• 00:44 The Challenge of Closing the Mental Loop
  • 01:28 Understanding Post-Session Reflection
  • 05:27 Strategies for Mental Closure
  • 09:45 The Power of Writing and Mental Redirection
  • 14:04 Self-Care and Professional Growth
  • 20:03 Resources and Community for Therapists

How to Stop Thinking About Your Therapy Clients

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How to Stop Thinking About Your Therapy Clients

I want to talk about a topic that’s particularly close to my heart — how we, as therapists, can lovingly close the loop after a session with our clients and STOP THINKING ABOUT THEM! 

It’s a testament to the depth of our care and commitment that we often find ourselves thinking about our clients’ problems and wellbeing even after the session has ended. While this reflects our genuine concern and responsibility toward the people we serve, it’s also important to recognize the need to gently redirect our minds for our own wellbeing. We deserve to have healthy boundaries and to unplug at the end of the day when our work is done. This helps us, our clients, and ultimately, it may even keep us in the profession long-term, rather than leading to a situation where we become burned out and overwhelmed. 

Of course, it can be easier said than done to stop thinking about your therapy clients! So, these are some strategies that have helped me and my colleagues at Growing Self Counseling and Coaching, where the wellbeing of therapists is our top priority. I hope they’ll help you, too. 

If you’d prefer to listen to this one, I’ve also recorded a podcast episode on this topic. You can find it on this page, or on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

1. Understanding the ‘Why’

This is because we feel a deep sense of responsibility toward our clients, and the plethora of options and outcomes can sometimes leave us without a definitive plan for helping them. So our mind stays hard at work, when the best thing for us — and ultimately for them — would be to take a breather.

Having empathy, compassion, and a desire to make a positive impact in the lives of others is at the core of being a therapist. It’s only natural that we take our work to heart. However, when the session ends and we find ourselves in an ambiguous situation, our minds may continue to race with all of the possibilities and uncertainties. 

2. The Power of a Clear Model

This is where the importance of having a clear model comes into play. A therapeutic model acts as a guiding framework, helping us navigate through the complexities of our clients’ experiences and our own responses to them. If you find yourself frequently mulling over your sessions, it might be an indicator that it’s time to look closely at your model, or become more grounded in one if you haven’t already.

3. Writing it Down: Case Conceptualization and Planning

Taking the time to write down your case conceptualization can be a game-changer when you’re feeling stuck. It’s a process that allows you to lay out your thoughts, understandings, and hypotheses about the client’s situation in a structured manner, which you can walk away from and then follow up with a clear and concise plan. Putting your case conceptualization in writing not only provides a tangible reference for future sessions, but also helps in mentally closing the loop, giving your mind permission to rest.

4. Mastering the Art of Mental Redirection

Not being able to turn off your brain is a challenge many therapists face, and it’s one of the biggest contributors to burnout in our profession. Learning the art of mental redirection is crucial. This could mean engaging in activities that bring you joy, practicing mindfulness, or simply allowing yourself a moment of quiet reflection.

5. Growth Opportunities

While it’s vital to learn how to stop the post-session mental churn, it’s also important to recognize that these moments of reflection can be valuable growth opportunities. They encourage us to constantly learn, evolve, and become better versions of ourselves, both for our clients and us.

And the reverse is also true: Seeking out growth opportunities so that you feel that you’re practicing your craft at your highest and best potential will help you ruminate about how you’re working with your clients less often outside of sessions. Seeking out professional trainings and certifications, reading career advice for therapists and listening to industry podcasts are all ways to maintain your edge.

6. Consider Your Context

Finally, I want to validate something that’s very real for therapists, and that needs to be addressed if it’s becoming an issue in your career: the culture where you’re doing your work, and whether it allows you to unplug and have a personal life outside of your working hours.

Many early-career therapists end up working in agency environments with high-needs populations and unreasonable caseloads that literally keep them up at night. These environments can wear therapists out before their careers have even begun. Unfortunately, solo private practice can present its own headaches that make it difficult to put work aside at the end of a long day.

If you think your work environment is preventing you from having balance, consider other possibilities. Many group private practice opportunities offer access to higher-functioning clients, fewer non-billable hours, and more manageable caseloads.

How to Stop Thinking about Your Therapy Clients

In wrapping up, dear friends, remember that caring for our clients is a beautiful part of our journey as therapists. However, caring for ourselves with the same intensity is equally important, and learning when and how to stop thinking about your therapy clients is an essential part of self-care. By closing the mental loop and mastering mental redirection, we can ensure that we are giving our best to our clients while nurturing our own minds and spirits.

Here’s to finding balance, growth, and serenity in our journey of caring and healing.

