I’ve found that it’s quite common to have loved ones that are unsupportive of your therapy career.
These loved ones often don’t really understand what we do as therapists. Therefore, they can be quite unsupportive. Some are blatantly unsupportive, and others are unsupportive in more covert ways.
So I thought for today I’d dive into some of the ways your loved ones can lack understanding or be directly unsupportive of your therapy career, and share some tools for how to navigate it.
Prefer to watch the video? You can watch the episode here:
Ignorance can breed unsupport
Now, to the credit of our loved ones, if they haven’t experienced high quality therapy themselves, it’s hard for them to know what it is that we do.
There’s so much secrecy around what we do due to confidentiality. And so, most people don’t know what we do unless they’re also a therapist or attended therapy themselves.
So above and beyond the lingering stigma around mental healthcare, this lack of awareness of what therapy actually looks like is one of the contributing factors to our loved ones not understanding exactly what we do. And therefore being unsupportive of our therapy career.
4 ways loved ones may be unsupportive
All of us are definitely impacted when our families aren’t able to be supportive towards us. Our profession calls us to support others, and so we need others to support us in order to have the ability to support others.
As I run through this list of ways that our loved ones might be unsupportive you’ll notice that they’re all reflective of a different category of misunderstanding.
1) think we *just* listen to people talk
One way we can be misunderstood by our loved ones, and therefore not well supported, is that our loved ones think we just listen to people talk all day long.
Again, to the credit of our loved ones, if they haven’t sat through their own, positive therapeutic experience then they’re probably not going to understand that what we do is so much more than sitting and listening to people talk. Even though, yes, we do listen to people talk all day.
Then, what can happen is that under the misconception that we have a pretty easy gig going on they can downplay the work that we do and not realize how much support that we need.
2) think you’re only working part-time
It can feel unsupportive when our loved ones see how many therapy clients we see per week and interpret that as us working part-time.
Of course, what full-time looks like, can vary a lot depending on where you work. Also, I would argue, it also depends on your own energy levels, sensitivities and abilities.
Nonetheless, I would make the argument that 20 client hours a week is working full-time! If we think of a full work week as how many hours a week that you work then perhaps if you’re in private practice and you’re seeing 20 clients per week you’re not sitting at a desk or therapy chair working for 40 hours a week.
But, I can almost guarantee you that somebody seeing 20 therapy clients per week is probably spending a lot more energy than someone who is working a typical desk job for 40 hours a week.
Then, what can happen is that our loved ones may hear us complain about our income. Their response might be: “You’re only working part-time. What did you expect?!”
Or they may be worried about joint income and say: “Hey, you’re not pulling your end of the bargain. Pick up the pace, because you’re only working part-time.”
3) think you don’t make enough
Similarly, our loved ones can be concerned about how little income we tend to earn, on average, as therapists. (And, it’s true! On average, most therapists don’t get paid enough!)
So, if you’re sharing your finances with a loved one, it might be a source of tension. And folks might point towards your career as the problem. This, then, translates to a lack of support.
It could be really easy for our loved one to point to the profession and blame systemic issues for your lower salary. But, in a lot of cases, the blame is put on you as the therapist. Somehow you’re not working hard enough, or you don’t care enough about your loved ones, etc.
4) don’t have empathy for tough days
Building on some of the previous ideas, because folks think we have such an easy job and are only working part-time there’s little or no empathy when we’re having a rough day.
If we’re having a tough time in our career sometimes we may not get that much empathy from our loved ones. Again, until you’re sitting in a therapist’s chair day in and day out, it’s hard to empathize with the amount of energy needed to be super attuned to your clients.
We don’t get the luxury to zone out for 2 minutes in the middle of a therapy session or quickly click over to another tab to check our email or respond to a text message.
misunderstandings
To sum up the theme around the ways that our loved ones might misunderstand what we do and therefore become unsupportive is that they can’t really see what it’s truly like to be in our shoes day in and day out.
Thus, they can really only go off of these very surface level numbers. Like, how many clients are we seeing weekly or how much income are we earning. They may look at those numbers and say: “That doesn’t seem like much.You’re not working that much. And you’re not earning that much. So, what the heck are you doing?”
For some of us our loved ones just don’t understand what we do at all. I can relate to that. I remember my mom would ask me questions like: “Why would you want to talk to crazy people all day?” The stigma that she carried around mental healthcare ran so deep that her conception of who would call a therapist for help was so otherizing, and she couldn’t step out of that viewpoint. There was no way that I was ever going to receive anything that looked like support from my mom for my career.
4 tools to help
So, if your loved ones are unsupportive of your therapy career here are some tools to help ensure you get the support you need.
1) emphasize the “why”
One tip is, instead of emphasizing hours you work, pay or specifics about your day to day, emphasize specifics around why you’ve chosen this career path. Or why you continue to believe that it’s worthwhile to stick with this career path.
I think a lot of folks genuinely want to offer their care and support for you. And when they see you so tired or under paid they might want to protect you from those hardships. So encouraging you to pivot or quit can feel like an understandable response. But, then that can feel really unsupportive.
So, if you can help fill in the blanks for them and explain that while therapy is a hard career path you want to stick with this path for specific reasons.
Hopefully with this understanding, when you come home and share about a tough day, they will react with empathy instead of blaming or complaining.
2) specify what support is needed
When you have something more challenging come up and need some more support from a loved one, rather than describing specifics of the challenge, be very specific about what support would look like for you right now.
For example, you could say: “Ugh. I had such a long day. I had two intakes, and my couple therapy clients yelled at me for the entire hour. Then, I had this insurance claim denied. Etc, etc.”
Or, you could say: “I had a really long day. I’m so tired. You know what would help me right now? Could we just order takeout for dinner? And is it okay if I go to bed a little early tonight?”
Be specific about the support that you need rather than the reasons why you are needing that support.
3) find other therapists
And I get that even when all this is said and done your loved ones may not always be able to offer the kind of support that you need when it comes to feeling supported in your career.
I do stand by my belief that all therapists need at least some trusted therapists in your lives who really get it because they’re doing the same stuff that you’re doing. You can’t get all of your support just from your circle of family members or those who are in your household. You really do need therapists in your life who can see the part of your experience that no one else is going to quite get.
4) set boundaries
Unfortunately, there are going to be some cases where some of your loved ones may not be able to understand, at all, what it is that you’re doing. Support in this situation may look like setting healthy boundaries with those particular loved ones.
extra resources
At the end of the day, much of the lack of support can stem from misconceptions folks may have about the therapy career. I’ve made a whole video about just that!
If you are finding yourself in need of support from fellow therapists. I have an article that can help in finding a network of colleagues that you get along with.
And until next time, from one therapist to another: I wish you well!
-Marie
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