If you’re a mental health therapist, counsellor or social worker, there’s a good chance you’ve experienced trauma due to the nature of your work as a helping professional.
Your professional life is dedicated to helping clients. You help people who are vulnerable, and they depend on you.
Your work is taking on other people’s emotional burdens and providing care. You put everything into your work because you were called to help others. Throughout your career, you’ve helped people save their relationships, families and lives. You’ve helped people work through grief—even when they weren’t aware of it—countless times.
Your case load is ever increasing and so are the expectations of your employer. You’re pressuring yourself to keep up with the demand and continue to serve the expanding needs of your clients.
You’ve noticed that mental health issues are becoming more complex and many of your clients meet concurrent diagnosis criteria.
With all this as part of your daily experience, you simply haven’t had a moment to pause and reflect on whether you’ve been traumatized by your work serving clients.
Trauma comes in many forms for helping professionals. It can come with dramatic events such as suicide, death, assault and verbal abuse. But it also comes in more subtle forms. You can experience work-related trauma when a client drops out of care and you’re not sure what happened, when you get a serious referral but cannot reach the client and when treatment fails.
This vicarious trauma adds up over time. You may not even know anything is wrong until you suddenly realize you’re not yourself anymore.
Does any of this sound familiar?
There’s a myth that people in the helping professions are so strong that they don’t need any help. That as therapists, we don’t get to have problems of our own.
This is false.
You only stay strong by getting help when you need it.
That’s where I come in.
I’m a registered clinical social worker and clinical traumatologist, certified in EMDR and cognitive behavioural therapy.
I provide trauma counselling for therapists, counsellors and social workers who have experienced traumatic events due to the nature of their work.
We all “know” supporting our own mental health is essential—after all, to become therapists, we had to participate in therapy. This is to prove that we know taking care of ourselves is essential for taking care of clients.
But when things get busy and stressful, it’s easy to forget this lesson.
My work-related trauma started when I lost a client to a drug overdose.
I blamed myself. I told myself I didn’t do enough. I wasn’t available enough. That he overdosed because I didn’t call him at the right time. That my mistake took his life.
My employer at the time didn’t offer support and I didn’t ask for any. I thought it was a sign of weakness and worried that if I shared my guilt of not calling him the day before his overdose, I’d be blamed. So, I stayed quiet and never told anyone.
My wakeup call was when I started to dread seeing clients with substance use issues. I wished they would miraculously go to another counsellor. At the same time, if they were late or no showed for their session, I had catastrophizing thoughts that they died.
The suffering stayed with me for a year, and in the meantime, I lost two more clients to substance use.
Finally, I decided to get help.
Here I am now, knowing that it wasn’t me or my work that caused the loss of my clients. I gave my 100% then and I continue to give my 100% now. But by processing my work-related trauma, the 100% I can give now is much more than the 100% I could give while shell-shocked by trauma.
Part of doing my 100% means helping you process work-related trauma so you can get back to giving your 100%.
Because I think it’s time to ask ourselves what message we’re sending as helping professionals. How can we help our clients when we’re reluctant to help ourselves? We ask our clients to open up and risk vulnerability so we can help them. After trauma, it’s essential that we’re strong and brave enough to do the same.
I know what it’s like to experience trauma from counselling, plus I’m a Clinical Traumatologist, certified in EMDR and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. EMDR and cognitive behavioural therapy are effective methods of treatment for trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder.
If you’re experiencing any of the symptoms on that long list above, it’s time to take care of yourself. If your family is complaining about how distant you’ve become, it’s time to get help. If you’re abusing substances to cope with work, it’s time for help. If you’re having suicidal thoughts, it’s time for help.
Because you’re tough and strong. And strong helping professionals start by helping themselves.
Trauma therapy can help you get back to who you were before you saw too much.
I’m here to help.
If you’re ready to get back the professional life you love, book a free, 20-minute consultation with me to see if trauma counselling is right for you.
We’ll discuss your view of the treatment plan. After all, we’re both therapists and I’ll share my suggested treatment plan with you, including how I can support you on your journey with trauma and getting back to feeling like yourself again.
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