When you have a boss or supervisor, you get to know their style, expectations, personality, demandingness, compassion, flexibility, and so on. You hear about your boss’s reputation, and you learn how they actually treat you vs. how they say they’ll treat you.
As therapists who truly desire to thrive, we must look within ourselves and our surroundings for the inspiration that sparks our evolution and growth.
We actually don’t need to look too far though. Inspiration for thriving is often all around us. In fact, sometimes it’s right across the room from us.
This post focuses on how clients inspire therapists’ growth. Simply by looking for clients’ areas of growth, you can ignite your own self-evolution. Keep on Reading…
There are many aspects of being a mental health practitioner that no one really talks about. This post is about one such aspect.
It’s about humor in the therapy room and how humor can express health, humanity, and humility like no other force.
Happy New Year! Whatever the last year threw at you, you’re right here right now. Despite the pandemic or perhaps because of it, it’s definitely worth taking a closer look at how you want to live your life in the coming months. But before we dive in, let’s consider how many of those admirable resolutions have you actually kept in past years.
One of the most important elements of a thriving practice is mindfully choosing your caseload. Done with self-awareness and intentionality, this can be a highly meaningful prevention strategy for burnout and compassion fatigue. How? This posts highlights 3 key elements – values, strengths, and stress hardiness – that when thoughtfully considered can help build a caseload that serves you and your clients quite well.
In their highly practical book How to Survive and Thrive as a Therapist, Pope and Vasquez provide us numerous actionable ideas and steps for how to establish ourselves successfully in private practice.
When we follow this “blueprint,’ we can put ourselves more in the driver’s seat, more in the thriving mode. We have structure and guidance. We no longer have to “just get by” and feel like we’re merely grasping and hoping.
But I wanted to introduce a slightly different way of thinking about the concept of thriving and pondering the question: are you thriving or just surviving as a therapist?
The qualities we bring to the occupational hazards of our clinical work have profound implications for our emotional, mental, physical, relational, and spiritual health.
This post is all about how acceptance and gratitude together reduce burnout and promote resilience. These companion practices can give us the confidence to handle so much of what comes our way.
It is quite rare (or at least I assume so) that a client calls or emails you well after they’ve discontinued treatment to tell you how well they are doing or to thank you for the work you did together.
I recently received one of those emails from a former client. Ah, it felt so good. The gratitude for being a psychotherapist flowed easily.
This post centers on the relatively uncommon “thank-you notes” from former clients and how to practice gratitude for being a psychotherapist in the here and now.
As practitioners, we constantly find ourselves in highly challenging positions.
We try our very best to assist those in need of our services while attempting to stay as mindfully present as possible with deep and (often unnecessary) suffering.
From this universally humanistic challenge, I began reflecting on what we actually do in our therapeutic work, and my realizations actually startled me a bit. I asked a question I’ve never asked before: “What are we really doing in therapy?”
Have you ever really messed up in therapy? Did you say something that you regretted? Did you come off as way too strong or heavy handed?
Or perhaps you didn’t bring “enough” compassion to some very hurt feelings your client was experiencing.
We have all been there. Right? Yes. It’s OK. Really it is.
This post is all about the internal therapist dynamics of what happens when we mis-step. Once we’ve taking responsibility for what has happened, we can then contemplate how to repair and refresh the therapeutic relationship. We can even use this rift and repair to revitalize the work we are doing.