Therapist Burnout: When Rest Isn’t Enough

What a breathwork retreat taught me about therapist burnout, performance, and the ways we take up too much—or not nearly enough—space.

I just spent the first 3 days of a 4-day breathwork retreat irritated as fuck.

It did not feel at all like the enlightenment I had hoped for.

For 3 days I felt my irritation grow over the people who took up all the space in the group. There was inappropriate trauma dumping, spiritual bypassing, and a complete lack of self-awareness by a handful of the participants. Every time I felt like I was about to drop in during breathwork, a screaming contest erupted and I felt distracted, and even more irritated.

I doodled and meditated my way through the process portions, only speaking when I absolutely couldn’t resist chiming in the obvious after the facilitator gently went around and around.

Through it all, I understood that the irritation was part of my process and I was open to sitting with it and getting to know it.

What made it difficult for me to actually move through the process was the polarization that was happening inside of me.

The “Evolved Therapist” part of me wanted to be non-judging and compassionate, to see that these people were hurting and have no attachment to my own expectations of the experience.

Meanwhile, the irritated part of me wanted to scream, “Oh my God, shut the fuck up!”

In the fourth breathwork session of the retreat, I realized that I had been trying to override my actual experience with the response that I thought I was “supposed” to have.

So instead of pushing it away, I surrendered to it.

I allowed myself to feel ALL of the irritation. I breathed and let it take over my body and watched as it got bigger and bigger.

When I ran out of space to hold it all in my body, I imagined myself growing bigger and bigger, eventually turning into a giant filled with irritation. Once the irritation had a place to go, my giant self walked around the room and when two of the participants gobbled through their attempts at speaking light language, I watched Giant Alicia put her foot across their necks.

The image made the whole thing feel so ridiculous.

I thought about meowing like a cat to my friend across the room and that sent me into silent but hysterical laughter. I laughed until tears streamed down my face.

After the laughter subsided and breathwork was over, I rolled onto my side and the irritation returned.

Being with it without trying to push it away shifted something for me. It reminded me of a lesson I’ve learned before: irritation is a sign that there’s something within me that I’m not yet ready to acknowledge, because to acknowledge it would require me to change something.

On the final day of the retreat, we had one last breathwork session. At the suggestion of the facilitator, I shifted my breathing pattern. Luckily the screamers had tired out by then, and I was finally able to drop in.

I went back to places I had been in previous breathwork sessions, visiting my ancestors and past lives I’ve lived, which brings me back to my inner-knowing and deep trust in myself.

I received the very clear, direct message:

Rid your life of anything that still feels performative.

I sat with this download for a while and talked about it with my friend on the drive home. I felt like I had done so much shedding of what felt performative over the past 5 years, but my higher self knew there was more.

She also works fast, because a few days later I sat down to write my Very Responsible Therapist Burnout Article™ and immediately hated everything I had planned to say.

What Does Therapist Burnout Actually Look Like?

This was supposed to be a very PC article that answered the common questions therapists ask about burnout:

How do I know if I’m burned out as a therapist?

Why am I still exhausted after taking time off?

What do I do when I don’t want to be a therapist anymore?

My outline went something like:

1. Explore responsibility, over-functioning, boundaries, and self-worth.

2. Talk about what happens when rest doesn’t resolve the exhaustion.

It was the end of my workday. I had already had 6 sessions with clients, my blood sugar was low, and I told myself those were the reasons I couldn’t write the article.

But when I sat down the next day, looked at my notes and outline, I knew better.

I was trying to write about why therapists are burnt out while carefully stepping around the reasons they’re exhausted.

And this is where my higher self was drawing the line.

The resistance was about my own burnout from performing the way the systems around me have trained and expected me to, and I’m so done with that.

Therapists are burnt the fuck out.

Why Are So Many Therapists Burned Out?

I see it in every therapist Facebook group I’m in. The desperation to find clients and to claw at anything that even smells like it could be a referral.

Someone will post something like:

“I’m looking for a therapist who does EMDR, also trained in ART, with experience working with veterans. Must be able to slide to $50 or under…”

And the responses all sound something like:

“I don’t do EMDR, but have the other 2 criteria and am willing to slide to $65 if the client is open to being seen online.”

The responses never meet the full criteria because what the OP is asking for is always a fucking unicorn!

And shame on them for even making a request that someone be highly trained but willing to sit with this client for pennies on the dollar when compared to what they need to be earning to make a healthy living.

We’d never ask a surgeon with multiple specialties to lower their rate. Hell, we probably wouldn’t ask a plumber to either.

So what makes us do this?

