The Other Side of the Couch: A Practical Guide for Therapists

By Melissa Danielson

This book should be on the bookshelves of every counselor, therapist, and
social worker. This is healing for the healer: therapy that turns its sights
from the patient on the proverbial couch to the caregiver who runs the daily
practice, examining the stress that comes with helping others.

Melissa Danielson gives an insider's view of the day-to-day challenges of a
counseling practitioner. She explains how to manage time; set healthy work
boundaries; manage stress, crisis, nutrition, and rest; and combat fatigue.
Her techniques include visualization, art, aromatherapy, cleansing rituals,
progressive relaxation, meditation, and more. In an effort to equip
practitioners with the tools that they need for their own well-being, she
provides creative, effective and fun techniques for in-office and at-home
management of this challenging profession.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 19, 2010
• ISBN: 9780984469406

Book preview

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

Copyright © 2010 Melissa Danielson

Published by Saddie Winston International

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission of the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

Printed in the United States of America

Danielson, Melissa

The Other Side of the Couch, A Practical Guide For Therapists on How to Leave Your Patient’s Problems at the Office/ by Melissa Danielson

ISBN: 9780984469406

Warning – Disclaimer

The purpose of this book is to educate and entertain. The author or publisher does not guarantee that anyone following the techniques, suggestions, tips, ideas, or strategies will become successful. The author and publisher shall have neither liability or responsibility to anyone with respect to loss or damage caused, or alleged to be caused, directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.

To practicing mental health counselors,

because they are amazing, caring, and deserve to be

recognized for their difficult work.

Melissa Danielson is a counselor living and working in Las Vegas, Nevada. She is a licensed marriage and family therapist with a Masters of Counseling from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Melissa has worked in hospital, pastoral, family treatment, and private practice settings. She has expertise in treating children, adolescents, adults, couples and families.

Melissa has had a wide range of training and practice. Her experience ranges from crisis and emergency support to longterm management of mental health concerns and family distress. This includes chronic mental illness, cooccurring disorders, mood disorders and trauma that affect children, adolescents, adults and families. Her specialized areas of practice include Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, depression, infidelity, marriage counseling, adjustment disorders, sexual abuse and other trauma as well as practitioner wellbeing.

Melissa’s approach uses a faithbased, strengthbased, solutionfocused therapy embedded in a narrative view. She is also trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and is a credentialed EMDR practitioner. Melissa is currently in private practice. You can learn more about her at www.DanielsonTherapy.com

Introduction

It has been my pleasure and my privilege to have known many members of the counseling profession. They are unique and especially gifted people who provide an invaluable service to people in need. I am proud and humbled to count myself among them.

The demands of the counseling profession are many and are often arduous. For these reasons, there are times when counselors provide services while suffering themselves. Mental and emotional exhaustion are occupational hazards. I have seen many of my colleagues and friends struggle to maintain or, at times, to regain their own balance. I have had to struggle to do so myself.

The subject of professional burnout has become very important to me personally and in my dealings with my colleagues. I very much want to support the extraordinary people who have chosen counseling as their profession. I want to see them happy and successful. In short, I want to see them stay in the profession, because we need all the wonderful counselors we can get!

My most memorable experience with professional burnout was early in my career. It took me by surprise, as I have found that it does with many, many counselors. In retrospect, I can see its inevitability; however, at that point in my life, I was a young and rather naïve counselor just about one month shy of a full year in practice. I’m sure that somewhere along the line, my mentors and teachers told me to expect it. Either I brushed it off thinking that it would never happen to me, or I simply could not imagine the experience well enough to recognize it when it arrived.

As a relatively new counselor, I still felt much joy and enthusiasm about my work. Things were going well. In fact, now that I think about it, things were going swimmingly well. I was working full time in a large mental health agency and had an attractive, affordable office, where my new, beautifully framed diploma hung prominently on the wall. Due to helpful colleagues and aggressive advertising, I already had a thriving practice. In just one year, I had managed to see 30+ clients each week. I knew that this was quite an accomplishment. Even though things were going beautifully, I was blindsided by my own bout of burnout. It was baffling and took me by surprise. In many ways, it felt debilitating and frightening. It felt as if my foundation had been pulled out from under me.

Like I said, perhaps I had been warned. Perhaps I had been prepared by teachers, supervisors and mentors. Perhaps, for me at least, professional burnout was something that I would never understand and never take seriously enough to work against it before it got here. It seems that I had to have an awful taste of it before I took it seriously. From what my fellow counselors and friends in the profession tell me, they’ve had similar experiences.

Here’s how it happened. When I was ready, completely prepared to be the best novice counselor I could be, I immersed myself in my clients’ travails and, made myself available at all hours of the day or night. I was proud of my accomplishments and my newfound success. I was running wide open and hungry for experience. The wonderful lessons that my clients taught me could never have been learned in graduate school. I had good relationships with colleagues and became familiar with the professional community. I was fortunate enough to have a good support system. All in all, I had a profound sense of growing confidence and accomplishment in my newfound career and reputation as a competent provider. I had all that and more: I had my first episode of counselor burnout.

I was caught completely off guard and was not prepared in the least to deal with burnout. My experience was extremely negative and painful. I felt myself bombarded by waves of overwhelming energy whenever my clients came to see me. It was as if the pain they brought into session literally became palpable. There were days when I thought that I would not be able to withstand it. There were also moments when I felt myself slipping, afraid that I would not be able to hold my own ground well enough to make it through the session, much less the day. I felt lost and alone, even though I was surrounded by a good support system. As I think about it, I felt that I was adrift somewhere, unable to see land or any possibility of rescue. It felt like a literal matter of survival.

With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, I now know what happened to me. With more experience under my belt and the advantages of retrospection, I am now the wiser for it. I had worked so hard to succeed that first year of my practice that I left myself no time for selfcare. I attempted to drive my passengers to their next destination and tended to their every need while depriving myself of adequate nutrition, rest, exercise, recreation, rejuvenation and revitalization. It was inevitable that our little imaginary bus with its weary, weary driver was going to either crash or break down.

Fortunately, several established counselors helped me. They suggested techniques and strategies for dealing with counselor burnout (most of which were common sense, but some of which were new age techniques) that really helped me then and continue to help me now. As I have talked to counselors over the years about professional burnout, I find that many mental health providers use such techniques routinely to maintain both their mental and physical health. I hope that by sharing the following information and suggestions, I will help other counselors avoid some of the pitfalls that I experienced.

Your journey as a counselor will be unique to you in many ways, but you will find that all of us in this profession share a great deal. Our common experience includes many of the underlying causes of counselor burnout. I encourage you to approach this information with an open mind and to begin to think about your profession in ways that include yourself. Furthermore, I strongly urge you to create your own maintenance plan for wellbeing as well as an emergency plan for regaining balance in your professional life.

I ask you to consider the following questions: Are you feeling run down? Is it difficult to leave your clients’ problems at the office? Are you often anxious and stressed due to your work? Has your enthusiasm begun to falter? Do you feel bombarded by the demands of your work? Do you struggle through your days? Are there clients or work tasks that you’ve begun to dread? If you find yourself burned out, I encourage you to have hope, and I promise you that there is hope. As empathic counselors, we cannot help but be affected by our clients’ tumultuous lives. We are exposed to negative, traumatic and painful information daily. The difficulties that we encounter are natural and normal, but there are many things that we can do in order to feel better.

These remedies and preventive measures are simple. Some of the things we need to do to pull ourselves out of a terrible