Nurturing the Nurturer: Self-Care Techniques to Prevent Burnout for Clinical Therapists

Catalog description

This workshop is designed for students currently in clinical training, or prior to clinical training. Burnout can be a significant issue amongst psychology graduate students in clinical training. Skills learned will be to identify symptoms of burnout, such as emotional exhaustion, depersonalization of clients, and loss of feeling personal accomplishment. Burnout can also be marked by increased cynicism towards clients, a loss of motivation towards one’s current training and future career, and can possibly impact one’s overall self-concept and self-efficacy. This course considers the stressors of clinical training, including the potential emotional impact of being a new trainee, finding balance between clinical practice, school, and personal life, one-way intimacy with clients, countertransference and vicarious traumatization. Self-care will be thoroughly explored by looking at the six self-care domains: social, cognitive, behavioral, physical, spiritual and occupational, including an introduction to Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). This course serves as an elective for Spiritual and Depth Psychology (SDP) and Conflict and Other Related Trauma (CRT).