Therapy for Therapists

Because "physician, heal thyself" is terrible advice and you, of all people, know it.

You're the one who holds it for everyone else. You're good at it, too — present, attuned, the steady nervous system in the room. And then session ends, the notes pile up, and you're left with a body full of other people's weather and an inner critic who's somehow read all the same books you have. You know exactly what you'd say to a client describing your week. You're just finding it remarkably hard to say it to yourself. Welcome. You can put it down here.

This is a space built specifically for helpers — therapists, counselors, social workers, supervisees, students, and adjacent caregiving professionals — who need a room where they get to be the client. No performing wellness. No proving you've done your own work. No worrying that your therapist is secretly assessing your case conceptualization (we're not; we promise).

What this can look like in real life

The occupational hazards of a caring profession are real and specific. A few of them:

• Compassion fatigue and the slow leak. You still care, but the caring costs more than it used to, and you've started to notice a flatness you'd flag in a minute if a client described it.

• Vicarious trauma. You carry stories that aren't yours, and some of them have moved in — showing up in your sleep, your startle response, your sense of how safe the world is.

• The two-hat problem. You can't fully turn off the clinician. You analyze your own friendships, narrate your own reactions, and find it weirdly hard to just be a person having a feeling.

• Boundary erosion. You're magnificent at protecting clients' boundaries and quietly catastrophic at protecting your own — the late notes, the squeezed-in client, the "I'll rest after this season."

• Impostor syndrome with credentials. Letters after your name and a nagging certainty you're underqualified, found out any minute now, faking competence everyone else clearly has.

• Who holds the holder? You're the container for so many people, and there's often no one whose job is to be the container for you. That's not sustainable, and a part of you already knows it.

You give this exact diagnosis to other people all the time. It's allowed to apply to you, too.

How we work here

A therapist who gets the field. Del is a doctoral-level licensed psychotherapist (PsyD, LPC, LMHC, NCC) and an Approved Clinical Supervisor — so you don't have to translate the work or explain what a no-show streak does to your soul and your income. We speak fluent caseload, documentation, ethics-board anxiety, and 4:50pm crisis. You can use shorthand. You can also drop it entirely and just be tired.

Decolonial and anti-oppression, including toward our own field. The mythology of the bottomless, self-sacrificing helper — the one who pours out endlessly and calls burnout a virtue — is a feature of extractive, productivity-obsessed systems, not a clinical necessity. So much of what gets framed as your personal resilience problem is actually a labor and systems problem: caseload sizes, insurance maze, underpayment, the cultural expectation that care work be quietly martyred. We won't help you tune your self-care routine so you can absorb unsustainable conditions a little longer. We'll help you tend yourself AND tell the truth about the conditions.

Sustainable care, practiced not just preached. We mean it about the long haul — for clients and clinicians alike. (Our own practice keeps Fridays through Sundays for rest, because a burned-out therapist helps no one, ourselves included.) Here, rest, limits, and laughter count as real work next to insight and grief. You're allowed to be a whole person with needs, not just a regulated nervous system rented out by the hour.

Note: If what you're after is clinical supervision or consultation rather than personal therapy, that's a different (also available) offering—Supervision

Frequently Asked Questions