I’ve written about the daily activities of a mental health counselor, and future posts will address more in detail the duties of a mental health counselor. However, what I HAVEN’T written about yet is how it FEELS. You know, what it’s like. So that’s what this post will be about.
Counseling people is like having emotionally intense conversations with friends all day long. Only, the conversations are mostly one-way, and since you don’t know the client, the emotions reside mostly with them. It’s a really strange thing. It’s like having intimacy with strangers all day long. They open up to you, tell you heart-wrenching things, and you sit there and think about them like they are a puzzle. Then, they pay you and leave. Very odd now that I sit here and think about it.
It’s exhausting work, but very rewarding. It can also affect us greatly.
We enter the lives of our clients when they are at their worst and leave when they are at their best. Sometimes I think this skews our sense of reality. For example, the other day I read about all of these people who are actually happy at their jobs. I couldn’t believe it- I actually thought virtually everyone was miserable. Yet here was an entire list of people talking about how they loved their jobs. Same thing when I see a happy couple- I think it’s an anomaly, or that it’s just a matter of time until they need counseling. We have to be careful to balance our lives so that we see things in a more balanced way. Now I understand why one of my counseling professors told us to garden.
Some of us aren’t cut out to be therapists. If we are overly empathetic, and take our clients’ feelings with us when we leave the office we are in trouble. We simply can’t afford to carry around all of that pain and negativity. The people who do this will burn out in a few years and will no longer be effective counselors. We have to learn to keep clients’ problems at the office. This means establishing boundaries; ie. not allowing clients to continually run over their time, not doing phone sessions on demand, not allowing clients to expect on-demand phone therapy, and my personal favorite, not working on our day off. Yes, therapists need days off, too.
There are times that I get emotional in session. It doesn’t happen too often, but when it does I just explain (briefly! Therapy is never about the counselor!) to the client what is going on, shrug, and reach for a tissue. Nobody has ever gotten upset with me because I tear up as they are telling me a tragic story. But I don’t take this home with me. It stays in the office. When it starts to come home, I know something is wrong and I need to readjust my boundaries, limit my client load, and/or seek peer support.
Because my conversations with people are so intense at my job, when I come home I rarely feel like talking. To anyone. I don’t want to talk on the phone and I certainly do not want to talk in person. Your family has to understand this. We’re talked out and we need some time to regroup.
I also have to be careful not to enter therapy mode with my friends, or even people I have just met. I’ve caught myself several times doing this out of habit. It can be hard to separate the professional self from the personal self, but we must. Otherwise our friendships will take on that therapy-like one-way thing, and that won’t be good for us. In fact, I found that once I started doing counseling the needs in my personal relationships shifted. I found that I was in much more need of someone who would listen; I was much more sensitive and apt to feel slighted when friends failed to do this. And they did. Kind of often. As a result, I’ve had to carefully consider who to keep in my life. So, the work has changed the dynamics of my personal relationships.
But that’s all the negative stuff. There’s lots of positive- I just didn’t focus on it because if you’re reading this blog, you already know what that is. Otherwise you wouldn’t have considered this profession in the first place. And, yes, most of that stuff is true. It IS extremely satisfying to help people, and it IS an honor to be trusted enough in order to do that. All true. I just focused on the negative because this is stuff I didn’t know when I started, and so I suspect you don’t, either.
On the best days, counseling is like sitting down for tea with your best friend, only you can’t talk about yourself. On the worst days, it’s like facing the bully in the school yard, only you can’t speak up for yourself. At least not in the way you really want to. In a sense, becoming a counselor means giving up part of the human side of you – the side of you that has needs and wants to relate to other humans on a personal level. We can’t get our personal needs met while we are in relationship with our clients. Know that, be prepared, and get ready for the most fulfilling career you could ever hope for.
Yours in the Joy of Knowledge,
Barb LoFrisco
Also check:
• https://mastersincounseling.org/imspiration/dont-let-mistakes-derail-your-success/
• https://mastersincounseling.org/counseling/how-to-find-a-job-after-graduation-networking/
• https://mastersincounseling.org/education/how-to-be-successful-in-graduate-school-part-two/
