Carrying the stories, weight, and emotions of your clients can weigh you down. The red-tape, the ins and outs of running an office, working in an agency, moving to online support, or feeling like you’re carrying the parallel process of your work relationships is spilling out into your life. Until you heal your own wounds you will probably struggle with balance in your life outside of work. Is your inner critic screaming...”Imposter”? Your inner child pushed into the corner by your perfectionism and self-doubt?

As Freud said, “we have the compulsion to repeat, most of the time subconsciously, what we do not see and have not healed.”  Maybe there is this nagging part of you that says I should be stronger even though you know intellectually that everyone needs support.  You’re wondering, “I am a therapist, why can’t I fix myself?” A great option is to reach out for online support for yourself.

You’ve been there after a long day: exhausted, not picking up the phone when your BFF calls, getting in a fight with your partner because HIPAA says you can’t talk about your hard session and they wouldn’t understand anyways, feeling like you're trying so hard to Mom AF but failing. It feels like you’re not at your best - that you’re leaving your best at work.

Maybe you struggle with boundaries in and out of session, or maybe you have tried self-care before, and it didn’t work.

You want to be able to let go of your past and live fully in the present, but things keep triggering you either in session, in your daily or professional life and blocking you from seeing your own greatness.

Maybe you’ve gotten lost spiritually and you feel empty feeling disconnected from this on the daily. It feels like there’s nothing fueling or feeding your passion anymore and feeling spiritually adrift, like you have no relationship or sense of yourself outside of your sessions.

You’re in private practice and it's lonely. Your agency or workplace says they value self-care but push productivity, so it's hard for you to get the support you need at work.    Outside of work, you may have a great support system, but they still can’t hold the space you need, or you don’t want to burden them so you stay quiet.

Don’t let yourself be one of those therapists that clients talk about saying, “All they did was talk about themselves” or “they fell asleep on me”. You know you’ve heard the urban myths of the “bad” therapists: yawning, checking their watch, doodling and not paying attention, or the therapist who becomes BFF with their client.

• If you feel like you’re slipping, maybe even yawning in your coffee cup at the end of a long day.
• Self-disclosing in session and as soon as you say it, realize you missed the mark?
• Skipping lunch or realizing you haven’t had a bathroom break for the last 5 hours?
• Are you up at 2:38 am thinking about work; paperwork, researching client interventions, being your perfectionist self.
• Do you stare at that pile of self-help books on your nightstand, covered in dust, wondering, what happened to your love of reading?
• Do you spend too much time cleaning the house and not enough time at yoga?
• Do you use Netflix, food, or alcohol as your number 1 coping skill all the while knowing you're numbing out?

It’s time to stop putting everything else first in your life, level the playing field and embody the work we teach to clients daily.  Let’s break the stigma around mental health and our profession by practicing what we preach and shining a light on our own issues.  As Brene Brown suggests,” Let’s get in the arena and duke it out…don’t stand on the sidelines”. One way you can get out the cheap seats, leave the imposter behind and get into the arena is reaching out to me for online support around your practice and work-life balance.

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"You can't pour from an empty vessel"
- E. Brown