Do helping professionals need their own therapy?
Yes. Helping professionals are shaped by relational wounds, losses, and hardships just like everyone else. Regardless of our academic studies and professional training, our feelings are stirred in professional and personal relationships, just like anyone else’s.
I have written this article to normalise helping professionals seeking their own therapy, while also highlighting some of the personal and professional reasons why therapy can be beneficial for helpers.
I believe all helping professionals can benefit from their own therapy as it can help with emotional resilience, attuning to our clients, patients or students with less of our own baggage getting in the way.
I am also a firm believer that “helping work” should not be a zero-sum game. If helping work has left you depleted and with less in the tank for yourself and your loved ones, there may be something worth exploring more deeply in therapy.
Why EAP for helping professionals is often not enough
Your work may offer an Employment Assistance Program (EAP). The EAP usually provides 3–5 sessions and is more of a crisis intervention, giving quick access to short-term solution-focused therapy and/or psychoeducation.
Our helping sector in Australia is understaffed, and people are often overworked. Importantly, it is not always just about the bullying and the psychosocial hazards that your employer is not addressing. Sometimes inner struggles, personal grief, or longstanding pain sit alongside workplace issues, and they may be the reason why you find it hard to speak up, move on to a new job or recover after a bad boss and bullying at work.
The problem with EAP for complex issues:
Firstly, if you access an EAP service, the timeframe is so short that the therapist barely gets to know you, let alone formulate — collaboratively with you — some understanding of the underlying causes that may have contributed to burnout or crisis point. Addressing underlying causes is usually not the primary focus of EAP counselling or psychology sessions. EAP services have very strict guidelines about how time is spent in sessions, and they are, by their nature, time-limited.
Secondly, for those working in frontline roles with people every single day, there is also the risk of serious workplace incidents such as a colleague, client, patient or student suiciding. My experience is that sometimes, a tragic loss in a workplace can be felt for years. Often, the loss sustained in the present time “tugs” at other losses or trauma in your past. Five EAP sessions are often not enough to disentangle and put words to what has been stirred up because of what happened in the workplace.
Why do some mental health professionals engage in their own therapy?
In most psychiatry, psychology and counselling trainings in Australia, a practitioner’s own therapy or the benefit they might get from it is not discussed or encouraged, nor is it the norm among many mental health practitioners. In some work roles, therapy is seen as a weakness, and in some settings, such as hospitals, there can be a culture that doctors or nurses should soldier on and not seek help.
In contrast, for mental health professionals working at a deeper therapeutic level, engaging in their own regular, long-term therapy is, however, widely regarded as an important part of training. This is also why you will see psychodynamic trainings incorporating minimum personal therapy requirements.
I believe personal therapy is non-negotiable if you want to become a rounded and effective mental health professional, preferably with therapy attended at a regular weekly frequency, as I discuss in this article about how often you should go to therapy.
Psychologist Jonathan Shedler, who is known for writing and publishing about the effectiveness of psychodynamic psychotherapy, lists a therapist having their own psychotherapy as one of 15 “green flags” for a good psychotherapist.
“In-depth personal psychotherapy for the psychotherapist. No one can know another person’s inner life unless they are intimately familiar with their own.”
The wounded healer trained earlier than their degre
I have often heard the comment that “mental health professionals just study psychology, counselling, or social work to fix themselves”.
I agree there may be unconscious reasons why some people are drawn towards helping work. And perhaps some of us are both here to help others and simultaneously do our own personal work—nothing wrong with that.
What I have seen both in private practice and organisational work in human services is that people who are deeply attuned when helping others often choose these professions because they already have a natural capacity to sit with emotional distress and an ability to attune to others.
It is, of course, difficult to tease out what is an inborn capacity and what is shaped by necessity (I don’t think it matters, as long as you are aware of both possibilities and how those experiences affect your work with others). Psychologist Karen Maroda (Maroda, 2022) suggests that therapists often “trained early” because they were the family member who could tolerate the distress of others. Maroda indicates that this early “learning” may also have come from having to survive in a dysfunctional family system and the natural temperamental inclination to soothe others in distress.
Natural or learned capacity to attune to others aside, helping work still demands a lot of us and if you want to overcome some of your own inclinations to, for example, be too supportive and inclined to agree with the views of others, personal therapy can help soften some of these relational inclinations over time. Poignantly, experienced psychologist and psychoanalyst, Jonathan Shedler, also points out that it is a red flag in a therapist if they “1. Agrees with almost everything you say”.
What kind of therapist should helping professionals see?
Many therapists, nurses, teachers, doctors, social workers, and other helping professionals need a space where they can step outside their professional roles and speak openly about both personal and work-related experiences.
When choosing a therapist as a helping professional, it can help to look for someone who:
Can separate therapy from supervision, while still allowing work and client relationships to be discussed in the room—the focus should be on you and the effects your work has on you, and how you relate to your work.
Can separate practical advice giving and skills building from addressing deep-seated issues to allow for your own understanding and agency to emerge over time.
Understands the therapeutic relationship itself, not just techniques or modalities, and that therapy for helping professionals often involves extra vulnerability for the helping professional in therapy. For example, it is not always easy to be in the client’s chair when you are used to being regarded with authority and “having it all together”.
Offers strong confidentiality and thoughtful handling of your "visibility" as a professional and the privacy you need, in particular if you are seeking in-person therapy.
Has a clear ethical stance around dual relationships, particularly in regional communities and the ability to discuss this openly and honestly.
Can create a space where grief, trauma, shame, anger, burnout, and vulnerability can be explored without judgment, and can tolerate you bringing the whole gamut of human experiences into the therapeutic relationship
References
Maroda, K. J. (2022). The analyst’s vulnerability: Impact on theory and practice. Routledge.
