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…
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.
You bring everything you have to your client sessions. But the fact of the matter is that some clients simply will not make the progress you so desire or even get worse.
This post is all about how the practice of gratitude counteracts therapist burnout and fatigue. The morale-dampening effects of experiencing clients’ deep suffering and lack of progress are realities we must all face. We can explore how gratitude may be a salve to this humanistic injury.
You’ve just finished a difficult session – your client was processing some very deep emotions around a traumatic incident from her childhood. When we, as therapists, turn toward brief practices like the 3-minute breathing space, we can help ourselves to mindfully let go, settle, and reset for the next client.
This post is designed to help mental health professionals take stock of and “reset” their thoughts, feelings, and intentions in between emotionally taxing appointments or throughout the normative challenges of our busy days.
“We have about five minutes left for today,” you manage to squeeze in as your client abruptly switches to another topic.
Upon reaching the final wrap-up moment and saying your goodbyes until next week, what do you typically do?
Are you poised to write your progress note, use the bathroom, eat a quick snack, or make a phone call to insurance or a collaborating clinician?
Or perhaps you manage to do all of these at once, unbeknownst to the scouts at the Guinness Book of World Records. (I actually do know a therapist who does 3 out of 4 of these activities, and yes, one of them includes the bathroom. Please don’t think too hard about it though).
This post is all about the precious moments between our sessions and how we intend to use them. This is about 3 key principles to help integrate self-care between therapy sessions.