Fall 2020
After spending eleven months in Thailand during the early days of the pandemic, I decide to accept a counselor position with an addiction & trauma treatment organization and return to the US. I don’t know it just yet, but this will be my last counselor gig in the field.
At this point in my decade-long mental health career I’ve already burned out three different times. On three separate occasions I gave more than I had to give, more often than I could give it, to organizations that cared very little for my personal wellbeing and profited healthily from my efforts. Nowadays I know that this pattern of behavior is rooted in my own self-worth issues, so I’ll take some ownership, but earlier in my career it was really hard to maintain any sort of sustainable balance with supervisors and CEO’s preaching self-care one moment, and then asking you to cover extra groups/shifts the next (and unfortunately, this is more the rule than the exception in the addiction and mental health treatment field these days.). All that being said, I was determined that this time, things would be different. This time I wouldn’t need months to recover from burning out again.
So I transition pretty smoothly into the organization and begin to really enjoy the work we’re doing and the folks I’m working with. It’s a magical mixture of personalities, skill sets, and experiences. Between myself, the behavioral techs, the counselors, the nurses, and the clients themselves, we succeed in creating a collaborative community experience within a residential treatment setting that basically runs itself. Older clients are bringing in newer clients in the right way. Staff is collaborating with minimal ego-interference. Deep healing is happening just about every day in a variety of different ways. Just amazing stuff. When I reflect back on my career in treatment, this experience will always be near or at the top of the list. We were participating in something really special and anyone that was a part of it, staff and client, recognized it.
And then, as happens in the treatment world, there was a shuffling of upper management within the organization, and a new CEO with a new agenda began “improving processes.” No consulting with the staff. No consideration for the impact these new decisions would have. Just changes in scheduling, responsibilities, and personnel, all focused on the bottom line. Within a few weeks the ripples started to reach us at the direct service level. The winds had changed.
And then there was this very subtle whisper in my being that said, “It’s time to go.”
It wasn’t a judgment or a decision or something I’d been thinking about. It was just a very clear message from my gut or my heart or my intuition or whatever you might want to call it. It wasn’t a question or a command. It was simply a recognition.
And for the first time in my work career, I decided to listen. Instead of coming up with a million justifiable reasons to stay and suffer through the regime change, I decided to trust my intuition. With no new job lined up, no money saved, and no real plan for the future, I submitted my letter of resignation and gave a month’s notice to allow for appropriate closure with clients and staff.
My mind threw a fit.
“Are you crazy?”
“What are you doing?”
“You can’t just leave.”
“You’ve got to think this through.”
Despite the mind’s endless arguments and objections however, I committed to following my heart and my gut. As it turns out, the week after I gave notice there were unexpected staffing changes that split up the group of us that had worked together to create the community experience. Shortly thereafter, upper management made several decisions that dropped our census to only one client and just like that- the entire community experience we’d worked so hard to create and sustain was over.
It still blows my mind to this day that my intuition “knew” what was coming. A lot of us have been taught to be overly reliant upon our mind and logical, rational thinking. We invest a lot of energy in our plans and projections. And while these modes of perceiving and understanding can be helpful in some situations, there’s actually a much bigger intelligence that we have access to that can be far more effective a lot of the time.
And so, because I was willing to listen to that little internal whisper, instead of my babbling mind, I got the new ending I was looking for. Instead of burning out again, I spent the summer on the magical Lake Atitlan in Guatemala seeing a handful of clients I enjoyed working with. And instead of needing time to focus on my mental health and recover from burnout, I was available to take a teaching position in Costa Rica for the coming fall semester.