Why are therapists over-functioning and willing to chronically under-earn?

Why do some therapists feel guilty about charging enough to support their lives when they are professionals with higher education, student loan debt, and more personal obligations than they can handle?

Much like the rest of the failing systems around us, the old way of doing things is over.

The hang-your-shingle, get-on-insurance-panels, and-let-the-good-times-roll approach just does not work.

The writing has been on the wall for the last 15 years I’ve been in the field, and the intensity of the collapse has exponentially increased as the tech bros have taken over our sector, promising sign-on bonuses and a plethora of clients, only to give the old bait-and-switch and put you in bronze handcuffs.

They don’t have the decency to make them gold anymore.

So why do we keep saying yes?

Why are we responsible for making mental healthcare affordable when the larger system refuses to?

Therapists are absorbing the moral responsibility for a broken system into their individual nervous systems and shaming others for not doing so.

It’s obvious that the system is broken, but how much of this do we bring with us into the profession?

When Over-Functioning Becomes Therapist Burnout

When I first started in the field, there was one coach out there named Casey Truffo and she had a book about how to become a millionaire as a therapist. She visited my graduate school and hosted a talk on the topic.

Her words always stuck with me, and when I decided to open my own practice, I was told by every therapist I knew that I needed to take insurance.

When I looked into it, it seemed like an arduous process and ya girl HATES paperwork, so I decided instead that I’d just learn everything about how to market a cash-pay practice.

I’ve managed to earn a steady and comfortable income for the last 13 years.

I want to be the first to admit that I did not arrive at this place because I was above falling into the trap of the system.

I was just lazy, and my flavor of trauma has caused me to rebel and buck this and many of the other capitalist, patriarchal systems in our country.

I definitely feel burnt out at times from the energy it takes to rebel.

Burnout can feel like a constant sense of fatigue that no amount of sleep can fix.

It can come from saying yes when you really mean no.

It can come from pushing down your emotions so intensely and for so long that you don’t even feel your own body anymore. And no amount of caffeine, mindfulness, or cognitive behavioral therapy is going to help you think your way out of it.

It breaks my heart to see therapists contorting themselves and lowering their rates while simultaneously investing more time and money into training after training, hoping that if they just learn more, offer more, or become even more specialized then someone will choose them.

Underneath all that striving are often parts that are driven by fear, scarcity, self-doubt, or the belief that they need to keep proving their worth.

When those parts go unchecked for long enough, therapist burnout inevitably kicks in.

Why Therapy for Therapists Matters

The nature of our work keeps us siloed and isolated. Our capitalist society teaches us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and to keep striving for more so we can buy more and be more.

Much like in my breathwork retreat experience, I feel the polarization within myself between compassion and anger when I think of where we are in this field.

I get angry when I hear stories from friends or clients about past therapists showing up late to sessions, cancelling on them multiple times, ending sessions early, or not helping them because they didn’t track and focus on appropriate goals or outcomes during their treatment.

Those therapists probably had the best of intentions to do no harm to their clients, but burnout sneaks in and takes over when we don’t do our own work.

It keeps us from nudging our clients to look at something we know needs to be explored because pushing them can feel like too much work.

If you’re afraid to look at your own shadows, then you’ll avoid pushing your clients to look at theirs.

This is one of the reasons I believe so deeply in therapy for therapists.

We need spaces where we don’t have to be the person holding everything together. We need places where we can explore our own parts, patterns, bodies, relationships, wounds, and exhaustion without having to perform the role of therapist.

As a collective, we should all be feeling some level of burnout. The wars, the increases in costs of food, fuel, and housing, the constant barrage of environmental disasters and destruction are all enough to warrant the desire to pull the covers over our heads and hide from it all.

So what do you do when you don’t feel like being a therapist anymore?

What to Do When You Don’t Want to Be a Therapist Anymore

You don’t make a rash decision and quit.

You don’t spend all your waking minutes trying to find a respectable side hustle, and you don’t take another training.

Those might feel like the easiest, most viable solutions, but you know you became a therapist for a reason.

Quitting or finding a side hustle that’s fun and fulfilling might be something to do after you’ve tried a couple other things I’m going to list, but you’re going to want to make those decisions from a grounded, intentional place.

Here are some things you can do if you’re a therapist who’s feeling burnt out. I’m listing them in order of difficulty, starting with the easy ones first.

Create real community with other therapists

Invest your time and energy into creating community. Identify other therapists you find interesting and reach out to them. Ask them to meet up for coffee or on Zoom and if they don’t seem like the right fit, keep looking.

