Therapist Training
An honest conversation about unpaid hours, minimal supervision, and the fear of burning out before your career even starts.
Kit Spina is a 27-year-old mental health counselor who recently completed her internship in a private practice in South Florida and is now studying for her licensing exam. She specializes in CBT, play therapy, and trauma-informed care — and she was willing to talk openly about what it's actually like to move from classroom theory to real clinical work, a transition that's rarely discussed candidly in the field.
“I thought I was going to go into the internship and meet this mentor that was going to change my life and teach me all the ways of therapy — and it just wasn’t the case.”
Kit's program described the internship as a ramp-up: 10 hours a week the first semester, 20 the second, 20 the third. In practice, she was closer to 35 hours a week every semester — a full-time, unpaid job layered on top of coursework and tuition, with no obligation for her site to follow the school's guidelines.
"So it is a full-time job, and your sites are not obligated to the school to follow those set hours," she explained. One friend on a different site worked the standard 10 hours and got holidays off. Kit's site didn't follow that protocol — and didn't have to.
The supervision she did receive was thin. "There was no individual supervision. She only provided group, which was crazy," Kit said. By the time the group made it around to her cases, she rarely brought up a client at all. When the internship ended, she didn't hear from her supervisor again — not even a thank-you email.
Kit remembers her first client clearly: a 12-year-old girl with anger issues, and parents who weren't thrilled to learn their daughter's therapist was a 25-year-old intern with no children of her own. "I just think you have to kind of fake it till you make it," she said of that first semester. "You're not going to know what you're doing. And I think that's okay."
What helped her steady herself wasn't certainty — it was giving up the idea that certainty was the goal. "Even therapists that have been in the industry for 50 years, they still don't have all the answers," she said. "Our goal is not to tell you what you should do. It's to dig deeper and help you find the answer for your issue."
“I'm scared of burning out. I'm scared of getting to that point, which a lot of therapists do, that it's just not fun anymore — because this field is a lot on your emotions.”
Kit named the sources of burnout plainly: clients who cancel fifteen minutes before a session after she's already mentally prepared, the emotional toll of holding other people's hardest moments all day, and the financial squeeze that comes with a cancellation policy that never feels fair to either side. "You can never really win when they cancel," she said. "I'm either slapping them with a charge and they're getting pissed, or I'm rescheduling and we're going another two weeks without seeing each other."
Her plan for staying in the field long-term is deliberately unglamorous: protect vacations, keep working out, and refuse to let self-care activities be the first thing to go.
Kit's experience reveals a pattern that shows up again and again in this field: new therapists thrown into clinical work with minimal preparation, inconsistent supervision, and zero business training — all while working for free. That's not just a hardship for new clinicians. It's a systemic issue that shapes the quality of mental healthcare everyone eventually receives.
We're designing supervision and training around the realities in this article — structured feedback, outcome tracking, and a team invested in your growth as a clinician.
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