Speaker A: Welcome to the Therapist Burnout podcast, episode 37. Hey therapist. Welcome back to the program. Today it’s me, and I’m talking to you about the myth of work life balance. So I’m going to go through four different reasons why it’s a myth, essentially, and how we can think about it differently. So let’s just get right into it. So September is a great time to think about a reset. A lot of us have gotten programmed that it’s the beginning of my kids are back to school. They are doing new routines. I am doing new routines. I also work for a school district, a couple of them, and I think it’s a perfect time to think about what do we need in a new season. So in the summer, my kids were home a lot of the time, and so I had a shift of what I needed during that time because it was a different kind of stress for sure. I love my little peanuts, but they needed to do it a different schedule, like 100%. So I love this time of year. I have four degrees in psychology, so of course I love school. I love being around a school atmosphere. I get like teary eyed at the beginning of the year, talks about how we’re going to motivate students, how we can really invest in the lives of students. So I do love being in the atmosphere. I think it’s just a wonderful spot. Kids look excited. Staff look refreshed from this break. So I think just knowing all of that, what this season brings, is one of my favorite times of year. I live in a particularly cold climate as well. So I love September in the state of Maine. It is beautiful and I just want to bottle up this time of year. So let’s get into it. Talking about four reasons why work life balance is a myth. So I posted a little bit about this on LinkedIn. If you are not on LinkedIn or you don’t post there, or you don’t go there, should I like some of the discussions that we have so you can find me on there, doctor Jen Blanchett, a licensed psychologist. You’ll find me. And I talked a little bit about the myth of a work life balance. So one of the things that I said is it’s normal for our lives to be out of balance at different points in time. There are different points in our careers that it’s going to take more from us. So some of those times for me have been starting a new degree program. So getting everything together that I needed to get together, wrapping up a degree program, having exams, writing my dissertation, those different projects required different things from me. I will add the caveat that when I wrote my dissertation, I did not have children. I did not have a lot of demands on my time. I had a cat who really didn’t need me a whole lot, but I guess I had to pet him here and there. But I didn’t really have a lot of demands during that season so I could invest more into my career. Similarly, that’s a hard word for me to pronounce. Anyway, during my internship year, that was a tough, tough year. I had to move with my partner for his internship. We do a predoctoral internship, so we match and we have to. Usually we have to move almost everybody that I know who’s a licensed psychologist, they had to do a pre doctoral internship. Typically you have to move across the country somewhere. You have to interview across the country, too. That’s fun. So that takes a lot out of your time, your life. And that internship year is a 40 hours, typically a 40 hours week job. Typically overworked, underpaid. I got a stipend, so it was minimum wage for my stipend. I know a lot of people say you actually got a stipend for your internship. I also did 2000 hours previous to that internship where I got no pay. So there was that. So I was happy after the first 2000 that I got minimum wage for the second 2000 hours. Anyway, I digress. We have this comparative suffering problem, don’t we, in our field? We do. We do. We all have our own stories with this. So that internship year was super tough. I honestly didn’t think I was going to make it through. There were times where I felt really targeted by a staff member. And I’ve talked about this a little bit on the podcast, but I went into that internship really not guarding myself for the environment that I was in. I worked for an agency on internship and I kind of went into it with a little bit of disappointment. So I waited a year. I didn’t match my first year in my internship and I wanted to match to an APA accredited site. So if you’re a psychologist, we all want an APA accredited site so that we can have like the top level of certification throughout our training. It hasn’t impacted me. The only places that don’t accept people without an APA internship are like the VA, which they’re under staffed. So I don’t even know why they do that. But. And some other, maybe some other places, but it hasn’t impacted me. No one asked me, did you go to an APA accredited internship internship no one has asked me that. So where was I going with that? Anyway? Yeah. So I’m coming into this internship program with kind of like a chip on my shoulder. Like, I’m not. I’m not gonna lie. I had. I wanted a different experience, but I should have held that stuff in, because one person over heard me say it when I first got there, that I was looking for an APA credited site and that it was apic. And if you don’t know those acronyms, it’s just a different. It’s not an accreditation. So I was already labeled at that at the time that I got there. She doesn’t want to be here. She’s probably not going to do a good job. I