As a therapist, your work requires you to give so much

As a therapist, you may or may not think of yourself as burnt out. I want to set a new standard, which by the standard more people might have to identify themselves as burnt out, but I'm not doing this to demoralize anybody.

I'm doing this because I think it's absolutely possible for us to reach and exceed this new standard. So I want to suggest that if you're not being actively energized by your work, if you're not ending the day with more emotional enthusiasm than you started, then you are burnt out or you're on the road to burnout. Now, that trajectory might be really fast, it might be really slow, but fundamentally, if you're ending the day depleted, then you are on the path to burnout because there's never going to be enough time to fully recover, right?

Your work should be feeding you, that should be the expectation. The standard should be that every client comes in excited about their mental health goals, because they understand what a proactive state of mental health is, they've set goals and they're enlisting your support to achieve them.

Every session ends in a celebration, acknowledgement, a recognition of what's shifting, what's changing. Clients go out, leave, excited to talk about their progress with their friends, with their colleagues, right?

There's no sense of stigma at all, just like if you go to a gym and you have a great trainer, then you tell that you're telling your friends, right?

And finally, you come away from every session, feeling in live-end by the immediate and tangible difference that you're making in people's lives.

That should be the standard. One way to take your own temperature on this is to notice, at the end of the day, do I still have time and energy for play?

And if the answer is no, you may be at or approaching burnout because a space for play means we're able to access a sense of curiosity, a sense of enthusiasm, even if we're physically tired or mentally tired, we still have that emotional energy that allows us to get invested in something other than our immediate survival needs. So if you're finding that you're not able to access that, that may be an indication that you are slowly coming down into a state of kind of a chronic survival mode, which is functionally burnout.

So if you're curious how we help mental health counselors and therapists assess and address all of these contributors to burnout and really create a practice where you're ending the day feeling more in-live than you started you're welcome to reach out and message us directly and we'll share with you a little bit more about what we do and how we do it.

In resilience,

Caitlin