Your Therapist Friend Needs a Break Too

Being a therapist is a very difficult profession. It requires you to have unconditional positive regard for people you may not have otherwise interacted with. It requires you to have empathy and compassion for everyone who comes into your office. It requires complete focus on another individual and self-control to ensure your emotional experience does not influence that of your clients. It requires that you navigate emotionally vulnerable and close connections with clients in a professional and ethical way without breaking boundaries. It requires that your brain is working on overdrive each moment to analyze what is being said, synthesize it based on your clinical knowledge, and respond in the right way. Learning to be a therapist is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Yet it is also the greatest honor of my life.

That being said, every therapist needs time to not be a therapist. It requires a selfless self-control that not many will ever have to exercise. It is not sustainable to fill the role of “therapist” all the time. Every therapist needs their off-the-clock hours. When studying clinical mental health counseling, nearly every one of my classes had a lecture on the importance of self-care and boundaries. As I began to take on clients and assume the role of a therapist, I discovered how important it is to let myself not be a therapist all the time. It was a learning curve, lots of time spent thinking, “Okay, am I being a girlfriend/sister/friend or a therapist right now?” Then, asking myself the follow-up question, “Am I allowed to prioritize/communicate my needs in this moment, or am I being a therapist right now?” It took a lot of putting myself on the back burner to realize the price I was paying. The lines were blurred, and my “therapist hat” was getting hard to take off. I had to take big steps back from relationships that I cared about to pour back into my cup, the cup I had emptied playing therapist for everyone in my life. While I feel I have learned to set the boundaries necessary and have lots of practice maintaining those boundaries, I know this is a lifelong adjustment, a constant re-analyzation of where my therapist role starts and ends.

While there are parts of me that play into my being a therapist that I cannot separate myself from (knowledge of psychology, expertise in mental health care, ability to accurately empathize, etc.), I cannot be expected to be an on-call mental health professional for everyone in my life. Don’t get me wrong. I have no issue talking ad nauseam with people about mental health, therapy, or psychology, and as a middle child, I have often played the role of mediator. But to expect that I will maintain the level of selflessness and objectivity it takes to be a therapist is not a fair expectation for me or any of your therapist loved ones.

If you have a therapist friend, sibling, or partner, I am sure you have benefited from their compassion, knowledge, or expertise. Please do thank them. If they are like me, they probably spent years in school and tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars in tuition to acquire that expertise. Having access to their knowledge for free is far more special and valuable than you may realize. So, return the favor to your loved one by giving them a space to not be a therapist.

Let them be human. Give them space to mess up without holding their profession over their head as some shaming or invalidating response. Give them time to cry about the weight they carry on their shoulders day in and day out. Give them grace when they say the wrong thing and mess up. Don’t expect them to treat you as a client because you are not their client. If you were, they wouldn’t be your loved ones. So, let them just be without unrealistic expectations of how or who they should be.

Therapists are human, that’s why they can do the work they do. Those who choose to become therapists often have a mental health journey of their own that led them to this work, a journey that instilled in them the passion and compassion necessary to be a therapist. They understand what it means to mess up, to feel guilt, to feel hopeless, dysregulated, or out of control. They understand how it feels to have contentious, tumultuous, or even toxic relationships. Your therapist, your therapist friend, or family member, is not a perfect person, nor should they be. How would they acquire accurate empathy if not through lived experience?