Don't burn your tea
Every day as therapists, we take in stories, emotions, and experiences. Every day, we have to take care to not let our metaphorical tea kettles simmer too long and burn all the leaves inside.
As a therapist, no matter where you work, or who you end up working with in your career, you are inevitably in a place of privilege and responsibility when it comes to your role, and you will be in the position of creating “containers” (i.e. physical and emotional/mental spaces in which your clients/patients will come to work with you) into which all variety of stories, emotions, concerns, questions, hopes, desires, failures, fears, frustrations, and uncertainties will be poured.
You will encounter stories of deep loss and indescribable pain, alongside stories of hope and excitement, mixed together with the day-to-day happenings and goings-on of the people who work with you.
You may start your day sitting with the expansive and hollow chasm of grief that has been suddenly ripped open in the life of a longtime client, and you may end the day interpreting and paraphrasing misunderstandings between disconnected partners or families.
You may ask a simple question to be met with an answer you never expected.
You may feel into the experiences of your fellow humans in a way you couldn’t have ever predicted, and will need to remain connected to their experience while managing a sometimes-fragile but always-vital boundary between your inner experience and theirs.
Your days may be punctuated by tears for an hour, followed by laughter and juicy “gossip” the next. Some days, our clients won’t have words, and neither will we. Some days, the only thing is words—the only experience that can be had, truly, is the verbal one, and we ride the waves along with our clients as they try to make sense of their world, and we try to make sense along with them.
And then, when the session end time comes and the last client waves goodbye for the day, we sit in the still, quiet space, full of our own questions, hearts brimming with all variety of emotions and sensations, and we have to sit there and…
Do our notes.
Or make a phone call.
Or reply to an email.
Or send a fax.
Or argue with insurance.
Or avoid it all and breathe in a moment of quiet—or, perhaps, several moments stuffed full of mindless internet scrolling and TikToks.
And for those of us who are working under the employ of an agency or other practice, we’re given the task of “meeting productivity,” lest we face the threat of a performance improvement plan or being written up for not clocking enough billable units.
For those of us self-employed, we spend time trying to learn marketing, business management, appropriate policy-setting practices, fee setting, etc. Maybe we hire help, maybe we do it on our own.
For all of us, when we finally leave the office (or shut the computer down), we walk back into the world bleary-eyed and, depending on the tasks for the day, mentally and emotionally drained. We move through our spaces with a tingling sensation on the skin—or, maybe, no sensation at all—and greet our loved ones with heavy lungs and half smiles. We make dinner, we wash dishes, we put on Netflix and zone out for the rest of the night.
Still, we haven’t quite made sense of the day yet. It’s sitting in the back of our minds like a tea kettle simmering over a flame, burning the leaves, with a whistle that spans anywhere from a background hum to an overwhelming din. And yet, we move into the evenings with that whistling pot and those burning leaves swirling somewhere in the background. We lay down eventually. We fall asleep (or try to) and wake up in the morning to start again.
The way I remember my professors & textbooks talking about self-care and managing transference/counter-transference feels very distanced and clinical now.
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