The work we do is hard. It can be lonely, scary, confusing. I simply don’t know of any way of doing it responsibly without having my own refuge in which I can talk about the ways that my patients, and my feelings about my patients, are affecting me - and, about the ways that the rest of my life might affect my work with my patients.
If you take only one message from this, this would be the one I would have you take: get yourself in treatment. You’ll be a much better clinician for it, and it’ll be the best investment you ever make.
If you're in your own treatment, then you don't need help finding a therapist. But if you are at the front end of building your own practice and you're not currently in your own treatment, it's vitally important that you identify a therapist on whom you can rely and to whom you can turn as you go through the challenges and excitements of becoming a clinician and becoming a business person.
The first step is to identify what it is that is important to you in a therapist. Is the thing that is most important to you geography, or gender identity, or ethnic or racial identity, or sexuality, or theoretical framework, or experience? Knowing what matters will help you identify a therapist with whom you are comfortable. And comfort, after all, is the single greatest contributor to a functioning therapeutic alliance.
As I have said, I am a strong proponent of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. I believe in internal conflict and in the unconscious. And I can't imagine doing the work of being a clinician without my own psychoanalysis, putting me in contact with my internal conflicts and my unconscious fears and desires. But psychoanalysis is only one form of psychotherapy and it's not the right answer for everyone.
What matters is not the kind of therapy you're in, but the fact that you are in therapy. As I've said, I simply don't believe you can offer your patients the promise of good care if you're not receiving good care yourself. Our own treatments are where we learn to become therapists and they're where we stay alive as therapists as we contend with the slings and arrows that our patients and the world throw at us.
So, as far as I'm concerned, the first and most important step you can take as you embark on the exciting journey of launching your private practice is to find yourself a therapist. I am a fan of consulting with multiple therapists, with spending 45 minutes, 50 minutes, or an hour with someone once, twice, or three times before you decide that they are going to be the person to whom you turn for the next stretch of years with your most private, most terrifying thoughts.
And I think it's worth sitting with two or three or four such people to ascertain with whom you are most comfortable. When I chose my most recent analyst, I had consultations with four different clinicians and with two of those, I chose to have a second meeting. It was my leaving my hat in my analyst's office after that second consultation that convinced me of what I think I knew, but somehow lacked confidence in, which is that I needed to return to her office.
There's something very gratifying about identifying a clinician about whom you are excited to work with and who you feel intuitively, implicitly has something that will be valuable for you. I encourage you to look until you find such a clinician. Don't settle. It's too important a role, too important a service for you to allow yourself to tolerate anything other than an optimal arrangement.