How do young therapists respond to the "You're too young to help me?"?

Cite your credentials. You're qualified to be a therapist because of your education, not your age.

You may have hit the answer right on the head and missed it. They see you as an equal and if you are an equal you can't have any more knowledge about it than they do. It is when we are young that we think we are the smartest, right? There is probably that part about telling something very personal to someone the age of who has troubled them, that it's almost a transferred mindset, but I know you know what I'm trying to say. The older people see you as an up and comer and don't see the age part, they are almost happy to talk to someone young, maybe for the same reason, that a young person will have a complete unbiased opinion and some true help.

If age was necessarily proportional to acquired knowledge, then these older clients of yours would necessarily not need therapy, as their age would provide them with the knowledge to deal with their problems...

Hence, in face of having one of them imply that you're too young to be a therapist, I would ask them "aren't you too old to need help from a therapist?" or something along those lines depending on whether you take the nice or the asshole approach of being a therapist...

I'm not a therapist myself - although I often serve the function of helping people deal with their problems - but being that I'm only 22, I too am often faced with the same problem... My personal experience is that the only way to break older people's misconception that age implies wisdom is to expose their lack of wisdom; no matter how much wisdom you show they'll always undermine it or attribute it to something else... Of course, there are exceptions, but it is rather rare to find an older person that truly believes that a young person is capable of wisdom and intelligence (although I must say that I don't completely blame them, as the last generations seem to be getting dumber almost exponentially).

I guess I'll explain that it's not the age that makes someone competent and very helpful. It's their experiences. There are people who are old but are acting like 5 years old and their young ones who act like as if there 40 years old or so.

I believe that for you to be able to be competent on helping other people, you need to liberate yourself with lots of experiences to learn, and also commit mistakes to learn.

Some old people just can't accept that someone so young is better than the old ones.

It's their problem not yours.

Im sure that if they desperately needed your help, or you were the only therapist there they would won't you, and that is unacceptable, if you weren't good enough you wouldn't be there, and you should explain that too them!

one's own spirituality creates a wisdom, life experiences just confirm that wisdom