don’t know. This is what I told myself. I don’t know who all said that, but at least the person who was targeting me definitely said something to herself about me. Uh, because it was a tough year of getting called into offices, of feeling like I was failing constantly feeling judged that I wasn’t measuring up clinically to the standards that they wanted me to be on. It was just a whole thing. I called my. My program and let them know that I was struggling. I did seek out some therapy, although that therapist told me when I saw them with the EAP program, I saw them probably three sessions, and I was telling them about what I was feeling and experiencing, and they told me I was idealist. That hurt. I guess I’m idealist if I expect to be treated with dignity and respect as an employee. I didn’t expect special treatment. None of that. Other things that I was doing, other than not knowing the computer program that I wasn’t trained on. I don’t know, if I rewind time, I can’t really see the actions that led to the treatment that I received. That psychologist at that time telling me that I might be idealistic, really stung, that I shouldn’t expect a lot, that I, quote, unquote, have to pay my dues and accept poor treatment. The whole point of that story was to tell you that there are times in our careers where we’re really out of balance, and that’s normal. I felt I didn’t know if I was going to make it through that program. I did. And I got to the next hurdle, which was my postdoctoral placement, which was a whole other cup can of worms. That was another season that took a lot out of me. So, after that year, I had a postdoc lined up. That company went under. My husband and I had to move to the state of Maine, because we were both out of a job. We were starting at the same company. That was the last economic downturn. And I literally cold called different postdoctoral placements trying to get a job, because for psychologists, we don’t have a conditional licensure where we can bill when we’re conditionally licensed. At least in my state, I don’t have one. So I was thinking about applying for, like, a licensed mental health counselor position or licensure so I could at least bill and make some money and pay for supervision. But luckily, there was a miracle, and I found a postdoc and it worked out. And I’m thankful for that. That breakthrough that happened, I attributed that to some luck, a lot of luck, and also, you know, interviewing skills, my ability to kind of communicate who I was as a therapist, all of those things. So another experience. So that was all of work that sends us out of balance, right? So fast forward a little bit. I had a young child right as I was wrapping up my postdoctoral training, and he had heart surgery, and I had planned to stay at my agency job. However, I didn’t feel like I could leave my little baby who had heart surgery, and I didn’t work for a good six months, months after that, because I just felt like I could not leave him. So, again, I was just trying to balance the stresses of being a new mother, a mother to a infant who had heart surgery, dealing with my own trauma reactions from going through all of that, having a baby in NICU. So there’s times when our lives are going to take us out of sync or I really think, like, taking our attention away from our work life, like if we have a loss in our families, if someone passed away, a major medical event for a family member or yourself, that takes you away from the work. You have to invest more in your personal life, less in your work life that has to go on coast mode, or that has to really be a lot reduced, for example. So my first point is, work life balance is a myth, complete myth. There’s no way that we can completely balance one or the other and really think we to think about this term that I keep talking about of counterbalance. So counterbalance is really thinking about what stresses are coming up. So, for me, I know my work really ramps up when I work for schools towards the back half of the school year. So work is going to take a lot of my attention after January, all the way through June, those six months, I am writing reports, and that’s a lot of what I’m doing. And the other parts of my work really take a backseat. I have to think about pre planning, like for this podcast that my podcast has to be on autopilot. I have to have some podcast episodes in the bank, right? So thinking ahead to this counterbalance of what season you’re in. So if you’re a parent of a young child, you’re probably in a season where home life has to be, has to have more of your attention because your children need more of you. That’s just natural. It’s developmental. They’re going to need more of you at that time. And if you have children who are not 18, then they require more of your time. They demand your attention. So thinking of this counterbalance of what season am I in and how can I counterbalance the stresses and the roles that I’m fulfilling in my life is really important. So it have you think about. Just sit down and think about your life right now. If you’re in solo practice or if you’re working for somebody, how much attention can work really have? So it’d have you think about that counterbalance piece. My second point is that being out of balance is really normal. And that was really talking about those different experiences for myself when life was really out of balance. So my second point is