How is therapy beneficial for helping professionals?

If you work in a helping profession, you hold space for others. You heal, support, and teach. You are attentive and emotionally attuned. You’re constantly thinking about how to help your patient, client, or student.

If you are a medical professional, you bear witness to pain, illness, and death.

If you are a mental health professional, you facilitate difficult conversations about grief, abuse, and emotional distress.

If you are an educator, you prepare content, deliver instruction, and help your students navigate developmental and socioemotional concerns.

Whether you’re a therapist, medical professional, social worker, teacher, or other helping professional, you advocate daily for those you help. And you deserve your own space to process your life and your work. 

Counseling for Medical Professionals

The medical profession is riddled with stress, burnout, and toxicity. You are exposed to pain and suffering on a daily basis. You might even have direct responsibility for your patients’ lives. As a medical professional, your job is unique because of the high intensity of stress that you experience, and sometimes simple coping strategies just aren’t enough. If you’re a doctor, therapy can be a space for you to process the feelings that you have to push down when you’re doing compressions on a patient who might die. If you’re a medical student, it can be a place for you to reflect on how you want to spend your time outside of the hospital, since it might be in short supply. I am familiar with the lifestyle and mental difficulties that often arise for medical professionals, and am passionate about delivering therapy to this population.

Therapy for Therapists

Having been on both sides of the couch, I can vouch for the importance of finding a good therapist as a therapist. It’s important to practice the maintenance of mental wellness that we preach. It’s important to process our work and prevent burnout. But even more so, it’s important to have an hour devoted to YOU. To be able to give yourself the space to think about how you’re feeling and what you want to work on in your life. Just because we’re therapists doesn’t mean we have it all figured out. We also need time to engage in mindfulness and create goals for ourselves, just like our clients.

If you’re a therapist or social worker seeking therapy, you get the added bonus of your therapist being able to more fully empathize with many of your work-related stressors. Sometimes your therapist can be a good sounding board for your experience as an employee or a clinician. Since I have previous clinical supervision and consultation experience, I am happy to provide professional feedback to my fellow mental health professionals. I regularly monitor the balance between providing professional consultation and maintaining focus on personal mental health, and I will commonly ask “do you want me to respond as your therapist or as a fellow mental health professional?”

You might be experiencing some self-doubt entering therapy. I’ve experienced it too. I’ve wondered how honest I can be about my work with clients. Will my therapist judge me? Do they think I’m a good therapist? As a client who is a therapist, it’s very important that your therapist knows how to show up in sessions for you. I believe strongly in genuineness in the therapy room and welcome feedback and open discussion about all of these feelings. Sometimes it feels good to know that you’re not the only therapist who feels this way!