From One Therapist to Another

Being a mental health professional practicing for a little more than four years now, I've felt a lot of things I didn't always expect to feel. There is a great sense of fulfillment in this work, the kind of joy you've always wanted to feel because you worked so hard to come into this field. You did your due diligence. You experienced life before you sat across from someone else's. And yet, as humans, even when we love our jobs, it sometimes gets a little overwhelming, because we are also offering a very vulnerable part of ourselves as humans, our empathy, our understanding, our capacity to hold someone else's pain. This is what we signed up for, and it can still feel exhausting. We don't have to feel guilty about that.

It is very much okay to ask ourselves for a little more me-time, to be more compassionate toward ourselves, to engage in hobbies and activities we simply like, without needing to always be the one who fixes things. As therapists, we may feel that outside of therapy too, we're bound to fix things, because we understand human relationships, connection, emotions. But we don't always have to be the fixers and the solvers. We don't always have to be the ones there for everyone else in our private lives. In a professional setting, of course, that's the role. But in our private life, we get to choose how we show up for ourselves, whether that's prioritizing our own needs, taking ourselves out, doing things we love, or simply expressing anger, sadness, or crying out loud for no particular reason at all.

We have the right to feel and express things normally, as humans do. We don't have to always make the right decision or say the right thing just because we're mental health practitioners, just because we understand the theory of it. Much like doctors, who promote health but aren't always the healthiest when it comes to their own lives, we have to remember that being a therapist is a part of who we are. It is not the whole of who we are.

I've heard versions of this from so many other therapists too, people I've connected with on social media, in trainings, in personal life. The quiet exhaustion, the guilt for needing rest, the pressure to always have it together. It seems to be a shared, unspoken thread running through so many of us in this field.

So from one therapist to another: you are allowed to be tired. You are allowed to not have the answers for yourself, even when you have them for others. You are allowed to just feel, without fixing, without analyzing, without performing okay-ness.

You are not alone in this. And you are also, simply, human.

Disclaimer: This blog post is meant for awareness/entertainment purposes only. It is not medical advice and one must refrain from self-diagnosing. It is in no way a substitute for therapy with a mental health professional and it is not meant to be clinical. To consult with a psychotherapist on our team, you can contact us on fettle.counselling@gmail.com.