COUNSELING FOR HELPING PROFSSIONALS

About Counseling For Helping Professionals

Helping professionals face many unique challenges when it comes to tending to our own mental health. For all of our talk on “leaning into vulnerability,” many of us struggle when we are the ones in the help-seeking position! We may feel pressure, both external and internal, to “have it all together.” We might also be reluctant to reach out to someone in our professional network for fear that we’ll be judged or ridiculed. Even when we finally do drag ourselves to therapy, it might take some time to let the professional facade down so that we can really be “seen.”

Often, I find that we get into this line of work because we have our own unfinished business. We secretly hope that, through study and supervision, we can heal ourselves. These pieces of our professional journey are invaluable, but it’s all-to-easy to confuse them with the deep healing that is really only available to us in the context of a therapeutic relationship. Ours is an interesting profession, indeed. The plumber can fix their own pipes, the mechanic their own vehicle. But we often can’t do for ourselves what we do for others. I am privileged to create a space for other helpers to mend themselves so that they can continue their life-altering work. (And yes, I go to therapy, too!)

Among my biggest passions are supporting other clinicians in avoiding burnout. I see far too many really wonderful, caring individuals leaving the field even though therapy is their passion. We contend with an expensive multi-year educational process, student loans, bureaucratic hoops to jump through, sub-standard pay from hospitals, treatment centers, and insurance companies, institutional exploitation, long hours (many unpaid), vicarious trauma, impacts on our own relationships…the list goes on! Folks who make their way into private practice, often viewed as the zenith of the profession, face their own set of problems. Unpredictable income, isolation, and the learning curve of running a business while building clinical skills is plenty daunting. And that’s to say nothing of the stuff we deal with just by being humans!

If you’re a therapist, counselor, psychologist, social worker, or other helper, you deserve a space to feel as seen and cared for as your patients or clients do with you.

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