Therapists and healthcare professionals are notoriously bad at caring for our own mental health and are prone to burnout and compassion fatigue. Do you identify as a perfectionist? Are you a high achiever? Perhaps you’ve been known to be a little self-sacrificing? On top of (sometimes because of) these personality traits, we have dedicated our careers to caring for others. We hold people during their hardest experiences during our own experiences of distress, grief, and the burdens of daily life. I have experienced this, I’ve seen colleagues go through it, and I specialize in helping mental health professionals in my practice get through it.
We are humans in a caring profession and we’re bound to be impacted by the people and systems we work with. I offer therapy for therapists, healthcare workers, and helping professionals as someone who has been in similar shoes and who cares deeply about your longevity in the profession.
You’re a therapist, so you know the importance of a good self care routine. But sometimes our self care routines stop being as effective. If they become too routine, we become bored. Other times, we lose the motivation to engage in an activity we once looked forward to doing.
Signs of burnout and compassion fatigue
- Feeling less connected to family and friends
- Reduced engagement in self care activities OR overindulgence to numb/avoid negative feelings/sensations
- Over or under eating
- Over or under sleeping
- Dreading work (do you get the “Sunday Scaries?”)
- Irritability with coworkers, clients, or friends/family
- Getting sick more often
- Calling out of work more often OR feeling like you can’t call out of work when you need to
- Looking at job opportunities to escape your current job
- More negative self-talk
- Increased cynicism/feelings of helplessness and hopelessness at work
- Dissociation, including via substance use, increased social media/smart phone use, overeating, and/or oversleeping
- Hypervigilance
- Loss of sensitivity OR hypersensitivity to emotional material
- Loss of sense of self outside of work
What does targeted therapy for healthcare workers look like?
I’ve worked with many healthcare professionals who felt like they were losing empathy. If they were showing up fully at work, they felt spent at home and lashed out at their partner and kids before crashing on the couch. The shame spiral that came after was real (read my blog for EMDRIA on treating shame with EMDR here). I’ve supported therapists and healthcare workers through workplace trauma, burnout, and reconnecting with themselves and their loved ones. I’ve supported nurses following the height of the COVID pandemic through processing the unpreparedness of the healthcare system, the false information spread by the media and their families, and the unrelenting grief they didn’t have time to process before the next loss. They moved from feeling triggered and frozen or lashing out to feeling more balanced and joyful. Their lives beyond work shifted as they reconnected to their partners and kids.
My practice integrates parts work, somatic psychology, interpersonal therapy, CBT, DBT, and EMDR. It’s not just about “coping” with toxic environments: It’s about creating systems to maintain safety, learning to separate, and processing the traumatic events and chronic stresses of the job. Workplace trauma impacts us the same as any other acute event. EMDR is incredibly effective for resolving the workplace traumas that contribute to burnout and compassion fatigue in healthcare professionals. I use specific EMDR protocols to address recent events to prevent you from developing PTSD by processing them now.
You know the physiological signs of stress: How are you noticing them in your own body?
My approach is gently challenging: I’ll help you pay attention to your patterns, including the intellectualizing that keeps you separated from experiencing what you’ve been through. You’re aware of the skills, but therapists and healthcare professionals aren’t always great at practicing what we preach. You need someone who recognizes your professional experience AND that knowing isn’t doing. You’ll hear me say, “I don’t want to make assumptions about what you know, so tell me if this is repetitive.” And then, “So how are you connecting with that in your own life?” I will guide you to reconnect with your system.