that counterbalancing is really what we should strive for instead of balance. We’re always changing and adapting throughout our lives. And as therapists especially, we have this belief, and we don’t say it out loud to anybody, but we think about all that intensive work that we had to do early in our careers, so we had to put in all those hours to get our license. If you’re licensed, I know a few people that a lot of people, some of you listen to this podcast might be pre licensed. So perhaps you’re putting in those hours, perhaps you’re even managing your children, doing all of that. Kudos to you. I always said, I don’t know how people who have children do this if they’re trying to get their license. So maybe you’re doing that while you have children and you’re trying to do it all and it feels impossible. Yeah, it’s pretty hard. So thinking about that counterbalance of, okay, this is needing my time, these other things also need my time, but I can’t do it. All three would be that you need to have different expectations for your season. So if you’re in a season where home life demands more of you again, like if your children are younger, if you are trying to work towards licensure, for example, for me, when I was working on my dissertation that season requires you to invest more in work, invest more in your home life. And I think especially for my female identifying folks, we’re often the ones that are caring for the children. We are socialized to be caretakers. And I think it’s hard to know where the caring stops and where it ends. I think part of my compassion fatigue and burnout was when my children were home. In the pandemic, there really was so many blurred lines to where caring stops and caring ended. So I’m caring for someone in my therapy relationship with them, seeing them on Zoom, which was also tiring at a whole other level. And then my kids needed my attention. So maybe I had to, like, come off a call and go right into parenting. There’s really not a lot of transition and natural rhythm to that, and that was a unique circumstance. But I think still, we’re. A lot of us are struggling with how do we shut off work? How do we shut off devices? And I think, fourth, it’s harder to have a sense of equilibrium, I won’t say balance day than it was before. Because of the influence of smartphones, because of the influence of social media, we have a phone where we have connectivity to our business 24/7 so if you work for agency or someone else, you have your email right on your phone. And so the pressure to feel like you need to respond to that is ever present. So really think about for that, of thinking about non negotiables on our time, ways that we can put guardrails up so that we’re not feeling like we’re constantly working. And I think that’s really what’s plaguing a lot of us right now. We feel like we’re constantly working, we’re constantly on, and I think with having smartphones as well, the burden, clinically, of our clients being able to reach us wherever we are. So we’re relaxing on the beach. You have your phone, you get an email from a client or an email from work, and you’re right there. You feel like you need to respond. If that’s the expectation set by your job, or if you have responded in the past to a client, or if a client reaches out to you and they’re in crisis, we might be responding from the beach, responding from places where we don’t want to respond. Literally, our phones are a trigger to feel like we need to constantly be connected and is our link to having that clinical burden be with us wherever we are. So putting up guardrails and having non negotiables for our time and with our emotional labor is very important. So communicating to our clients about how they can reach us and really having to stick to that. Perhaps that means if you’re in private practice, you choose not to take clients with high levels of acuity because you don’t want to be answering the phone or having to do crisis calls, for example. And I think for a therapist in private practice, it is perfectly acceptable to let clients know that you don’t provide crisis services, have that in your informed consent forms so that they know they need to contact crisis numbers or resources outside of your sessions, for example. However, we have the expectation that we want to please our, we want to please people, right? We want to make our clients happy. We want to make sure that people feel cared for. So answering those messages where we know we shouldn’t do it, a lot of times we choose to do it because we feel like we don’t want them to feel like we don’t care for them. We’re worried that they may feel abandoned or neglected if we’re not responding. So thinking of really protocols for how you manage your phone, how you manage your time, is essential to counterbalancing the stress that comes with working as a therapist or working in this field. So while I don’t work as a therapist, I still work in the field, I still do work related to mental health. And I think it’s really important that we have protocols in place to know what do my clients have in place when they become dysregulated? What is their go to? Because therapies address rehearsal for life. So if we are preparing them for life, then we’re preparing them for these situations where they’re going to be dysregulated and how they can get in touch with us and when they can get in touch with us. I think the tendency early in