How Not To Burn Out While Working With Mental Trauma?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Today I would like to dwell in a little more detail on one of the most important problems of modern psychotherapy. It will focus on the ecology of psychotherapy of mental trauma and on the prevention of professional burnout of the psychotherapist. This topic seems to me all the more relevant in connection with the above-discussed concept of psychotherapy as a process that supports the experience

The following questions naturally arise: "What happens during therapy with the experience of the therapist himself?", "Does the therapist have the right to experience the events of his own life during therapy?"

I am convinced that in this case it is not so much about rights as about necessity. In my opinion, the most important tool in the professional work of the therapist is his own experience process. It is the therapist's freedom to experience the current context of life that is the leading therapeutic factor in determining the success of therapy. First, the therapist's treatment of his self-phenomena is, in a sense, a model for the client.

Secondly, only the therapist who is free in his experiences, through his creative dynamics and, therefore, high sensitivity to the current situation, can facilitate self-dynamics in contact. Thus, everything described above regarding the process of experiencing and self-dynamics is equally relevant to the therapist, including both the presence of mental trauma and the process of revitalization.

So, the therapist is also at risk of mental trauma, moreover, as the experience of conducting professional training programs for gestalt therapists shows, many of the most successful students have many of their own rather deep mental traumas. I think that the therapists' interest in the other and in themselves is largely motivated by their own traumas, and it is this factor (curiosity about the life of another person and their own) that largely determines success in our profession. Of course, the therapeutic tool of the therapist is not so much trauma as mental scars and scars left from them [1].

So what happens to the life of the therapist during therapy?

Being in contact with the client is also an event in the therapist's life. Therefore, it also needs to be experienced. At some point in time, the lives of two people turn out to be intertwined, joint. In the course of therapy, I experience the event of the meeting, and by supporting the process of experiencing the client, in a sense, we can say that I also experience his life. Of course, in this case, there is a danger of focusing only on the client's experience, ignoring oneself, turning, in the words of one of my many and successfully working colleagues, into "an apparatus for serving other people's lives." The way out of this situation is, on the one hand, sensitivity to one's life during therapy, which manifests itself as responses to contact with a client, on the other hand, an ecological attitude towards one's life outside of therapy.

The latter presupposes the maintenance of the completeness of the experience of life events and, as a consequence, satisfaction with life. In both cases, we are talking about the pregnant relationship of the processes of experience. The stalemate in therapy and the therapist's burnout is a consequence of the therapist's ignorance of his experiential process. A dynamic field implies constant dynamics of the figure and background. Creative adaptation presupposes the potential for background phenomena to manifest themselves as a figure.

In other words, in order to prevent burnout in the process of therapeutic work, the therapist should be attentive to his process of experience, and for this, sometimes it should be placed in the figure, if not of the therapeutic process, then of his own awareness. On the other hand, “burying” in the background of one's professional life the experience of events related to life outside of work deprives the therapist of the resources necessary, including for therapy. Moreover, ignoring the experience of one's life binds a significant amount of energy and excitement in this "grave", de-energizing not only the therapist's life, but also the therapeutic process. It is from this that the therapist needs his own personal therapy and supervision.

Another aspect of the ecology of crisis psychotherapy is the need for confrontation on the border of therapeutic contact with someone else's pain. However, in order to help the client to cope with his pain, you need to be able to deal with your own environmentally, which inevitably becomes actualized at the same time. The ability of the therapist to be aware of and experience their mental pain is, in my opinion, a prerequisite for successful therapy of mental trauma [2].

This factor is all the more important given that mental pain related to mental trauma never goes away without a trace, even after successfully completed personal therapy. Once appeared, mental pain does not leave a person, but remains as a reminder of the event. Eco-friendly (in the sense of experience) treatment of the therapist with his pain is, on the one hand, a model for the client, on the other hand, it acts as a preventive measure against the risk of professional burnout when working with crisis clients.

Summing up the discussion of the features of crisis psychotherapy in general, and the ecology of the therapist, in particular, I note that a necessary condition for both recovery and the existence of the process of experiencing in general is the presence of another and the boundary of contact in the organism / environment field. At the same time, what has been said relates not only to the client, but also to the therapist. In other words, the therapist can take care of himself by placing his process of experience in therapeutic contact (if he has the ability to be aware of the dynamics of self phenomena), as a supervisor (if difficulties in experience prevent the therapist from adequately fulfilling his professional task), or with his own a therapist (in case of blocking their experience process).

[1] By scars and scars in this context, I mean the phenomenological remnant of an experienced traumatogenic event or trauma (in the course of my own therapy). It is these mental scars that form the phenomenon of personality in its traditional understanding. As a matter of fact, there is nothing else that would make our uniqueness.

[2] I think that it is the presence of mental pain in a person and the adequate treatment of it that is the factor underlying the development of sensitivity to the experiences of another.