Unemployment --- the unexpected, the learned, the gift.
I haven't updated this in a while, because I have been busy working. That came to an end five weeks ago, when I was unexpectedly laid off. I have never been fired from a job, especially one where I was performing quite well. However, given the recent changes in the mental health care system in North Carolina along with some of the organizational challenges my last job was facing, it was not out of the realm of the possible. Still, working one minute and the next being told you are no longer an employee is quite jarring. It shakes your identity and leaves you in an existential vacuum as you renegotiate a part of your identity.
In a lot of ways, this is a follow up from my post almost two years ago. Working in the social science field as a clinician is quite draining. Therapy is a profession which taxes not only the analytical prefrontal regions of our brains, but the midbrain and base brain as well. Our emotions, our reflections of our emotions, mirroring the mental states of others, processing those states, projecting the implications of those states, etc. is something quite complex. Two years later and I still have yet to master this "self-care" so many of us in the helping field are bad at.
I work out regularly, eat well, sleep well, etc. However that is only the basics. I find myself, as a clinician, building walls to protect my own emotional states. This is needed, of course, in practice. However in our interpersonal worlds, these walls and barriers are quite ineffective. In the last two years I have learned to turn off "therapist mode". People always assume you are analyzing them in public if/once they know you are a therapist. Let me inform you --- this is not the case. It is like any other job. Being a therapist is highly taxing. Doing that 24/7 is impossible and not really preferable.
The last two years of working in the non-profit world has taught me this skill to the umpty-umpth degree. There is a great need in our society for social work, mental health, understanding of those issues, etc. As a young therapist, we often want to use what we know to attack these problems head on. The need is greater than what we can individually provide. Even the organizations we work with often have these lofty expectations and have a short fuse for any type of failure. Learning to use the "cut off" skill with clients is the "easy" part. Learning to do this with the organizations which usually want to carry out shared principals is the lesson harder learned.
Fifty or more hour work weeks are common. Even if scientific studies show us that after about forty hours you are not producing as well, the emotional demand from clients and organizations push you harder. The empathy most of us in this field develop is exploited in a real way. Self-care of the body is one thing; self-care of the mind is another. We therapist are often like observers looking through binoculars. We observe the pack. When we are in the world, we are part of the pack. You cannot look at yourself though binoculars. I think we forget this. We are cognitively blinded by our own work. We need others to check us when we might not be aware when we are out of line, or not doing the mental house keeping. Or when we are being exploited.
It is often hard to reconcile the need to help people, your personal health, and the demands of the organizations we work for. We like to think these three things can be aligned, but quite often they are at odds. I think successful therapists learn how and when to raise these boundaries --- when to give, when to let things happen, and when to take. And if the past two years have taught me anything, it is that I do not take enough mental time for myself. Most of the work we do is mental, so often we want to shy away from it in our free time. I would encourage us to learn when we need to actively engage in self-reflection, meditation, and maintenance. It needs to be ongoing of course, but we also have to identify more times (i.e. vacations) to do this.
In our field, we are always pressed with the urgency of the now. Individuals, organizations, and families have needs that are usually pressing. The higher the risk the client (or the organization that works with these populations), the more urgent the need. But you also have those needs. It is easy to drown out our own needs for those things, since the world itself is always calling.
Unexpected unemployment in a lot of ways has been nice. It has given me the time to recharge after two very demanding years. A time to reflect on the demands of this field, the current politics of it, and how to better address it when I re-enter it. Burnout is common in our field because it taxes almost all of the systems in our brain. We perhaps need MORE time off (in various ways) than other fields. This has yet to be recognized by the culture of our work, which has given into the demands of corporate work mantra of "more is better". Our organizations have also become privy to this I believe, by over-responding to minor mistakes and chastising the employee when they make those mistakes.
I have been a victim of this before (although not as much in my last position) and I have seen this happen to others in my field. Since our goals are lofty, the demand high, the needs great, we, as humans, will fail. That's all there is to it. Those failures should not be seen as ingrained individual faults, used to chastise and potentially penalize an individual, but chances to learn, adopt, and grow. In a digital world where everything is documented, we need to remember we are analog beings --- not binary computers. We are humans, dealing with human lives. We will error, we will mess up. We do not always make the right call. I think our work culture has forgotten that. And in order to preserve the greater mission (and avoid legal issues), often lose good people who were trying their best. WE have forgotten that as therapist. Individuals and families come to us all the time for "the answer" to their problems. It is the process which often is the best teacher. It is the process of learning to engage in the moment. Even if that moment is fraught with the unknown.
