Why Therapists Need Support Too

The tell is the sentence “I’m fine, I just need a few quiet evenings.” You’ve said it about yourself this year, probably more than once.

The quiet evening does soften the residue of the day. Tuesday’s hard session loosens its grip while you cook dinner. By Wednesday morning you can show up again. The evening is doing real work. What it can’t do is process the cumulative deposit that the work leaves in you across months. The evening’s job is the day. The deposit needs something else.

What you carry across years has nowhere to go inside your own head. You’re trained well enough that you can probably do a passable cognitive piece of work on yourself when something’s bothering you. You know how to recognise an unhelpful thinking pattern. You know how to regulate your nervous system. None of that replaces being received by another person who isn’t paying you to listen, who isn’t your client, who has the bandwidth to actually attend to you.

Your own therapy is the centrepiece. A standing fortnightly or monthly hour with someone whose training you respect, that runs whether you’re in crisis or not. The hour is for whatever turns up. The fact of the relationship existing across years is what makes it useful. The clinical sophistication of any single intervention matters less than the steadiness of having a place where you are the one being met.

Around the centre, two or three other supports change the shape of the year. A peer consultation group of three or four other solo therapists, meeting fortnightly. The group’s stated purpose is case work, but a side effect of meeting steadily for two years is that the people in it know you. They notice the week you’re flat. One of them messages on Thursday morning to check in.

A specific therapist friend who you talk to monthly, by phone or in person. The conversations stay personal rather than clinical. The friend who’s been in this for fifteen years takes thirty seconds to understand what an ordinary clinician would need an hour of context for.

A regular supervisor or coach for the questions you can’t bring to friends. Clinical questions, business questions, the harder identity questions. Someone whose role includes helping you think clearly about the things you’re stuck on, on a paid hour where you don’t owe them anything outside that hour.

Someone in your personal life who knows your work well enough to hear when something is hard. A partner, a sibling, a friend who’s not in the field but who’s curious enough about the work to follow what you tell them. Not a colleague. Someone whose primary relationship to you isn’t professional.

In my-cbt, the case file pulls the documentation off your evenings. The Friday afternoon you used to spend catching up on notes is the slot where the consultation group fits, or your own therapy hour, or the call with the friend. The structure is what makes the support actually possible to schedule.

Build the supports while you’re well. The version of you who needs them most is the one least able to construct them. Set them up now.