Finding A Therapist as a Therapist Can Be Difficult 

I know from personal experience how difficult it can be to find a therapist to work with when you are one yourself. The role reversal can be uncomfortable, as you enter the space as a client when you spend most of your days in the therapist's chair.

You were drawn to becoming a mental health professional for a reason. Therapists tend to be creative, empathetic, and compassionate individuals who work from their core and heart to provide a caring and supportive environment for their clients.

We entered this field most of the time due to our personal individual experiences with Mental Health. When you find yourself working with clients that are so close to your lived experience it can be difficult to find the space for yourself to process what is coming up for you. Holding the space for many clients is deep emotional work and due to the compassionate nature of this work, we tend to take on more than we can chew in the name of helping others. When it comes to our own needs, we often intellectualize or push them to the side.

This can lead to the feeling of always being “on” as a therapist, bleeding into poor boundaries with friends, partners, and the workplace,and high stress levels.

We are in a service lead profession, and the idea of sacrifice for the betterment of providing care is a mindset that is drilled into us since graduate school. We are taught to be therapists for others, but we aren’t always taught how to maintain a healthy balance between work and self when the work we do calls us to bring aspects of ourselves into the therapeutic relationship. As a therapist, you embody compassion and empathy for long periods of time, and when the tools of your trade are in compassion and empathy this can lead to some troubled waters. Therapists are prone to compassion fatigue, burnout, depression, and even depersonalization or dissociation.

Therapists are People Too

When asked what your goals for your clients are, most therapists will say “to develop a more authentic self towards a more authentic life”. How does that factor into our own care as therapists?

Developing your full authentic self while being a care provider can be a hard dynamic to juggle.

There may be feelings of guilt, shame, or frustration for taking space for yourself. The same space that you caringly provide for your clients. As a Therapist, you need support just as much as everyone else does, if not more, as you are actively exploring emotions, and experiences every day. We may enter the mindset that therapists can’t take breaks because trudging forward is what a therapist is supposed to do, right? We are supposed to have it all together, provide space, and keep on providing space for our clients regardless of what is going on in our lives. However, this model isn’t sustainable. Therapists are people too, and that means we also get overwhelmed, stressed, and uncertain. You have your own lived experience to support and unpack.

If you are a student undergoing training, a recent graduate, or a seasoned therapist, I am sure you have learned to explore your feelings in session as an act of countertransference and enactment in the therapy room. Over time, however, this can lead to a default setting of only exploring our feelings when they are “useful” to the client. You may be so used to embodying your therapist self, that you begin to feel ungrounded in the other aspects of who you are. Experiencing this feeling while continuing to provide care can be distressing and difficult.

As a therapist, you help others navigate their journey, find growth and go through the process of healing.

You are a person too. You are just as human as the clients that you deeply care for. You deserve the space to explore all aspects of yourself.

You are a good care provider, and now is the time to turn some of that compassion towards yourself.

Developing your inner self-knowledge and curiosity allows you to show up better not only for your clients, but in your life. If we are to use our own selves, perceptions, experiences and reactions as sensitive instruments in the therapy room, we hope to take good care of our equipment.

I invite you to claim a supportive space for yourself where your “therapist self” is one aspect of a full whole. We will explore fully embodying and acknolwedgement of all aspects of yourself, grow and develop healthy boundaries with friends, family, partners and work, find ways to show up for yourself authentically and emotionally, and honor all aspects of you, beyond the therapists chair.