How To Tell My Therapy Clients I Am Taking A Break
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- Опубликовано: 7 сен 2024
- How To Tell My Therapy Clients I Am Taking A Break.
Scenario - You are working in the mental health field and are due to go away for a holiday or business trip.
How do you pass this information on to your clients?
Do you give details, are vague, or are you somewhere in between?
In this episode of Therapy Business School, I give some tips around this, including suggested time frames for mentioning it before you go and some suggested coping strategies for your clients in your absence.
I hope you enjoy this episode.
Best wishes,
James
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#therapybusinessschool #takingabreak #therapy
• How To Tell My Therapy...
Scenario - You are working in the mental health field and are due to go away for a holiday or business trip.
How do you pass this information onto your clients?
Do you give details, are vague, or are you somewhere in between?
In this episode of Therapy Business School, I give some tips around this, including suggested time frames to mention it before you go, and some suggested coping strategies for your clients in your absence too.
My former therapist of 6 years began to take trips the last couple years. As the final couple years progressed the trips got longer and more often. By the end he was taking 3-5 trips per year of 3-6 weeks each. Thats too much. I thought maybe he was trying to close out his practice but apparently not. During his most recent trip I found a new therapist and started seeing her before he left. He didn’t seem to mind. He came back 6 weeks later and texted me at 11 pm the night before our regular session and said “see you tomorrow at 10 am our normal time?” I thought this was disrespectful and frankly…. Strange. Mostly that he didn’t seem to notice these long and frequent trips weren’t ok. Easy to trigger abandonment. And what were his other patients saying? I have no idea. I did a wrap up session at his request the following week and that was it. I will never understand what happened. Very clueless, disrespectful and bizarre behavior isn’t it???
Perhaps my therapist was trying to get me to grow up and not need him anymore? If so, it was a misread by him. Perhaps he knew we weren’t a match anymore but was wanting me to make the decision so the travel was his way of phasing me out? I have no idea. Dumbfounding. The good news is my new therapist of 4 months is great!
It sounds like there was a potential 'Elephant in the room there', which I am never a fan of personally.
@@TherapyBusinessSchool meaning he’d kind of run his course with me and didn’t know how to tell me? Genuinely I think the trips were a bit suspicious because wouldn’t his other patients be saying the same with his constant long time away? Pure speculation but I wonder if he could have been taking big gaps (“trips”) because he wanted me to make the decision. is this a possibility? Why wouldn’t he just tell me we’d run our course? Perhaps it’s very hard for some therapists to do? Though he did often tell me where he was going. Europe. Australia etc. and he’d have some brief antidotes about his trips when he got back . As i said, I can’t wrap my head around what was going on there. Certainly he’s not dumb enough to think that was any way appropriate….
@@GeoffreyPilkington, what I mean by a possible elephant in the room is that there may have been one for you perhaps, that was not brought up by you.
Ideally, the therapeutic relationship should be strong and healthy enough to have these questions discussed during the session.
With myself, I often 'check in' with my clients as to how they feel the sessions are going, are we still working on the things they want to work on, are we working on something else that has become more prominent for them, or are we NOT working on the things they really want to work on. I also ask where the client thinks 'we' are on our journey together.
I find this a much healthier approach, it's respectiful, and it's ethical too, so I am not a fan of elephants being present on either side of the therapeutic relationship.
Endings are also such an important part of therapy, they should be handled with care and consideration too. It sounds like your ending was not ideal for you, based on the questions it has left you with.
@@TherapyBusinessSchool your approach sounds astute. As far as the elephant, yes. But it’s not my role to tell him when he should and should not take trips. If he’s that inept, I don’t want him as a therapist. I had found someone I liked better anyway. 😊
How often would you recommend a Counsellor takes a break?
Hi @tanyadobrovolskis1443,
That depends on how the therapist is feeling really, but I would say it is a ‘must’, rather than a ‘should’.
You don’t want to wait until you are burned out before deciding to take a break.
I would also recommend that when you take a break, you actually are taking a break, and not studying or learning something for your own personal development. That is still working, just in a different way.
As I run my own business, I work quite long hours, (both ‘in’ and ‘on’ my business), so one day a month I book myself a day off, and that goes in my diary.
It’s very rare I will not do this and I’d suggest you make it as important to you as an actual client appointment.
Does that answer your question?
@TherapyBusinessSchool it does, thanks 😊