Emotional Labour

“I feel like I have a mental fever”.

I was confessing this to a friend who was also completing her internship. We met regularly to discuss the baptism by fire that was our internship. Usually, we talked about learning or meeting the requirements for the registration pathway. But today was the first time I opened up about how the work made me feel.?

In a rush, I told her that I drove home every day with a head full of racing thoughts. I was trying to process the things I’d heard in sessions and at the same time trying to suppress them. It didn’t feel professional to be like this, so even as I was blurting it out I was bracing for her judgement. I was sure she’d be concerned about my suitability to be a psychologist.?

Instead, she told me she’d been going through the same thing. And interestingly she’d also refrained from telling her supervisors any of this. Our supervisors were warm, but we didn’t think it was a thing you did. It didn’t seem professional at that stage in our careers. The internship seemed like a place for learning and meeting competency, not self-care or reflecting on personal issues. Over follow-up conversations, we wondered if our supervisors ever felt like this. After all, they seemed so competent and unbothered by the work.?

If I’m honest, I don’t remember exactly when I changed my attitude about what the emotional life of a mental health professional should look like. But, I do distinctly remember catching up with the same friend again several years later and talking about the internship over coffee. I was explaining to her that I’d moved into a role that allowed me to have fewer therapy-heavy days. I had no problem saying I was enjoying the change because I needed a break from a previously punishing schedule of up to 8 therapy clients a day. She shared that her days in private practice would consist of a maximum of 6 clients a day and spreading her complex clients out over the week. Neither of us seemed to have any concern about being viewed as unprofessional for acknowledging the emotional burden of our work. We’d figured out our way to take care of our mental health and continue the work.?

As I drove home I reflected on the elements that had helped me change. I knew it was partly due to maturing as a person, just as much as a professional. You get older and you stop idealizing the work. You know it's great work, but like any kind of work, there needs to be balance. And just because it’s work we love, doesn’t mean it can’t burn us out.

I also knew part of the change was due to good supervision.? My current supervisor talked about cases from two angles. First, what was going on for the client and second, what was going on for the clinician. The focus on acknowledging the dynamics between the two people in the room made much more sense to me. It was clinical but made room for the complexities of human relationships.?

And then there was the influence ACT had in my life. I’d been using it as my primary therapy for over 10 years and noted that it was the first therapy I wanted to apply to myself. I practised mindfulness, acceptance, and cognitive defusion and slowly developed a less rigid view of myself and my feelings. It allowed me to see that my emotional life didn’t stop the minute I walked into work. And better yet, it didn’t need to, I could make room for it across all the domains of my life.??

If I could give psychologists starting their journey any advice about how the work affects them emotionally, I’d start by encouraging them to admit that it does. There’s no good reason to think that our work is something that we can neatly pack away at the end of every day. We do emotional labour for a living and finding ways to deal with this reality without suppressing our emotions or thinking of ourselves as less professional, is a must.