Therapists—and people in our culture generally—are lonely AF. I promise you they’re looking for people to have true connections with. If you don’t want to hang out with other therapists then work on building community elsewhere like church, parent’s groups, or through local meetups.

Join a consultation group

If there aren’t any consultation groups that fit your vibe, start your own.

Use those Facebook groups for what they were originally intended and aura farm connection and support.

(Ok, I don’t actually know what aura farming is, but I told my kids I was helping therapists aura farm so they’d get off my back for working past 4pm.)

Once you find your people, intentionally meet up with them regularly.

It could be weekly, biweekly, or monthly. You get to choose what fits your needs best, but the more you meet, the more opportunity you have to deepen your connections and relationships.

If meeting more frequently seems challenging, consider starting a Marco Polo group chat, email chain, or group chat of some sort to stay connected and share support.

You also don’t need to only talk about therapy. Use your chats to share recipes, ideas, funny memes, and to really get to know them.

Community is one of the most overlooked yet important things we can cultivate to foster healing and aid us through the collapse of this system.

This isn’t just about having people you refer to. It’s about having people who share in your wins and failures. People who will support you when you need it, listen, and provide care through the tough times.

This part takes willingness to be vulnerable and honest.

If that feels scary or hard, then see my next point and use that as a jumping-off point when you get into your own therapy.

Find your own therapy for therapists

Get yourself a therapist. Preferably one who does some sort of bottom-up modality.

As therapists, we’re really good at saying the right things, hiding our burnout, and hiding the other places where we feel stuck.

If you’re already in therapy, revisit your goals and honestly ask yourself—and your therapist—if they are pushing you.

I’m a firm believer that good therapy should feel comfortably uncomfortable.

If you’ve just been shooting the shit and “venting” in your sessions, it’s time to move on.

My favorite modalities are somatic healing, Brainspotting, and IFS, but you choose your own adventure.

Consider deeper therapeutic work

If you’ve been in therapy for a long time and have worked through a significant amount of trauma, you might consider exploring psychedelic-assisted therapy where it is legally and clinically appropriate.

Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy is available in many places. Integration is an important part of the treatment, so if you’re exploring ketamine treatment, consider working with a therapist who specializes in psychedelic integration.

My preference is in-office treatment with trained professionals who can support both the dosing experience and integration, but there are different models of care available.

Other psychedelic-assisted approaches are legally available in limited jurisdictions and regulated settings. If you explore any of these options, understand the legal and clinical context where you live and seek appropriately trained support.

Healing does not come in the form of one dose or one intervention.

Let go of the belief that you will be fixed when…

The goal should not be to arrive at some mystical, enlightened place. You will never ascend as long as you are human.

Healing happens in a spiral, and there will be times when you feel like you’ve already worked through something only to find that the wound gets triggered in a completely different way months or years later.

How Much Space Are You Allowing Yourself to Take Up?

In closing, I have to point out the deeper parallel to my own experience and illustrate why these two things have come together in this way for me.

At the retreat, I was watching people take up what felt like too much space.

In the Facebook groups, I have been noticing therapists take up too little.

And I find it fascinating to be somewhere in the middle asking:

What does the appropriate amount of space look like?

This is a question I’ll be sitting with for a while because I don’t know that there is a correct answer.

But I do know that having an identity as a helper can sometimes make acknowledging our own needs uncomfortable.

I encourage you to sit with this question yourself.

How much space are you allowing yourself to take up—in your practice, your relationships, your finances, and your own healing?

Therapy for Therapists: A Space for the Person Behind the Role

If any part of this resonated with you, I hope you will give yourself permission to get curious about what might be underneath your own exhaustion or burnout.

My work providing therapy for therapists is about creating space for the person underneath this sacred role, and allowing room for the parts of you that have been over-functioning, proving, performing, and taking care of everyone for far too long.

You can explore my therapy intensive services for therapists if you’re ready for deeper individual work. I also intentionally keep one or two pay-what-you-can spots in my caseload for therapists who need support but genuinely can’t afford my full fee.

I don’t want finances to be the reason you continue carrying all of this alone.

And in January, I will be opening a new Healing Circle for Therapists—a sacred space for internal exploration, connection, and coming home to yourself, much like my Becoming circle but created specifically for therapists.

The circle will also be offered with community-supported tuition because I want this kind of support to be accessible to therapists across different financial circumstances.

If you’d like to hear more about the Therapist Healing Circle when enrollment opens, join my therapist mailing list HERE.

They Told Me My Body Had Failed

Some of the deepest healing I’ve experienced didn’t come from understanding myself better. It came from being witnessed.

