Training to be a clinical psychologist is hard. Emotional, raw, vulnerable, challenging, exposing, uncertain, exhausting, demanding, anxiety provoking.... Don't get me wrong, there are also moments of enthusiasm, confidence, achievement, passion, gratitude, contentedness, privilege.... But I don't think I fully appreciated what a roller coaster the journey would be until I actually embarked on the journey that is 3 long years of clinical, academic and research commitments that make up the DClinPsy. I write this fully aware that people warned me. I read it on clinical psychology forums. I heard the remarks by supervisors and current trainees I knew through work. I imagined myself juggling the demands and remember feeling overwhelmed just thinking about it. So I did what any cognitive therapist would have told me to - I reframed it. "I'll be ok, it'll be different for me, I'll cope. Challenging is good, I like a challenge". I looked for evidence that I'd be able to cope - I thought back over other difficult challenges in my life and the skills I'd developed to deal with them. So I stopped entertaining these ideas and soldiered on, knowing that to successfully gain a training place I would need 100% commitment and nothing less. Perhaps I was naive not to heed the warning signs. But here I am, mid way through this journey and I say it again...training to be a clinical psychologist is hard.

So would I have applied knowing what I know now? That's a difficult one. Of course hindsight is a wonderful thing and how can any of us accurately predict how we may feel once fully immersed in the results of any decision we may have had to make in life. It's all about stepping out and trusting. Anyway, it's not like I have any idea what else I'd be doing...although how much of that is the result of having invested the last 7ish years of my life to this career path and I therefore can't face entertaining the possibility of not following it through....