Sustainability Coaching for Helping Professions
Certain professions carry inherent psychological risks—not in the hard-hat-and-safety-goggles sense, but in the toll they take on your empathy, your nervous system, and your sense of purpose. Burnout, compassion fatigue, and vicarious trauma are professional hazards of caring work, and they need to be actively managed as risk factors.
My practitioner sustainability coaching is focused on practical strategies, professional knowledge, and skill-building to help you sustain yourself in work that demands a lot of you. My background as a licensed clinician and as a former research assistant studying burnout and counselor wellness informs my approach. The focus here is on what you can do to protect you and the work you love.
What Are the Psychological Hazards of Caring Work?
Burnout is often characterized by a loss of a sense of self-efficacy, emotional detachment and exhaustion, cynicism, and decreased quality of work. Compassion fatigue can be a subset of burnout or be separate but includes a decrease in the ability to empathize with the suffering of those whom you are trying to help.
Secondary traumatic stress (also called vicarious trauma) is a particular risk of jobs that require repeated exposure to images or descriptions of violent or disturbing material even when you yourself are not experiencing the violence. With the increase in violent imagery in the news and on social media, you can find yourself exposed even outside of work. It can leave you struggling with intrusive images, nightmares, hypervigilance, and avoidance after reading, hearing about or watching violent images.
Who Is This For?
If your profession asks you to show up with empathy day after day or to repeatedly engage with other's trauma or suffering, the risks described above come with the territory. The question isn’t whether they’ll show up, but whether you have the tools and practices in place to manage them before they take hold. I am able to work with a wide range of professionals whose job requires emotional engagement with people in pain, including other therapists, teachers, nurses, and first responders.
How I Work With You
I start by taking an inventory of the barriers and supports toward well-being that are currently present in your life. This involves looking at:
-
Your personal wellness practices and self-care habits
-
The rewards and meaning you find in your current work
-
The unique stressors—professional and personal—that you’re facing
From there, we identify changes you may want to make. I find that insight and self-direction are the most important factors in lasting and effective change, so the goal isn’t to hand you a checklist. It’s to build your awareness of how you relate to the different facets of your work so that you’re better equipped to make changes that actually fit your life.
What You Can Expect
Depending on what you’re facing, our work together may include:
-
Strategies for mourning, release, and nervous system regulation to help mitigate the impact of difficult material on your day-to-day life
-
Identifying and strengthening supports and resilience factors to counterbalance the demands of your work
-
Building sustainable practices that protect your capacity to keep doing what you love
-
Developing greater awareness of the interplay between external demands and your own internal responses
If it becomes clear that what you’re dealing with goes beyond the scope of coaching—if there’s deeper psychological work that needs attention—I’ll be honest about that and can help connect you with appropriate therapeutic support, whether with me or with someone else.
Payment and Fees
Individual sessions are $200. I am primarily private pay and do not accept any commercial insurances. If you have out-of-network benefits, I’m happy to provide receipts or superbills that you can submit to your insurance for reimbursement.
”One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.”
Carl Jung