The Hidden Dangers of Being a Therapist

It’s possible I glorified what it was to become a therapist during my days training to become a therapist. It has to be true that for a while there, I thought that becoming a therapist would help me evolve into this really put-together and emotionally well version of myself.

As time went on and on, I further discovered that being a therapist is both a blessing and a curse. Obviously I couldn’t be more grateful for my ability to work with clients and for the progress I’ve seen clients make as a result of our connections. I’m grateful that I have so much insight into my own patterns of behavior and into the links between my patterns and my past stresses and traumas.

But let’s talk about the curse.

I’m always thinking about my mental health.

Let’s be fair; I should mention that I’ve been diagnosed with OCD, so it shouldn’t be shocking to any of us that I quite literally obsess over my mental health. But aside from my OCD, I know I can’t be alone in the “I’m-constantly-analyzing-myself” experience.

But that’s just one side of the double edged sword. While I might constantly think about my mental health, I’m simultaneously avoiding feeling my feelings. Because who really wants to get off work and then go do more work?

I once saw a reel on Instagram that spoke to this concept; “discovering that becoming a therapist was my trauma response.” That hit deep.

I became a therapist because I wanted to understand why my partner was making the choices he was making and to understand why I was making the choices I made. I became a therapist because I knew what it was like to feel judged for being emotional, and I wanted to create the emotionally safe space for others that I didn’t quite have in childhood. I became a therapist because I wanted to be for someone else who my therapist was able to be for me.

But I also became a therapist because it allowed me to focus more on the feelings of other people than on my own; because I learned over the course of my life that feelings were “too much.”

So let’s break down my top 3 “hidden dangers of being a therapist.”

1) Re-enacting your trauma in your professional career

Many of us become therapists because we learned to equate “doing for others” with “I am worthy and valuable.” We learned that we’re better liked and better loved when we can set our own feelings aside to be present for others in the ways others need us to be.

In our professional careers and personal time, we might spend any free moment thinking about our clients’ needs and our professional development journey in order to continually better serve our clients; neglecting to turn inwards and neglecting to process our own underlying triggered experiences. And sometimes just neglecting to participate in personal joy.

We “re-enact” our trauma by automatically self abandoning in the interest of serving others.

2) Avoiding your emotions in your personal life

As a helping professional, you might be experiencing compassion fatigue. I think we can all agree that being a therapist is emotionally draining (in the best way ever, of course) and it can feel like more work to face our own emotions head on after helping others do it all day long. You might be amazing at empowering others to face their emotions, but you might struggle to even label your own feelings on a day to day basis.

Here’s why; facing your own emotions requires that you feel rather than think. You’re good at thinking; your life has helped develop you into an excellent evaluator and analyzer. In fact, you’re so good at thinking, evaluating, and analyzing that you keep your default mode network activated constantly. Meaning, you’re more apt to ruminate, reflect, and cognitively think through your circumstances… when what your body really needs is to physically feel and move through your emotions.

3) The functional freeze state might ensue as a result of vicarious trauma

While you might not be personally impacted by the stresses and traumas your clients are currently facing, your body and nervous system might still have a reaction to the experiences you process with clients in your own therapy sessions.

For example, if processing grief with another client (while you might not consciously be impacted by their story), your body might even subtly react similarly to how it did during a time when you personally experienced grief; potentially triggering body tension, causing you to hold your breath, and perhaps causing you to crash and “couch rot” at the end of each day, with no energy or motivation to put forth effort in your personal life.

This isn’t an experience you can think your way out of, but rather an experience you have to regulate yourself through.

The therapist life is no joke.

I honor you as a fellow therapist because… DAMN… this work is the realest, and it’s important that we recognize these hard but important truths so that we can intervene accordingly. We carry a big responsibility; but the biggest one is to ourselves.

For help learning how to mindfully and somatically process emotion, you can access my free Emotional Processing Guide HERE.

I’m grateful you’re here.