Ready to Grow Your Career?

If you’re feeling ready to explore even more, check out my free resource: The Licensed Certified Coach 2-Part Video Training: “The Ultimate Guide”. This training is designed to help you get clear on your professional path and explore whether coaching could be a fulfilling addition to your career. 

Also, let’s connect on LinkedIn! I’d love to hear about the strategies you implement to stop thinking about your therapy clients.

To the light,

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby 

P.S. — I have many more articles and podcast episodes for you in my content collection for therapists. I hope you’ll check it out, they’re all there for you!

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Lisa Marie Bobby:   Hello and welcome back to Love, Happiness and Success for Therapists. This is a podcast where we dive deep into the heart of therapy for therapists. We’re talking about self care, the beautiful journey of helping others while really taking great care of ourselves as helping professionals so that we can flourish and thrive in this challenging yet rewarding profession.

I’m your host, Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby. I’m the founder of Growing Self Counseling and Coaching, and I am the host of this podcast. And today I’m so glad you’re joining me for a topic that I think we all struggle with. And I think it is important for all of us to be talking about, which is how to close the mental loop after your client sessions so that you’re not thinking about them and their issues and how to help them while you are supposed to be present in your own personal life.

I wanted to talk about this because This is a real issue for every therapist, and I believe that it is one of the most powerful contributing factors to professional burnout that we have to deal with. That’s what we’re diving into today. Get comfortable, grab a cup of tea. And let’s dive in. So just to set this up, I think we all know as therapists that when our session is over, it doesn’t mean that the work ends.

There’s the practical stuff, right? We need to do notes and update our systems and make sure things are scheduled and all the things, but the hard part is that our thoughts often linger, right? We ponder on our client’s well being, we think about the session that we just had, what we said, what they said, should we have said something else, what’s going on?

And we also start thinking about where we want to take this Next, right? And this I think is a beautiful testament to the depth of our commitment. And it really is a by product of the fact that we genuinely care about our clients. They’re important to us. We want to help them, but it’s also really essential to have some tools in our professional tool bags that help us gently redirect our minds disconnect from our work to ensure our own wellbeing.

And when we find ourselves in these moments of post session reflection it’s usually, in my experience, because we have stepped into a place of ambiguity, we’ve opened our hearts, we’ve connected deeply we’ve seen the situation from their side of the table. We know what we hope for them.

And also, I think, feel the responsibility of being their guide. So how am I going to meet you where you are and then help you move successfully to where you want to go towards growth and healing and wellness? And so because that isn’t always clear, like how are we going to help? That creates a situation where Our minds are now trying to close this loop, thinking about our responsibility, all of the options that we have, the many paths that lay ahead.

One of the challenges I think of being a therapist is that there’s a lot of ambiguity in this profession. There is no right way to do this. There’s no formula. And so what then happens is that we need to figure out the path forward in order to provide leadership and guidance for our clients to be their process guide, if you will.

And so when we don’t have good strategies in place to help us get clear and close that loop, meaning that We understand where we are, we understand where we want to go with things, we have settled things in our own mind, have a plan, without that closure almost it occupies our mind, it stays alive, even if we’re not fully conscious of it, because as our brains are so powerful and a lot of our brains are processing things and trying to solve problems on non conscious levels, and that will create feelings of stress and activation, certainly if we’re like consciously thinking about it, but even if we’re not, it generates this like something’s not finished kind of feeling, right?

So understanding and having strategies for how to do this for ourselves gives us the mental space to really recharge, rejuvenate, let it go for a little while. And I think also it. Having the ability to take a step back, get some emotional distance, not think about it, in some ways I think makes us more effective than when we get back into the ring, particularly if we have some good strategies to truly process it and make sense of things before we do let it go.

So how do we do this? One strategy that I think is the probably the most powerful way is to, as quaint as it sounds, look to our therapeutic orientation and when we go through counseling school, it’s hammered into us, figure out what your theoretical orientation is. And there’s a lot of comfort, I think, in that direction for us.

And we can say Dr. John Gottman would say, here’s what to do next or, whoever The so many models we could choose from, right? And as we develop in our profession what happens naturally is that we develop a multi-dimensional way of assisting clients. For example, as a couple’s counselor, my core theoretical orientation is emotionally focused therapy for couples.

I really enjoy the attachment perspective. It makes a lot of sense to me. And of course, over the years, I’ve learned the hard way that is not actually the best way to help some clients. They need another system, a more direct system, perhaps they’re not digging the experiential thing. Going into the Gottman method of couples counseling there are so many different things that we can draw from, right?

And of course I’m speaking as somebody who’s I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist and that’s how I. primarily identify professionally. I’m also a licensed psychologist but anyway, over the course of time, we get exposed to these different models. And I think from that, understand the legitimacy and the power of all of them.

