Solitude: a Therapist's Best Friend
Rather than seeking to fill your brain with more and more information, seek instead to clear space and make room for intentional, quiet processing.
The early years of being a therapist are some of the most expansive and eye-opening—and, unsurprisingly, they’re some of the most anxiety-provoking and fear-fueling years, as well.
The excitement of pursuing a meaningful and challenging career reveals to many an underlying sense of inadequacy and an overwhelming need to consume as much information as is humanly possible, so as to stave off falling directly into the bottomless pit of self-doubt and second-guessing.
Okay, so, here’s the thing:
Maintaining your willingness to be wrong, an openness to changing your approach, and keeping a learner’s mind when working with clients is indeed a necessary and helpful part of this job.
But for fuck’s sake, y’all—it doesn’t mean you have to spend every waking hour double checking your work, second-guessing your interventions, consuming piles of information (books, trainings, podcasts, articles, social media “hot takes,” etc), and walking around wondering if you’re going to irrevocably fuck up your clients and ruin your chances of ever being a “good therapist.”
Just take a breath, put the study guides & headphones down for a moment, and take a moment.
Okay, now that you’ve calmed just a bit, let me offer you a piece of advice that I desperately needed when I was in graduate school and just starting fresh in my first full-time therapy job:
Stop over-emphasizing the importance of information consumption, and stop under-emphasizing the importance of information integration & processing.
Put more simply: give your mind a damn break.
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