Your Black Therapist is Tired
As I write this, I’m listening to the sound of ocean waves with critical caution. Am I at the beach? Hell no. I just got my daughter down and am clinging desperately to the hope that the artificial ocean streaming through her sound machine is lulling her overtired mind into dreams of a world that doesn’t involve pandemics, problematic administrations, and kindergarten experienced only through headphones over Zoom. I hope in her deep sleep she’s driving a donut car to a camping trip with all of her favorite dogs, gleefully bumping the Trolls soundtrack.
Meanwhile, I am bone tired. My day consisted of waking up at 6:00am, quietly enjoying a singular cup of coffee before rousing my sleeping child, making her breakfast, getting her some semblance of camera ready for her 8:00am Zoom meeting, and attempting to answer client emails in between her moments of total resignation toward school due to not being chosen to showcase the letter A she made out of Playdoh… Is it worth explaining to her that her teacher probably didn’t see her wildly raising her hand because the gallery view can only hold so many squares at a time? Probably not.
In between fits, I get dressed, devour my own breakfast, brush my teeth and grab a handful of snacks to eat between sessions later. I had big dreams of meal prep, but sleep wins every night now. My childcare arrives and I allow for a cordial but calculated seven minutes of “How are you?” before I need to be in my car driving to my office to start my first telesession. The time between kissing my daughter goodbye and greeting my 9:00am client is 17 minutes. There are no transitions anymore. The time between closing my computer after my last client and greeting my daughter at the door is four minutes. I don’t remember what a real break feels like.
In early March I was terrified that therapy would become a luxury item and I’d lose my clients. As a self-employed single mother, that is simply not an option. So when the natural consequence of a coinciding pandemic and civil rights movement brought an influx of new clients, I threw my doors wide open. A lot of us did. Partially due to fear of the unknown, but mostly due to the fact that Black clients want providers who look like them, and more importantly, providers who won’t re-traumatize them with talk of being “colorblind” and the subconscious racial gaslighting that comes with unchecked bias. Newsflash: systemic oppression exists in helping professions too. And it should come as no surprise, that the mental health world is mostly white… similar to other medical roles requiring access to higher education and income. In hindsight, I felt just as helpless as my clients, but diving into my helping profession allowed me to take breaks from being a Black woman terrified about her nation’s racial justice tipping point and having no clarity about which way we would fall.
By April I learned that my body and mind couldn’t sustain as many virtual sessions in a day as they used to in person. Between cultivating safety and reading somatic cues through a screen, to sometimes just plain trying to focus on a blurry face and choppy audio due to poor wifi, I reached new levels of exhaustion. Then the tingling, vertigo, and headaches began so I bought blue light blocking glasses. The migraines didn’t stop.
After George Floyd I wondered if my clients could tell I’d been sobbing for two days. I wore mascara and glasses to hide my truth-telling puffy eyes. The news was traumatizing to me, so I’d chosen to step away. And yet, I heard unsettling things from my clients as they processed their own response to events I’d desperately tried to avoid. I took two weeks off. Many thought it was a vacation. When in truth, it was an attempt to bring my nervous system back to baseline because I’d been in a stress response like every other Black American since the world finally started believing us when we say “we are dying out here”.
Fatigue doesn’t even come close. My nervous system has been tested in unparalleled ways for almost a year now. I am enduring the same racial trauma as my clients. I am surviving the same pandemic as my clients. I am missing my community tremendously, like my clients. I have never been so closely aligned with my clients and yet, I am still beating myself up for missing emails, being weeks behind in returning calls, and slacking on the level of holistic self-care I recommend to my clients every day. I am, in short, being really fucking human these days.
There is no hyperbole in the statement that Black therapists will need at least six months off to truly grieve and heal from what the world has taken from us and what the work has asked of us. Both without time to prepare for, let alone recover from. We love our clients, and while circumstance may put this next statement in question…we love our job. We will continue to show up for our clients, but it will look different; because showing up can no longer be at the expense of ourselves. If you notice your therapist making adjustments to their practice, know that it’s because it’s never been harder to do this work.
We are now in a new year, but one fact remains — your Black therapist is tired. In ways that she never thought existed. And she has become increasingly creative about how to maintain so she can show up for you. But she is not on her “A” game. Frankly, no one is. That is not possible in the midst of a global trauma. Your Black therapist has been grieving alongside you in ways you will never see, because for that hour, she holds space for you. She has upped her own therapy sessions. She leans on her community, even if only from a distance. And as both a frontline worker in this pandemic and a marginalized citizen in this nation, she’s wondering how she can simultaneously bear the brunt of so much while falling through the cracks of support efforts. There are foundations for Black clients, but not Black therapists. We are rarely seen as frontline workers, but just as hospitals have reached capacity, so have our schedules. My waitlist is now as long as my caseload. And I am just one story echoed by many.
We are all struggling to make sense of a career that asks us to never stop working, as we fill a severe gap in services in the face of a need that’s ever growing. In addition to removing barriers to accessing mental healthcare, we must also begin acknowledging the weight and pressure being put on Black therapists as the gatekeepers to service. The focus, and thus the work, falls on the systems of inequity that maintain those barriers to service because we can no longer be martyrs to this profession. We cannot keep adding “just one more” to the end of our day and we cannot maintain a livelihood on exclusively sliding scale clients, and trust me, we lose sleep at night trying to reconcile this. Yet if we don’t start normalizing the humanity, and thus, the finite resources of our Black providers, we will lose them all to burnout and exhaustion.
This was meant to be an op-ed, but it felt more important for providers to feel seen, heard, and understood. So from the therapist working from their makeshift “office” in the back of a closet to the parent trying not to be distracted from session by the toddler fingers sneaking under the door. I see you. And to the many who can’t help but question if they still “love this work”… you are not alone. I invite you to give yourself permission to be a mess. And I can say all of this on the other side of what I hope to be the worst of it… but we must take breaks. And I mean long, extended luxurious rest. Not just as a cyclical crisis intervention before returning to the pace that depleted us in the first place. I spent the better part of my career bending and stretching myself around this work, but now, I have the audacity to recalibrate my business around the wellbeing of the Black woman who runs it.