And while we want to stay away from being eclectic, right? That means we’re just using tools from different toolboxes without really having a solid orientation. It is important to have different models at our disposal. So how does this tie back to when we can’t stop thinking about our clients? One of the things that we’ve discussed is that when we can’t stop thinking about our clients, it means that there’s this uncertainty.

What just happened? What’s gonna happen next? Did I do the right thing? What’s really going on for them? Like case conceptualization, right? And when we’re able to. Say to ourselves, okay, with this person, with this presenting issue, I feel confident that this model, this path, this method of helping this particular client create change becomes for us a guiding light.

A framework that helps us navigate through the complexities of our clients experiences and also our own responses to them. Through the lens of a solid evidence based model, we can create a case conceptualization that helps us understand what is going on with this person and what needs to shift in order to help them create positive change.

And it also creates a roadmap for us around how to help them, what to do next, right? And so if you find yourself frequently mulling over your sessions, perhaps it’s an indicator to either revisit your model, take the book off the shelf and reread it just to refamiliarize, especially if you’ve been out of school for a while, right?

What is the path here to refine it or if you are operating at this point in your career without a solid model, if you’ve grown and gotten detached from the guiding light that maybe you did have earlier in your career, it’s time to get reconnected with that. Because if you don’t, you don’t have a map.

Right? And if people are looking to you for leadership and guidance and you don’t really know what’s going on or where you are or where this whole thing needs to go or if your client is stuck and you don’t know why, it creates a lot of stress and that’s when it’s hard to turn off your brain. Getting clear for yourself about the model that makes the most sense in this situation is one of the most important things that you can do to provide yourself with clarity and direction. Another really important skill tool in your little box is the power, I think, of writing things down. There is a different kind of cognitive processing that happens when we take, vague, ephemeral thoughts and physically write them down with our hands.

It processes things in a different way. It encodes information in a way that puts it into language that makes it more understandable and that helps us get our arms around it. So pulling out a journal or a secure, Google Doc, take the time to, you don’t have to put their names in it but just write down the case conceptualization.

Here’s what’s going on. Here’s why I think this is going on. Pulling from your model, how would my model inform me about what’s going on? And just the act of writing through it, writing out a case conceptualization can be transformational. When you lay out your thoughts, your understanding, your hypotheses about the client situation, you create clarity for yourself that then can become a clear and concise plan for how to help your client move forward.

This also creates tangible reference for future sessions. Additionally, it acts as a ritual of sorts. It helps your mind to close the loop and create clarity for yourself, which then consciously and subconsciously gives your brain permission to rest. Of course, you’re already in the habit of doing case notes, which, might be, here’s what happened, here’s what we talked about, here’s the next session.

But to take the time, just a few extra minutes to be here’s what’s happening and here’s my plan. I think that particularly in some environments we’ve had to write out treatment plans to fulfill the requirements of, working with insurance or whatever. And these treatment plans are, at least in my experience as a therapist, not that meaningful to me.

In the sense of creating a really clear roadmap for me about what the problem is and what needs to happen in order to make it better. And again, just taking the time to write through the narrative rather than just relying on a kind of, copy and paste sort of treatment plan can be really helpful.

Now, so doing this process, creating this ritual can really help. And this brings us to another crucial skill which is mastering the art of mental redirection. So learning how to gently first of all notice that we are thinking about something, we’re thinking about our clients, but then how to intentionally gently guide our minds away from this post session analysis and back into the present towards activities thoughts.

Things that bring us joy, calm, and balance, which means that it’s important to have activities and things in our lives that feel positive, pleasurable, enjoyable, that bring us balance, which you know, ties back into how are we taking care of ourselves and how are we building lives where we have positive things in it.

Because again, if you don’t have these anchors, these solid things in your life that feel fulfilling and robust, it’s difficult to have something else to move to mentally and emotionally. And then we stay stuck in our work. It’s important to remember that not being able to turn off your brain, as I mentioned in the beginning, is one of the biggest contributors to burnout in our profession.

It is an emotional labor. It is, feels like a personal. energy drain. And so learning how to master mental redirection isn’t just beneficial. It’s really essential if you want to have a positive long term career that is satisfying, enjoyable as a therapist. Now we’re focusing on how to stop the mental churn after sessions, it’s also I think important to acknowledge that these moments of reflection are not bad, they’re really positive things that’s our brain saying you, you need to solve this puzzle, right?

And This also can be a very valuable opportunity for growth, for learning, and professional development for us. Because each client, each session, is a chance to learn, to evolve, to master our craft, and it’s in these post session reflections, when managed in healthy ways, that can be a really important part of our learning process and our own personal and professional growth.

