Therapist Burnout: An Honest Letter to Fellow Healers

I wanted to write a blog about EMDR. I wanted to give you something hopeful and encouraging, to give you excellent information. I want everyone to heal, and I believe deeply in the power of EMDR. I believe everyone should use it to heal at some point in their journey.

But I’m tired. I’m emotionally exhausted and really, truly burnt out.

We talk about therapist burnout in this field all the time. All the time. I had a class in grad school teaching how to avoid it, and still, about every year and a half (well, actually, probably at least once every year), I have a complete meltdown.

What does therapist burnout feel like?

When it happens, all my systems shut down. This is what it looks like for me:

• I feel incapable of connecting with others
• I feel irritable
• I cry
• I can’t sleep
• My worry increases exponentially, about things I don’t even need to worry about
• I feel disconnected from my husband
• I feel like I’m letting everybody down

And every time this happens, it’s always the same pattern. I give too much for too long without enough breaks.

Why do therapists burn out?

Our system is broken. We don’t take care of social workers. We don’t take care of health workers in general. We ask so much of them and expect them to hold it.

I love my job. I love working with the clients I get to work with, and I love teaching the clinicians I get to teach. But this is an interesting job. It’s not clock in, clock out. This job is all about relationship, deep and meaningful relationship.

If you’re my client, I’m attuned to you for an entire hour. I think about you between sessions. I care about you, and I care about how well I’m helping you heal and supporting you. I ask myself: am I smart enough? Do I know enough? Do I need another training?

And I do that with at least 20 to 25 people every week. Some of you I only see every other week, so really, there are about 40 people I’m deeply attuned to. That’s not even including the people in my personal life. That’s just my professional life.

There are a lot of weeks doing this work when I don’t have much left over for my personal life. I have less for my husband, less for my family, less for friends, because I’m pouring everything into my work. But how can you be a good clinician and do it any differently?

How the mental health system fails the people who hold it

We all know the mental health system is broken. Insurance is not set up for people to actually heal. There’s not enough support for the healers, the people who guide and sit with those who need it most.

And at the end of the day, most clinicians I know struggle to make enough money to support their families.

Holding on to hope when you’re burnt out

As I write this, I’m getting teary-eyed because it feels really hopeless. I don’t always feel this way. I’m usually full of hope: hope for change, hope for humanity. But hope is something that can slip through your fingers when you’re exhausted.

I have been pushing and pushing to build something different. A place where clinicians can be supported and have what they need for their professional growth, all while being able to maintain their personal lives.

There are so many things stacked against me in trying to build this. There have been lots of days, especially in the last six months, when I’ve wanted to quit. I don’t want to keep going. I don’t want to keep pushing.

But there’s something deep inside of me that feels like I have to keep going. Like maybe it’s part of why I’m on this earth. Part of my dharma.

To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t really know what the point of this article is. Usually when I write something, it all comes together as I’m writing. It arcs into this beautiful, insightful encouragement, and I was hoping I’d get there as I wrote this. But I just continue to feel an increasing level of sadness.

All I know is, if it’s not me, then who? If I don’t build this, then who will? There are a lot of people out there, a lot smarter than me and probably a lot more capable. But I feel like there’s something, some gift or some bigger meaning, driving me to keep going and keep moving forward. Maybe that is the beautiful insight.

One thing I truly believe is that we’re all connected. Everything I do impacts the world. So I keep trying to do good. I keep trying to create a place where people can come and heal, a place of honesty, safety, and true care for humanity.

Why can’t you be creative in survival mode?

Being a business owner takes a massive amount of creativity. In my opinion, as humans, we can’t be creative when we’re in survival mode.

There is no creativity when we’re running from the lion. There is no creativity when we can’t pay our bills. There is no creativity when we’re pouring everything into everyone else.

Creativity comes when we have space to feel bored.

Is it a brick wall or an open door?

I always pray for the open door. With every decision I’ve ever made, I try to recognize whether I’m pushing against a brick wall when there’s an open door I could just walk through. In all my professional and personal decisions, I try to take the path I’m actually able to walk down.

Sometimes those paths are easy and feel effortless. Lately, they’ve been difficult, scary, and winding, without a clear sightline to the future.

I will say, though: every time I thought we would fold, every time I thought I wouldn’t be able to make payroll, every time I thought we weren’t going to be able to pay our mortgage, almost at the last minute, it has worked out.

Those insurance checks that were taking three months finally came through. We got exciting contracts to do mental health work with refugees in the community. We’re finally getting visibility for our website.

These things happened at the very last minute, though, and resulted in some very stressful periods and sleepless nights.

I wish someone could tell me whether this is a brick wall or an open door. It’s getting harder to tell.

A supervisor once told me that if I was going to walk down this path, running my own business and taking other clinicians under my wing, I needed to be OK with potentially losing everything. Money. My license. If I could accept this, I could move forward.

I think about this all the time: the liability, the work I’ve put in. I could lose it all. It still feels worth it, though.

Our system is broken, but it’s not broken enough for me to walk away. I still believe I can make an impact for the good of humanity.

You are not alone: why community matters for healers

If you’re a clinician reading this, or any sort of healer, know that you are not alone.

I have been building this practice by myself. It never even occurred to me that I needed help. That is the main thing I’m searching for now: community.

Building alongside, and being with, people who are doing similar things is the only way we can survive, whatever industry you’re in and whatever’s happening in your personal life.

Relationship is everything.

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