Written by Dr Kate Beaven-Marks
Who is self-care for? People with problems? Just those working as hypnotherapists? Or other talking therapists? The answer is that self-care is essential for anyone who is involved in helping others. Whether you are working full-time, or part-time, as a therapist, using hypnosis to help friends and family, or having a role caring for or supporting others, self-care can have a significant impact on your quality of life.
You may already know that being a hypnotherapist, talking therapist, carer, or support worker, can be a highly rewarding and satisfying occupation. You are in a position to help clients make significant and positive changes; enhancing their quality of life. However, this work may also be highly challenging and emotionally demanding, and can, without care, lead to a therapist feeling depleted, distressed or burned out. Resulting in a result, less-effective and less compassionate therapist, carer or support worker.
This may be experienced as a growing sense of emotional exhaustion, a lack of care, a loss of ability to be empathetic, or even a reduction in any sense of achievement. Depending on your client caseload, there might also be aspects of vicarious traumatisation, which is sometimes considered as secondary traumatic stress. This can lead to compassion fatigue, intrusive thoughts and images relating to the client’s issues; even physical symptoms.
Rather than waiting until you feel stressed, exhausted, sad, or even guilty about having to take some personal time, making regular time for you can help you engage with your full potential as a therapist and sustain a successful career.
Impact on life
Regardless of your best intentions to keep personal issues away from your work life, and work away from your home life, in reality there is no real line drawn in the sand to keep professional and personal lives completely separate. Each will have an influence and impact on the other.
As a result, professional effectiveness and your emotional well-being as a therapist can be affected by a pressured personal life, whether family, relationships, health, hobbies, even troublesome neighbours.
Whether professional or personal in origin, pressures can build up and, for a while, you may not even notice them. Or, you might be subconsciously ignoring them.
It can be helpful to take time to reflect on your behaviours and notice if you are,
- Accepting high workloads to keep too busy to think about other issues.
- Avoiding taking scheduled breaks.
- Aware of low motivation to promote positive client changes.
- Becoming bored, distracted, disinterested or irritated by clients.
- Clock watching, waiting for the session to end.
- Experiencing a lack of enjoyment at the end of a session.
- Experiencing a reduction in enjoyment of life.
- Feeling emotionally drained or exhausted during or after certain client sessions.
- Feelings of fatigue, even during the start of a workday.
- Finding yourself staring into space and unable to focus on work.
- Isolating yourself from other professional colleagues.
- Seeking emotional support and nurturing from clients.
- Unable to feel rewarded or gratified by work.
- Violating or ignoring your own professional boundaries.
Being self-aware will naturally enhance therapeutic work in many ways, and can help a therapist notice early warning signs before they escalate into something potentially more damaging.
Finding solutions
There is no need to wait for poor mental or physical health or performance issues to arise before engaging in self-care. Indeed, by engaging in self-care when you are feeling great can give you an added advantage. You can then learn and develop strategies prior to needing them, and, these strategies can even prevent or reduce issues arising.
Having some proactive self-care strategies to hand, such as being mindful, treating yourself with self-compassion, and engaging in supervision, is a great way to start. It also helps to have some reactive approaches and tools to call upon as needed, whether utilised in the alert state or in self-hypnosis.
Being mindful
Mindfulness practice, being present in the moment, has many benefits, including proactively and reactively boosting mental and physical wellbeing.
Mindful practice boosts emotional resilience and helps with mental balance. It includes mindful observation of how we engage with our internal (emotions, sensations) and external world (see, hear, feel, smell, taste) and includes how we describe what we experience. This includes being non-judgmental of our inner experience (so not listening to that critical inner voice) as well as non-reactivity to our emotions. In other words, noticing negative thoughts and emotions and being able to detach from them. To recognise their existence without having to immerse yourself in them.
There are a vast number of mindful activities that you can find with a simple Google search. For any of these approaches, if any other thoughts intrude, recognise them as a thought and let them go (no need to follow them), refocusing back on what you were doing.
Examples of mindful activities include body scans, breathing, meditation, walking/active meditation (e.g. mindful eating), even mindful ironing!
