Advice For Psychotherapist - Dealing With Burnout

In the career of every psychotherapist, there comes a time when it becomes very difficult to help depressed patients solve their problems. It’s like the initial spark that has made you capable of treating people and helping them with their problems is long gone. Once you submerge yourself in the problems of others, and pay less attention to your own, you might become incapable of doing your job with the necessary motivation.
It is crucial for a therapist to know that doing what he does – treating depression in other people, can have a risky effect on themselves. Depression is contagious , in the sense that it is easy for people to start feeling depressed about their own problems after they hear about those of others. By giving your positive energy, lending it to others who might need it, it may be natural for you to feel depleted in a certain sense, to feel incapable of sorting out your own issues . It is crucial for you , both in a personal plan and in a professional one, to get rid of these depressive feelings before they take over you and make you incapable of handling your ordinary day to day tasks. If that happens, you’ll be experiencing burnout as a psychotherapist.
Preventing burnout, as well as depression, requires you to take a look at the very same things you point out to your patients. Every person, in order to feel good and to be productive, needs to be given attention, a sense of security and safety, of meaning and purpose, of respect. In the end , it doesn’t matter if you’re a therapist or not – if you’re a human being, you need these things in order to be productive in your job. If you’re constantly exposed to needy people, it will be likely for others to perceive you as a therapist first, and to be able to expect of you not to depress. This is a crucial mistake you need to remind your close friends and family not to make. Tell them that even as a therapist, you yourself also have needs – to share with someone, to get advice and guidance , and that you’re no different from them in the need of another’s opinion and another’s care.
Also , as it commonly happens to psychotherapists (or godt psykoterapeut københavn as we say in Denmark), you’ll be asked to help someone out of work. Even if you feel comfortable with it from time to time, it becomes very depressing if it’s too much. If someone is so persistent over the idea, ask them to book a meeting. Be polite and don’t hurt their feelings, but at the same time, try not to get yourself worse by trying to give people all your help and attention all around the clock. That’s not only tiring, but hardly good for you in any sense. You can’t be everyone’s therapist , not unless you want to end up completely depressed and sad in the end. Be careful with this and you won’t have any problems.
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