Heal your practice, heal yourself.
No, seriously, how are you doing lately
as the world
literally burns?
It seems like the chaos and injustice have sped up, not slowed down since the pandemic began.
We are watching the genocide of Palestinian families live-streamed to our phones.
Rage and hopelessness are gripping us as we are constantly growing our capacity to feel, witness and act.
Now, more than ever, therapists from marginalized identities are the most desired mental health workers.
Despite being some of the most extensively trained professionals, we are among the most overworked and underpaid healthcare workers.
You left your old job to be able to do your best work, work less and be able make enough money to take care of yourself. But you’re still struggling month to month. You either don’t have enough clients or are working another job.
Or you have too many sliding scale clients to make ends meet. And so you’re overworking to try to close the gaps. But your healing or clinical work is suffering because you’re drained. This was supposed to be different.
As you know, the nonprofit industrial complex isn’t known for taking great care of their workers. Talk about being overworked and underpaid to try to change the world for the better. Hello, burnout! Have you ever been paid for one job but expected to do 2 or even 3 people’s jobs? Or been laid off? And let’s not even mention the paperwork.
Your past bosses may have treated you poorly. Maybe they had their own trauma stuff that was leaking out into their leadership. Many of us come to social change work by way of our own wounds. But your long and powerful healing path has led you here to therapistlandia!
The promise of deeper, more meaningful work with and for your community seemed so worth the struggles of swimming in a sea of very ‘nice’ white cis ladies and a few too many out of touch professors at your liberal at best grad school. You may have a pile of student debt that came knocking as soon as you got your long awaited diploma.
Or maybe you’ve endured oppressive conditions in a training program that added to your own trauma to learn skills and methodologies.
Then you’re expected to work for little or nothing to get those hours for licensure. And then take more ableist AF hours-long tests. Who designed this system? Class privileged male psychologists who had wives doing all their domestic labor? When will the institutional nightmare end?
We have a lot of organizing to do. The problem is that most of us are too tired to do much activist work outside of seeing clients anymore. Maybe you’ve noticed that a lot us here in Therapistlandia are heavily flirting with burnout if not full on in a relationship with them. It’s terrible to have worked so hard to start your own practice and still find exhaustion creeping up on you. Or maybe even swallowing you whole.
The worst part is, you’re your own boss now. So there’s no one but internalized capitalism to hate on. And that’s not a specific person. So you’re left alone with all the ickiness and rage. At least before you had coworkers to commiserate with.
It can be really bleak out there.
I have supported 50+ therapists and somatic practitioners, new and seasoned, in private practice to be able to feel satisfied in their days and lives and resourced in this work. I know you can, too.
We’re all different and here are some examples from my own journey: I arrived in private practice pre-burnt out from working in community mental health even before grad school. I love my communities but I sure as hell wasn’t doing that again.
I was so programmed from those experiences, it took me years to unlearn the patterns—even though no one was making me work like that anymore!
I’m not going to tell you I have it all figured out because I don't. I honestly don’t think there are any magic answers in late stage capitalism. We’re just trying to reduce harm to ourselves and others, be there for our loved ones, and try to enjoy this one life we know we have. But I have tried many many ways of being in this work.
As a survivor of developmental trauma, I am determined to have a happy childhood now despite being in my 40’s! And I also have had to deeply excavate patterns of diminishing my needs and re-defining how I can feel safe in my body.
Feeling supported and resourced used to bring up terror. The fear of being cast out. Of not belonging to our people. I was so used to living in an adrenalized state which worked well for not dying while bike commuting in downtown San Francisco. I live in the woods now, thank goodness.
We all have different bodies and biorhythms. Here are a few examples of what private practice has made possible once I processed more pesky trauma patterns and was able to live from a more regulated place: I haven’t used an alarm clock or worked before 10am in years.
But maybe you’re a morning person! Either way, this working for yourself thing is your chance to align your work with your body, your health, your life. And all the things you love beyond this work.
I use somatic practice to go deeper than “business coaching” and “marketing courses.”
Just like healing, this process might feel a little worse before it feels better. This might even be harder than some of the therapy you’ve done. But it’s worth it. I know you already know that facing what’s under all this surface stuff is scary and hard. And it’s what allows real change to happen.
We will go deep. We will work with financial trauma, work habits, codependent patterns, and more. All the work is grounded in an anti-capitalist and disembodying white supremacy analysis. Your dreams and desires are worth it. Your life is worth it.
Healing your practice isn’t mysterious magic. But it is magical.
The rest of your practice…and the rest of your life is before you.