Proactive self-care – Self-compassion
Are you ask tough with your friends as you are with yourself? The answer is, probably not. Treating yourself with compassion means supporting yourself during times of challenge. Rather than negatively judging yourself, criticizing or beating yourself up, or even squashing your emotions (‘suck it up’), self-compassion is about offering care and comfort to yourself.
A simple Google search will help you find many research studies which indicate that those who treat themselves with compassion tend to experience both mental and physical health benefits. By being kind, helpful and supportive to yourself in challenging situations you avoid being part of the problem, and, instead, become part of the solution. Creating and connecting to your own inner support is powerful. After all, you know yourself better than anyone else, so who better to be your best friend, mentor or coach than you! This builds a sense of personal safety and security that can help you to cope with challenges and engage in change.
Self-compassion requires perspective and benefits from you being mindful and remaining in the present moment. Rather than jumping to conclusions, ruminating over the past, over-identifying with negative feelings or thoughts, or catastrophizing about the future, it involves taking a more balanced perspective, and looking at the reality of the present moment.
Supervision
Therapy supervision, with an experienced supervisor, will explore how you are working with clients and can help you to identify and address therapist or personal issues which may be having an impact on you and your work. For example, anxiety, burnout, compassion fatigue, depression, or stress. You also have the benefit of early identification of issues such as counter transference, where you respond to the client’s transference (treating you as though you were the problem).
There are many benefits to both your personal wellbeing and your professional practice; supervision can even help you develop your business by creating performance targets, providing advice on professional development and work-life balance, and having defined actions and measurable goals.
Reactive self-care
As soon as you become aware of any impact on your mental or physical wellbeing, this is the ideal time to take action. It might be tempting to wait and see if things improve, or think that if you work harder, you can push through and things will get better. However, by taking time out to put yourself first, and engage in self-care, then you will be better equipped to address any further challenges. You may already teach clients how to self-sooth, yet those skills in emotional regulation are also really helpful for therapists. You may often encounter your client’s strong emotions, such as fear, anxiety, distress, stress and sadness. At the end of the session, the client may have effectively dumped their emotional rubbish in your therapy, and leave to go on with the rest of their day feeling great, whilst you are left having to deal with what they left behind.
It may be that you consciously recognise the impact of clients’ negative emotions, and notice that you are not feeling as great at the end of the day as you did when you started. You might feel yourself reaching out for a glass of wine, or a bar of chocolate, either to distract you from the day, or to reward yourself for tolerating the discomfort of your client’s distress.
Or, it might be that you are aware of the consequences of limited self-care, and notice misunderstanding and relationship conflicts arising from this. Perhaps you find yourself avoiding family and social activities, hiding away with internet surfing, and withdrawing from loved ones. Sadly, this can add to the problem, rather than resolve it, as social / physical contact can lower stress levels and increase levels of oxytocin (bonding). Interestingly, self-touch, such as the butterfly hug, can be as effective as receiving a hug from someone else.
Self-hug
A great form of self-soothing is the ‘self-hug’. Simply, cross your arms in front of your body to have your palms on your upper arms, and then explore whether you prefer stationery contact, just resting the hands there, a gentle tapping (either together or alternating), or a gentle stroking up and down. You might even say internally, or out loud, an affirmation. For example, “I am a good person”, or, “I am secure and confident”.
Say, sing, shout
You can explore releasing unwanted thoughts and emotions via sound. Perhaps that is by saying, out loud, what you wish you had been able to say that day. Maybe, it is in singing songs that make you feel good (where the deep breathing can also be a great side benefit). For some, the effort and force of shouting, can release a whole load of emotional or physical tension.
This blog has used extracts from our brand new self-care for therapists course, The course video and 74 page manual go into greater depth on the topics covered here, together with giving you an extensive range of alert state and hypnosis tools, strategies and approaches for pro-active and reactive self-care.
To find out about this course and our other courses, visit our course page.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this blog on self-care for therapists. If you have any more questions about this topic or anything else for that matter, do please get in touch, because we’re always happy to help!
– written by Dr Kate Beaven-Marks
(Hypnosis-Courses.com Trainer)