our careers is that we want to be everything to everyone. So to be a quote unquote good therapist, we need to invest more into work. We need to make sure that we’re super available and super accommodating, that people feel like they get really cared for, that we’re. We have them at the top of our minds. And while we do, we also need to set that down. We also need to set that burden down. One of the big things that therapists talk to me about is the clinical burden is essentially being in charge of the care of a person. And I think the reset that we need to have is that, especially for our adult clients, is that we are not responsible for them or for their choices and that to provide good care, we have to make sure they know that they are ultimately responsible for their lives. We cannot hold that responsibility. And I think sometimes we get in that place of feeling like we need to be their rock or be their, their biggest supporter when resetting that for I am trying to help you find your biggest supporter in your life. That is my role, to help you find those things and that person, because I won’t always be here. Whether or not I leave the field like I did leave the practice if I become ill, for example, we’re setting them up for success in that way. But because we feel like we need to be everything to everyone, we don’t want to let people down. We feel like if we’re not accommodating and available all the time, that we’re not providing a good service. So just to recap, I want you to think instead of work life balance, to think about counterbalance. What is the season you’re in right now? What do you need to counterbalance the stresses and the demands on your time? Do you need a reset? Do you need to reset some of your relationships, some of the expectations that people have on you? Often the first step for a lot of my clients is pulling back, is really taking a look at their life, their schedule, and removing things before thinking about putting other things in. I think one of the traps that have us think that we should have, quote unquote perfect work life balance is that we hear a lot of this information about self care. Well, are you doing your self care? Is that why, you know, you’re out of balance and stuff? There’s no amount of self care that can fix burnout or depletion. Constant caring and constant giving requires that same level of constant, the same level of care and attention that you’re giving to come back to yourself. So if we need that intensive care and support to be able to give from a different place, we have to seek that out and know what’s going to restore our bodies, our hearts, our mind, our souls. One thing I heard on a consult call this week was that seeing a lot of trauma clients has changed the way they see the world. And I so resonated with that for a while, I really struggled with feeling any feelings of positivity and joy and happiness because, number one, I felt really stuck in my work. I felt like I started this practice, I had to keep going, like what happened to all my clients. So I just had all of these things where I felt like I could not change. And then the changes that I tried to do didn’t work for quite a long time until I made the decision to ultimately close and find a different way to make money. So I know that there’s other therapists that are struggling with that feeling of depletion, with sadness, with depression, and just know you’re not alone in that. Just know that while that isn’t a great place to be in, it’s what a lot of people feel. Especially if you’re doing a lot of trauma work and feeling like it’s changed who you are. It might change who you are now and will continue and how you see the world, but you can also heal from that too. And while that has taken me time to say that, I feel like I can start to say those things now. I know that many of you listen to me, many of you listening to this just need deep rest. You need break. You need and you so deserve it. So just have you think, how can I have a break today, this hour, this week, this month, this year? Really think about those experiences that are going to counterbalance the stress and demands that are on you in the season and start to get excited about those breaks. Those times like get obsessed with your ten minute nature walks. If that’s all you have, tell your brain how much you’re looking forward to that. I’m thinking about an upcoming vacation to go see my family and I’m trying to tell myself of what it’s going to be like to be on the beach with my brother to see my family. Many of them I have not seen in over a year. So telling yourself how you’re looking forward to that. If you need some support, I’m here for it. I have just an email list if you want to know about the podcast. Get updates from me about what’s going on. I’d love to be your pen pal. I do write back, so join the pen pal list if you want. If you want more support. Like if you want support in, you know, you want to leave your role as a therapist or your agency job, or you want to close your practice and no one else is talking about this, then I’m here for it. So I do offer consult call for if you’re ready to quit. So before you quit, jump on this consult call and let’s just get some clarity on what your next steps are and how you can get some real support. I’d love it to be me, but if it’s not, I likely have some other ideas about what can be your next step. Alright, have a good one.
