Therapist Mental Health: 10 (Sometimes Surprising) Ways to Support Ourselves

 

Working on the frontline of an escalating mental health crisis takes its toll. As therapists, we are carrying heavier and heavier case loads. We are being confronted with the deepening complexity of clinical presentations. We are struggling with feelings of exhaustion, hopelessness and overwhelm as we bear witness to the scale of human distress in today’s world.

If we are still to meet each client with our full attention and a ready supply of hope, we need to take care of our own mental health – which could start with some of these enriching, resourcing, reassuring and sometimes surprising posts from our archive.
 

1 Take a shame check

Shame is a brutal taskmaster, and we therapists are far from invulnerable. Who lately hasn’t experienced the feeling that we ‘aren’t doing enough’ for our clients? As Susan Warren Warshow writes in Therapist Shame: How to Recognise and Reduce It, noticing and attending to our own shame can remove one of the biggest obstacles in therapy for our clients.

In this post, she shares some typical thought patterns and bodily sensations to look out for, and offers some compassionate reflections for all the hardworking but only-human therapists out there.
 

2 Make time for mindfulness

When she collapsed during a workshop, Margaret Landale realised she had neglected to listen to her own body’s urgent somatic signals. It’s easily done… even when, like Margaret herself, you specialise in stress-related and psychosomatic disorders.

In her blogs about the benefits of mindfulness, Margaret encourages busy therapists to pause and pay attention. You might start with Just Too Busy for Mindfulness?, in which she shares her own struggle to find the time – and tracks the benefits that emerge when she does.

3 Notice our own stress levels

It can feel as though the whole world is out of balance at the moment, let alone our nervous systems. As a psychotherapist therapist specialising in trauma and neuroscience, PESI UK director Tracy Jarvis blogs about the impact of stress – and how to reduce it.

In Stress and the Neurology of Noticing, Tracy Jarvis invites us to take a minute to notice what is happening in our bodies – and offers five strategies for reducing stress and regulating our nervous systems. Or find out how her acronym ACCESS can help you (and your clients) to structure stress-informed self-care in Coping with Stress in our Changing World.

4 Feel enlivened by our clients

Yes, our work as therapists takes its toll. But it can also restore us, replenishing our zest for life and our hope in the power of healing.

For a welcome reminder of the transformative two-way process of therapy, we recommend reading Growing Together in Child Therapy: Enlivening Interactions and Mutual Change – a moving (and duly enlivening) post from leading child psychotherapist Tamsin Cottis.
 

5 Have a laugh

‘When I hear people say they have not laughed so much in years, this is the kind of therapy I want to be associated with,’ writes Robin Shohet in The Therapeutic Role of Improv.

Learning something new can often be uplifting. In this post, the seasoned therapy trainer and specialist in supervision shares his love of improv as a therapeutic tool – including helping us to notice how we ‘block’ or ‘accept’ various parts of ourselves. After all, why should theatre practitioners have all the fun?

 

6 Get to know ourselves through exercise

From building mental stamina to releasing trauma, Professor Sarah Niblock writes about the benefits of getting physically fit in Five Things I Have Learnt About the Mind-Body Connection.

Embracing exercise in her late forties, at a time when she was feeling unhealthy and depressed, the CEO of UKCP found her path to personal growth and deep self-knowledge (via burpees and barbells). ‘It’s not who you are that holds you back,’ she advises, ‘it’s who you think you’re not’.
 

7 Be ‘in the moving moment’

No time for exercise? We don’t have to step outside of our existing routine (or even the clinical setting) to start developing a more positive connection with our own bodies.

In Embodied Perspectives in Psychotherapy, Professor Helen Payne shares an easy two-minute practice to help us align more deeply with our bodies. Seeing things from this new ‘body felt’ position, she explains, can allow us access to insights, creativity and solutions that were previously out of reach.

 

8 Embrace our (surprisingly efficacious) feelings of failure

Hopelessness, powerlessness, futility. As therapists, we may be all too familiar with these feelings, which can be so corrosive to our mental health. But what if they were actually a key to clinical success?

In The Importance of Treatment Failure, psychologist, psychotherapist and author Brad Sachs overturns a natural attitude to one of the commonest experiences therapists contend with, suggesting that this uncomfortable confrontation with clinical futility can paradoxically serve the needs of our clients. ‘It is a tremendous accomplishment on the part of therapist and patient,’ he writes, ‘when they reach the threshold at which they both feel like failures…’

 

9 Ease up on ourselves with CFT

‘What small thing could I do today that would involve me treating myself like I would someone I care for?’ Compassion Focused Therapy is full of these deceptively simple exercises that can transform our clients’ (and our own) relationship to self.

As CFT specialist Chris Irons explains in Turning Up For Yourself, this takes real strength and courage. To improve our mental health as practitioners, we might start with Warming Up and Warming Down – something we can do before and after sessions ‘to connect with ourselves, our feelings and distress, and set an intention for what is helpful for the remainder of the day’.
 

10 Remember that any job worth doing has a grotty side

Therapy’s ‘eureka moments’ inevitably get more press. But at times it can actually help our morale to remember that this work is probably – for all of us – more often plodding and frustrating and humdrum.

In Engaging with the Unglamorous Side of Therapy, Sarah Van Gogh of the Re-Vision Centre reminds us that, despite what our modern, consumer-led, advert-seduced society would have us believe, meaningful attainment doesn’t come without soul-wrenching effort.