To become a self-esteem therapist, you must first follow the steps to become a licensed therapist and then work to develop self-esteem improvement as one of your specialty areas. If you want to become a therapist, you generally will be required to complete an internship in therapy, obtain an appropriate college degree, complete the requirements for licensure or credentialing, and gain experience with different types of clients who have various issues and problems. The actual steps you will need to complete to become a self-esteem therapist vary by country, state or province, because laws, procedures and rules governing becoming a licensed therapist vary by location. You also will need to participate in continuing education to keep your professional knowledge and practice current and to retain your licensure and certification.
As a therapist, you will work with many different types of people, possible of all age ranges, and with various disorders and stressors. Over time, you will naturally develop certain areas in which you feel more comfortable helping people, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, marital issues or self-esteem. If self-esteem becomes one of your specialty areas, then you will work with patients to help improve their self-esteem along with a broader range of problems that they may be experiencing. Some problems, such as depression, eating disorders and anger management issues, are often positively correlated with low self-esteem. You will listen to clients’ concerns about their self-esteem, pick up on verbal and nonverbal cues about the state of their self-esteem and then help them develop goals, activities and strategies to improve how they feel about themselves as you work to become a self-esteem therapist.
Once you have become a self-esteem therapist, you can then advertise this as one of your areas of specialty. Advertising and the recommendations of clients with whom you have worked successfully to improve their self-esteem will be important to letting others know of your skills in self-esteem therapy. It will be helpful for you to continue to research and take workshops and courses dealing with client self-esteem. You can take that information and put it into practice, along with the lessons learned from the work you’ve done with previous clients suffering from self-esteem issues. As effective self-esteem therapists know, every client must be treated as an individual, and a plan of action based on his or needs must be developed for the best results, because every client is unique.