Professional Self-Care

Ok. Time for some real talk about mental health.

So, here’s the thing about professional self-care. Much like personal self-care, I don’t do enough. I just don’t. So when one of my colleagues asked me to put in a proposal with him to present at a counselor education conference in Seattle, I jumped at it. This was not FOMOP - I go to this conference every year anyway - and I love beefing up the ole’ CV, and I loved the topic - Simulated Clients in Counseling Skills Class (which I happen to teach and use them a lot). We got an education session, I fangirled because the daughter of the authors of a few of my books in grad school came to it and was like “I DO VR LETS COLLABORATE PLZ” and it was awesome, and just...it was an all around great conference.

I went to sessions about impostor syndrome (which, if you look it up in the dictionary, you’ll find my picture instead of a definition...more on that in a minute), liability, how to talk about sex with your students and supervisees, and how to coach them around leaving space for talking about sex with their clients, and self-compassion and self-care, and mandated reporting, and I listened to a great keynote about passion and work from a great author, and I left so full of knowledge and gratitude. This was all on top of seeing a really great friend and hanging out with my colleagues and just having an amazing time.

phew. To say that my cup refilled to overflowing would be an understatement. I had a seven-hour long flight home to start to unpack it, and what I came to is this.

I’m at a huge crossroads professionally. Huge. Leaving my job was so hard for so many reasons, but I finally admitted to myself just how much I questioned myself and the work that I’m doing and my very competence as a counselor, and that’s why I had to leave. To admit this to myself, I also had to admit to myself that my workplace was toxic to me. Maybe not to everyone who worked there, but certainly to me, and admitting that I could no longer tolerate it was the first step to stopping that internal train of not ever feeling like I’m going to be good enough at what I do enough to feel satisfied.

You know how you have those times that are really hard but you don’t really realize how hard they were until you’re on the other side of them? Yeah. That’s where I am now.

What I was experiencing before I went to Seattle was burnout. I can comfortably call it that at this point. It wasn’t to the level where I couldn’t work, but I came dangerously close. I had been having thoughts of taking some FMLA to give myself some time to rest and get things figured out. I also started seeing my therapist weekly again. I just really needed the support. 

Then I went to Seattle and somewhere in my head, the wheels were set in motion. I made the conscious decision somewhere along the way to leave it all there.

The grief about leaving this job and this team that I loved.

The shame.

The hopelessness.

The feeling that I failed.

The feelings of not being enough professionally.

Just all of it.

I got on that plane home a different person than when I left. My outlook was completely different and I finally felt better. Like, genuinely better. I felt like I’d been carrying a horse on my back that I was finally able to let go.

Better still, I learned what my burnout actually looked like. I have been intimately familiar for a long time with how I experience compassion fatigue (what I affectionately call burnout’s oppositional little cousin), but this was not that. This was bigger and harder to work with.

I also learned that what I need in those times is to talk about it openly. In the workshops I went to, we talked a lot about the costs of these jobs, which doesn’t get acknowledged nearly enough. And because every time I go this particular conference every year feeling as though I am around My People, I felt comfortable enough to internalize the validation I found there, and didn’t realize how much I needed it. I allowed it into those dark places that were difficult to sit with on my own, and just sat with this new knowledge and was able to process a lot of difficult stuff.

Do I still have a long way to go? Yes. I’m realistic about that. But I’m getting there, and that ain’t nothing.