There is no perfection. Only process. It's life. It is messy. Go forth and get dirty.
In a lot of ways, this is a follow up from my post almost two years ago. Working in the social science field as a clinician is quite draining. Therapy is a profession which taxes not only the analytical prefrontal regions of our brains, but the midbrain and base brain as well. Our emotions, our reflections of our emotions, mirroring the mental states of others, processing those states, projecting the implications of those states, etc. is something quite complex. Two years later and I still have yet to master this "self-care" so many of us in the helping field are bad at.
I work out regularly, eat well, sleep well, etc. However that is only the basics. I find myself, as a clinician, building walls to protect my own emotional states. This is needed, of course, in practice. However in our interpersonal worlds, these walls and barriers are quite ineffective. In the last two years I have learned to turn off "therapist mode". People always assume you are analyzing them in public if/once they know you are a therapist. Let me inform you --- this is not the case. It is like any other job. Being a therapist is highly taxing. Doing that 24/7 is impossible and not really preferable.
The last two years of working in the non-profit world has taught me this skill to the umpty-umpth degree. There is a great need in our society for social work, mental health, understanding of those issues, etc. As a young therapist, we often want to use what we know to attack these problems head on. The need is greater than what we can individually provide. Even the organizations we work with often have these lofty expectations and have a short fuse for any type of failure. Learning to use the "cut off" skill with clients is the "easy" part. Learning to do this with the organizations which usually want to carry out shared principals is the lesson harder learned.
Fifty or more hour work weeks are common. Even if scientific studies show us that after about forty hours you are not producing as well, the emotional demand from clients and organizations push you harder. The empathy most of us in this field develop is exploited in a real way. Self-care of the body is one thing; self-care of the mind is another. We therapist are often like observers looking through binoculars. We observe the pack. When we are in the world, we are part of the pack. You cannot look at yourself though binoculars. I think we forget this. We are cognitively blinded by our own work. We need others to check us when we might not be aware when we are out of line, or not doing the mental house keeping. Or when we are being exploited.
It is often hard to reconcile the need to help people, your personal health, and the demands of the organizations we work for. We like to think these three things can be aligned, but quite often they are at odds. I think successful therapists learn how and when to raise these boundaries --- when to give, when to let things happen, and when to take. And if the past two years have taught me anything, it is that I do not take enough mental time for myself. Most of the work we do is mental, so often we want to shy away from it in our free time. I would encourage us to learn when we need to actively engage in self-reflection, meditation, and maintenance. It needs to be ongoing of course, but we also have to identify more times (i.e. vacations) to do this.
In our field, we are always pressed with the urgency of the now. Individuals, organizations, and families have needs that are usually pressing. The higher the risk the client (or the organization that works with these populations), the more urgent the need. But you also have those needs. It is easy to drown out our own needs for those things, since the world itself is always calling.
Unexpected unemployment in a lot of ways has been nice. It has given me the time to recharge after two very demanding years. A time to reflect on the demands of this field, the current politics of it, and how to better address it when I re-enter it. Burnout is common in our field because it taxes almost all of the systems in our brain. We perhaps need MORE time off (in various ways) than other fields. This has yet to be recognized by the culture of our work, which has given into the demands of corporate work mantra of "more is better". Our organizations have also become privy to this I believe, by over-responding to minor mistakes and chastising the employee when they make those mistakes.
I have been a victim of this before (although not as much in my last position) and I have seen this happen to others in my field. Since our goals are lofty, the demand high, the needs great, we, as humans, will fail. That's all there is to it. Those failures should not be seen as ingrained individual faults, used to chastise and potentially penalize an individual, but chances to learn, adopt, and grow. In a digital world where everything is documented, we need to remember we are analog beings --- not binary computers. We are humans, dealing with human lives. We will error, we will mess up. We do not always make the right call. I think our work culture has forgotten that. And in order to preserve the greater mission (and avoid legal issues), often lose good people who were trying their best. WE have forgotten that as therapist. Individuals and families come to us all the time for "the answer" to their problems. It is the process which often is the best teacher. It is the process of learning to engage in the moment. Even if that moment is fraught with the unknown.
There is no perfection. Only process. It's life. It is messy. Go forth and get dirty.
I'm sorry to hear about the job, but it sounds as though you are making the best of a rotten situation. There are always so many more people in need of help that there's never a stopping point. You had a stopping point found for you, I guess. Enjoy it as much as is possible!
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