Emotions And Self-Care

This article is from a series of articles on self-care for counsellors and therapists

Lizel just recently found out that her husband has been diagnosed with Cancer and he has advanced to 3rd stage already. Lizel felt her whole world come crashing down. She can’t seem to concentrate. She finds herself wandering away in thought when she is in a session as well.

Self-care is often misunderstood as time taken out for oneself and that is seen as selfish and nothing seems more far from the truth than this. If self-care is not attended to on a regular basis, it can affect all the circles of a therapist’s life. Let us consider only the emotional circle in this article. The other articles can be found here.

For example: In Lizel’s case, if she is worried about the health of her spouse, it will reflect in the ability to pay attention to the client’s story and what the client is presenting in the counselling room. Being present for the client is a crucial step for the client feeling safe in the counselling room. If self-care is ignored it can result in putting the client in danger.

When looking at the emotional circle, the addressing of feelings and emotions is paramount. Especially when there is a major issue going on in the family or immediate family members, it can affect the therapist concentration and performance in the session.

This is true of any emotional disturbance as well to the therapist. One of the ways that this can be worked on is to name them so that specific emotion can be identified and worked on.

Here are a few suggestions that can help a therapist at this time:

Keep a track of what you are telling yourself: We all have inner dialogues that we engage in on a daily basis, this has an effect on how we see things and events that happen in our life. Sometimes these dialogues can be quite detrimental to our functioning.

For example: A client doesn’t turn up for a following session, one of the inner dialogues that you can be having is “It’s my fault that the client didn’t come for a follow-up session. I didn’t do a good job the first time.” As therapists, one of the things to pay attention to is that the success is not just based on the effectiveness of the therapist but that it is the process, the methodology, the techniques that a therapist uses along with the willingness of the client to be open to that. Therefore, attributing the success of a session only on the performance of the therapist might be stretching it a little too far.

However, one’s confidence should be in the proper use of therapy and the therapeutic processes. Once you catch such thoughts and emotions, work on those thoughts and see where the roots of those thoughts are coming from and address those issues with a supervisor or a senior therapist. Keep a journal to address and track these internal dialogues. Systematically looking at it and working through these issues will tremendously help the therapist and in turn show in the counselling room.

Creating clear boundaries with work and play is essential. Often where there aren’t clear boundaries set there is a lot of merging that happens which can affect the ability to function fully. Why is this so important?

We have boundaries to keep our property safe, to demarcate where our lines begin and end and where another’s begins. Likewise with work, family and personal space, it is imperative to define those boundaries. If they are not clearly defined then there will be a lot of confusion and interplay of work and family, passing into the territory of personal space.

Having addressed this, it might be helpful to reschedule one’s schedule in such a way that enough time is given to each circle.

Another way that will help is to look at activities that help you calm down. Get creative with it and enjoy it as these activities are supposed to calm you down and make you relaxed.

For example: If you are interested in painting, you can spice it up by using different types of textures to paint on. Using different types of paints is also another way to change it up to make it more adventurous. To read more articles on self-care: Never underestimate the power of self-care