What we do and what we are when not therapists

Is the glass half full or half empty?

Remember this whole debate?

What has been your approach or perspective toward it?

This whole debate comes to me very differently. We chose our cups to be emptied to provide for our clients, but how are we filling them if it is being constantly emptied?

Grounding, relaxing, regulating, and just breathing in sometimes are some of the therapists' favorite words in the therapy room.

We often forget to leave some breathing space and some compassion for ourselves, but how do we focus on ourselves when our self-consuming guilt of helping people doesn’t let us stop?

Since I started practicing, I have experienced this self-consuming guilt and have discussed the same with my colleagues as well. In some of the sessions, we could physically feel exhaustion and burnout.

I have come to recently realize how our profession as a therapist, we constantly face burnout, and in order to be an effective therapist we push ourselves because no one told us to hold space for our own selves.

Although we have made people realize that therapists are humans too and they are just doing their jobs, we, the therapists, I feel have lost that vision somewhere and we constantly need to remind ourselves of that.

I remember one Saturday evening, my colleagues and I were discussing how we feel so drained and exhausted. How we don’t have any compassion or empathy left on some days and while discussing our doomy-gloomy day and feeling, we saw colourful colours kept on the side of the table.

We instantly decided to pick out those colours, take a small sheet of paper (which I am pretty sure was for official use) and started colouring while still talking about the gloomy-doomy.

We were instantly joined by our other colleague, and soon it was sketch pens, pencil colours, crayons and shifts of different drawings everywhere. And that’s when all of us took a sigh of relief and giggled on the timing.

While reflecting on the mood and conversation change, we realised how making art, just any random art, or just doodling took away the exhaustion we all were feeling so heavily. No denying that it did come back in the night and we need to seriously consider taking care of ourselves while taking care of our clients, but that little piece of art, that pure joy of showing each other what we made is something that has been stuck in my mind for a long time.

We need to start taking care of ourselves in the smallest of ways possible, throughout the day and in different ways because I feel burnout is going to be our annoying friend and we need to be able to deal with them because it is not going anywhere.

We need to find little joys that fill up our jars and bodies with warmth, love, and pure joy and remind ourselves who we are and what we do when not therapists.