Um, caring for our clients is this profound, beautiful part of our journey as therapists, but really intentionally caring for ourselves with the same dedication, right? The same commitment is equally important. In the last episode, in episode one, we talked about the struggles, right? The emotional weight, the reality, the environmental stressors that so many of us deal with.

And we acknowledged how the feelings of sometimes isolation, the weight of carrying other people’s traumas can really be personally very difficult. I hope the message was also hopeful for you because we highlighted all the opportunities for growth, love, happiness, and success that we have. And by using these opportunities, self awareness, like when you can’t stop thinking about a client, that can be a window of insight into yourself and into what you need.

Do I know how to help this person? Am I feeling personally triggered by whatever is happening with this person or between me and this person? Is this an opportunity for self of therapist work? It can be insight into do I need Consultation. Do I need to talk to somebody about this? I wish I had a consultation group, right?

I wish I had a mentor who could help me or, the fact I can’t tear my mind away from work because, I have been so focused on my career and on my clients. I don’t have a lot going on for myself personally, right? That’s something positive to shift my attention towards. All of these are just opportunities to get visibility into what we need and to figure out how to embrace a challenging career path while also finding joy and fulfillment in our work.

In order to do this, to do it well and to not be incinerated by it it is vital that we’re growing as therapists, we’re building our own resilience. We are creating a satisfying, successful, thriving practice experience, whether or not you’re in a private practice, a group practice or an agency, it’s how do I thrive while I’m doing this?

And this always starts with self awareness. Understanding our own triggers knowing our own boundaries and recognizing when we need to take a step back and take care of ourselves. None of this happens unless we become aware of it. Similarly, what we need to build a strong foundation of self care so that we can continue to pour so much of ourselves into others.

without depleting ourselves in the process and this journey again can take you in lots of different directions. It can be finding your tribe, right? Connecting with other therapists who understand the unique challenges of this profession, building a support network that uplifts you and encourages you.

There are so many ways to get these needs met, but they are really real. And then of course, Using these opportunities to get insight into yourself, like, why can’t I stop thinking about this, can also be, again, the power of continuing education, right? Staying curious, keeping your skills sharp, constantly learning and growing.

These are the things that keep us engaged and passionate about our work. And sometimes when we can stop thinking about clients it shines a light in that direction. Maybe I do still have things to learn, and as a byproduct of that, in my experience, when we can learn and grow and feel challenged and excited about things, that’s how we stay passionate, it’s how we stay juicy.

It’s part of the, I think, wellness recipe of enjoying what it is that we do. Also, lastly, one other tip here, it’s very important in these and all moments to celebrate your successes, no matter how small they might seem. Every breakthrough, every moment of connection, every time you help a client find clarity or peace, these are the moments.

And that could even be a point of self awareness and reflection for you if it’s hard to stop thinking about, did I do something wrong? What should I do next? To really reconnect with your own confidence, with your own competence and be able to remind yourself of, I’ve been here before.

I know how to do this. I can do this again with this client. Let me take a few minutes and think about my model, think about my case conceptualization, work through it, like in writing, and then be able to put it away and shift my attention back to something that feels really positive for me. That’s how we do it.

I hope that this conversation was helpful for you because I’m, I am here for you. This iteration of the Love, Happiness, and Success podcast for therapists is all about you. Because I genuinely believe that taking care of you, helping therapists flourish and thrive is how we collectively work together to make the It’s a podcast.

I have so many other resources that I have been putting together for you. So please visit me at growingself. com forward slash therapists. You can start your journey of self discovery by taking a assessment that I put together for you. It’s called How to Flourish and Thrive as a Therapist.

It’s a quiz that will help you get insight and clarity into yourself, what growth opportunities you have, both personally and professionally, in order to flourish and thrive in this profession. And also there, growingself. com forward slash therapists. You can access other free articles and resources that I put together for you, and you can also get in touch with me and let me know what’s on your mind, because I really want to hear from you, learn what’s going on, and take that information back to, okay, what else do we need to be talking about on this podcast?

What other resources can I develop with? For you to support you so you can email me at hello at growing self. com or you can also certainly connect with me and our community on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, find growing self on Instagram and LinkedIn. I maintain a personal Instagram and Facebook page that is more client facing, but at the growing self social accounts, you’ll find Things that are for you to support your journey of growth and flourishing and thriving as a therapist.

So be sure to check out those accounts because that’s where I’m keeping the things that I’m making for you. So all of you out there, I want you to know I see you, I appreciate you, and I’m so grateful for the work that you do. You are making a difference and you are not alone. I’ll see you next time.

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