As an Introvert and Highly Sensitive Person, I understand the struggles of balancing self-care while supporting others. I want to help you reduce overwhelm and honor your Strengths as a Sensitive Therapist so you can feel fulfilled in your work again.
All tagged emotional fatigue
There’s a correlation between caseload capacity and career length for HSTs. The longer they’ve been a therapist, the fewer clients you can see each day. If you’re highly sensitive and/or an empath, the weight of doing therapy could take an emotional and nervous system toll from vicarious trauma and the mere stress of supporting others.
Being a deeply feeling, empathetic therapist certainly has its struggles, but let’s not forget the bright spots that make this work special. When you can allow yourself permission to work in alignment with your needs, you get to bypass burnout and experience the best parts of being an HST while creating meaningful change for your clients.
Can you be a good therapist and make choices about who you help based on what feels most aligned to your needs, personality, or interests? For HSTs, there is so much benefit in narrowing your clinical focus to help your clients more effectively while you feel more satisfied as the clinician. This work is often so draining for us, it’s paramount to bolster against burnout in every way you can.
Being a therapist takes a significant amount of energy and focus, but friends and family don't usually understand what your work entails. It’s important to protect the space around the work so you’ll have the internal resources you need to show up fully for your clients, get your admin work done, process and decompress afterward, and then have something left over for yourself. Are you often pulled between work and personal life?
If you knew then what you know now, would you still choose to be a therapist? Reflections on the impact of being a therapist and how this role changes you and impacts your personal relationships. This work is special, it’s just mixed with the dread of doing paperwork, the exhaustion of the daily emotional rollercoaster you go on session to session, the self-doubt of being enough for your clients, and the upkeep of running a private practice or navigating the politics of a group/agency setting.
During the screening process, are you trusting your intuition to refer clients out? Initial contact with clients can seem so insignificant compared to the therapy itself, but this process is a critical part of maintaining a sustainable practice. You and the client must match on availability, fee, presenting issue, and other factors. Maintaining your boundaries is the compassionate choice and in the best interest of the client.
What if stepping away to recharge and reconnect with yourself was part of the framework of being a therapist? Here I share my own experience of taking a sabbatical and what I discovered along the way.
After graduation, you’re searching for a counseling field placement that doesn’t leave you feeling burned out before you even get licensed and fully start your therapist career. All the usual places (agencies, hospitals, schools) come with demanding caseloads and productivity standards. Thinking outside the box on the path to complete your hours will be the key to sustainable work as a therapist now and in the future.
Sensitive Therapists need time to process the impact of doing this work and to nurture yourself on client days. Just focusing on the administrative side of being a therapist and only getting self-care time on the weekends is not sustainable for someone who feels deeply and has a high level of empathy. Carve out moments to release, digest, and recharge as often as you can.
Common roadblocks for Sensitive Therapists are how to work less while maintaining your current income, earn more income when you’re maxed out on your capacity for 1:1 clients, or find other ways to be fulfilled in your work. These roadblocks often bring up thoughts about “passive income” projects to find a more energetically/emotionally sustainable or financially stable way to be a therapist, but is that the right solution for you?
Back-to-back sessions are a Highly Sensitive Therapist's worst nightmare. Your mind doesn’t have time to process all your session details and your nervous system never gets a chance to decompress from the stimulation. If you’re on the emotionally spongy or empathic side, you’ve also picked up some of your clients emotional “residue”. With too many sessions crammed into one day, you leave work drained, frazzled, irritated, or on the verge of burnout. This article dives into the specifics of why too many sessions and not enough downtime will leave you feeling depleted.
You may want to help every client who reaches out, but putting empathy first often leads to therapist burnout. It’s important to consider how many clients you can support long-term when you set adequate boundaries.
The struggle of accessibility vs. sustainability burdens Sensitive Therapists who are highly empathetic and care deeply for their clients. You alone cannot solve the problem of mental health accessibility, but you can make sure you maintain a sustainable practice so you can offer care for years to come while honoring your own needs.
Now more than ever it’s important to focus on the essentials and prioritize preserving your energy. Being more empathetic and more aware of little details is a great asset as a Sensitive Therapist but can become overwhelming when life becomes stressful, scary, or we are supporting many clients through trauma. Our temperament makes us more prone to the effects of compassion fatigue or vicarious trauma, but thankfully we are also more susceptible to the beneficial effects of positive supports.
7 ways to honor our needs and calm down the overwhelm and exhaustion many Sensitive Therapists are feeling now. All therapists have been bearing the emotional toll of supporting clients as we ourselves experience a worldwide crisis, but Sensitive Therapists will have a unique reaction due to our heightened empathy, perceptive abilities, and need to process our experiences deeply. Going forward, we will need to reflect on what has already happened and give ourselves time to ease into the changes ahead in order to tame the overwhelm and exhaustion we’re feeling right now. Now more than ever we must go at our own pace, set strong boundaries in every area of our lives, and take time to rest.
Supporting clients who are experiencing some of the same emotions and uncertainties as we are could lead to overwhelm, compassion fatigue, and burnout. It’s vital that we set strong boundaries, take time to ground ourselves, create space between sessions, get support from our therapist communities, and take time off if we need to.
Migrating to teletherapy can feel overwhelming and uncomfortable for Sensitive Therapists. Navigating the tech challenges and therapeutic container are often the most difficult part, but there are benefits from seeing clients remotely that can actually save us time and energy.
Our finely tuned nervous systems make Highly Sensitive Therapists more susceptible to the physical effects of overstimulation. Movement and physical self-care are essential practices to combat the effects of sitting and getting easily dysregulated.
As Highly Sensitive Therapists, we need to take our self-care practice to the next level to deeply nourish ourselves and prevent burnout.
Instead of burning yourself out each day trying to do everything perfectly, try leaving some fuel in your tank so you have the energy to focus on your self-care routine and personal responsibilities. This practice can help you maintain energy levels over time, get more done and feel more balanced.
