Issue #186: What Working with Clients Has Taught Me About Burnout

Wring out the sponge.

🎥 ‘Black Bag,’ in theaters: This spy thriller (by the same duo who wrote and directed ‘KIMI,’ recommended here!) stars Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as a married spy duo who use the shorthand “black bag,” when engaging in missions too highly classified to discuss with the other. “My devotion to my marriage is my professional weakness,” says Cate, which is an apt summary of this fast-moving, smart thriller. I’m also curious to see ‘Opus,’ which stars Ayo Edebiri!

📚 Firstborn: A Memoir By Lauren Christensen: Lauren is a thirty-something editor living in New York when she and her husband learn she’s pregnant with their first child. At 20 weeks, the unimaginable happens, and Lauren learns that their daughter Simone is dying in the womb. Lauren weaves the intimate loss and grief around her stillbirth amid larger, existential questions in this haunting memoir, out today.

📺 “The Åre Murders” on Netflix: As if we needed another high-stress show (!), I’m intrigued by the premise of this Swedish murder mystery, which I found thanks to

Jessie Randall

’s recommendation. In it, a young girl goes missing at a Swedish ski resort town, prompting an investigator, who is there on vacation and under internal investigation, to go looking for her.

Workplace stress is nothing new to me. I’ve held editorial jobs where pitches were due by dawn and worked in roles probably better suited for three people, but I’ve never experienced anything quite like the emotional demands that come from practicing therapy.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve upped my caseload at my clinical internship to the point that clients come and go with the dizzying cadence of a revolving door. As soon as one session ends, I’m walking into another, conducting an intake, or running a group for people impacted by substance abuse and houselessness. It is immensely gratifying—and emotionally all-consuming.

Sitting with clients requires being wholly present with their pain and trauma, an experience I’ve seen described as akin to meditation. When addictions expert

Carl Erik Fisher

asked one of my favorite writers on psychotherapy, Dr. Mark Epstein, how much time he spends meditating or “sitting,” he responded, “When I’m working, I’m sitting like eight to ten hours a day because being a psychotherapist is all about sitting.” Similar to when we sit with our own minds, being present with another’s requires the constant “calling back” of our attention, so we can hold, witness, and work with everything they bring into the space.

It genuinely feels like a sacred space, but it also means that by the end of the week, I feel like a sponge, saturated in the emotional content my clients have brought in. I often need an entire day to wring myself out and recenter—a careful attunement that, when ignored, contributes to the disproportionately high burnout rate in therapists.

While I usually head straight home to tend to myself at the end of my internship week, I left Thursday night to head directly to dinner plans and a performance of ‘Hamilton.’ The last time I saw the show was during the Obama administration ten years ago, a decidedly more cathartic and less complicated experience than this time around. At no fault of the performers, I left the theater feeling a low level of dread and depression that compounded the emotional weight that had accumulated over the week. When I woke up Friday morning, after a terrible night’s sleep, I felt depleted and exhausted. All it took was one small frustration, and I was careening.