Question
What happens if you do not make time for selfcare?
Answer
The therapist in me says, if you do not make time, you are going to find that you are going to burn out. That is the reality. If you are not prioritizing self-care, it is going to come back later to bite you, and think about the impact that would have, not just on you but on your wider area.
For example, if you take off work sick because of stress, because of burnout, all of your clients have to be shifted around, disrupting continuity of care. If you are seeing children or young people, it is going to be hard for them to trust a new therapist coming in. So, it behooves you to prioritize making self-care a priority for you.
The other thing is you are not indispensable. We are entrenched in systems that love to glorify busyness. We are entrenched in systems that very much grind everything out of us. And so, if you are not prioritizing yourself, no one else is, and capitalism is going to eat you up and spit you out and it will not think two seconds about you.
So as much as we like to think to ourselves that we are indispensable at our job, like if I do not do it, no one else is going to do it. I must stay late. I must hold all the pieces together. But, if you walk out today and get hit by a bus, capitalism is going to hire somebody else to take your job and the machine will keep going.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the webinar, Self-Care to Avoid Burnout, presented by Kelley Hollie, MSW, LMSW