My own experience with postpartum anxiety eventually changed not only the way I understood myself, but the way I understood therapy. It showed me the limits of trying to heal entirely on our own and the power of being in relationship with people who can help us see the things we’ve learned to normalize.

Today, that experience influences the way I approach individual and group work, including online therapy in California and the healing circles I offer for women throughout the state. For women searching for group therapy in San Diego or elsewhere in California, I believe there is something uniquely powerful about having a space where healing happens not only within ourselves, but in connection with others.

This is part of the story of how I came to understand that:

I sat in my hospital bed holding my brand new baby. After 18 hours of labor and an emergency c-section, he was finally here and my life as a new mom had just begun. I had just experienced more physical pain than I ever knew was possible. My body was bleeding, I was exhausted, and my abdomen was freshly stitched up, but nevermind all that - I was now responsible for this very tiny human.

Who said I could be in charge of this tiny human?

I didn’t know the first thing about breast feeding, but a nurse came in and showed me how to hold him and get him to latch. She was gruff and not very kind. I could tell that maybe she’d been having a bad day, so I tried not to ask too many questions. I felt desperate to get the whole breast-feeding thing right, so I hung on every word she’d said and tried to commit it all to memory. My brain felt like mush.

She seemed like she was in a hurry, so I didn’t want to take up too much of her time. He had latched and seemed like he was eating fine, but I was so new at this that I felt anxious. How do I know when he’s done? How will I know when he’s hungry again? Do I switch boobs? I had so many questions but I told myself that I’d just figure it out as I went. This nurse was definitely not up for chit-chat.

After he seemed to be done I rolled him carefully onto my chest and she showed me how to burp him. Nothing came out so I just I held him there. He was so small and felt so fragile. I tried to take it in, but I was worried I’d hurt him somehow. The nurse was very adamant that his head needed to be supported. I did my best to hold his tiny little head without touching the soft spot on top. She was also adamant that I needed to be careful not to injure his brain by pushing on it.

I let him sleep on me for a while. The nurse came back in to check on us. She took my vitals, checked my incision, and pushed on my belly. Tears welled in my eyes but I refused to cry because I was afraid of waking the baby and inflicting even more pain into my abdomen.

The nurse looked at me and said, “make sure you don’t hold him too much. He’ll become spoiled if he’s always in your arms.”

I nodded my head slowly as she left the room. I looked down at my baby, worried again that I’d somehow fuck this up. I figured she knew what she was talking about. She was the one wearing the scrubs and taking care of all the new moms on this floor. I’d only been a mom for 6 hours at this point, what did I know?

After that, I’d feed him, burp him, change him, rock him for a little while and then put him in the little clear isolette next to my bed. I’d stare at him and make sure he was still breathing. He seemed to be fine with this arrangement for the reminder of our stay at the hospital.

Once we got home I followed the same routine and placed him in his Momaroo. I stared at him as he was lulled to sleep by the circular rocking motion it made.

On his second night home he started crying and would not stop. Every time I tried feeding him he’d latch for a minute or two and then pull his head off and wail. I felt panicked and worried that something was terribly wrong with him. My partner and I took turns trying to soothe him.

Maybe he wasn't getting enough milk. How could he be getting enough milk? He wasn’t latching long enough.

Why wasn’t he latching??

This continued for hours. I don’t even remember how it finally stopped. I’d only had 8 hours of sleep in the last 3 days, so maybe I blacked out at some point and he finally gave up after deciding I was an unfit mother.

Some version of this scenario continued the next night and the next day my partner drove me to the breast-feeding group hosted by the hospital. There, I sat in a circle of women who were also having trouble with breastfeeding while the nurse walked around and adjusted our positions, handed out nipple shields, and gave tips about ways to improve milk production. The nurse told me that my colostrum was fine and that my real milk should arrive in the next day or so.

It did not.

I bought all the lactation cookies, teas, and tinctures I could get my hands on. The smell of maple syrup came out of my pores from all the fenugreek I ingested. I changed my diet and ate all the things that were said to increase milk production.

I pumped and fed and pumped some more. I slept in 1-hour increments and returned to the breastfeeding support group a couple days later. I felt ashamed that my breasts weren’t engorged with milk. I told the nurse that nothing was coming out when I pumped.

She said, “your body just isn’t going to produce what your baby needs.”

I felt devastated that, once again, my body had failed to do what it was supposed to know how to do naturally.

Or so I was told.

I remember the first time I sat in a room full of women and told them these stories.

They were outraged.

There were parts of me that knew the things I was told weren’t great, but hearing from a group of women who were all intelligent, caring, and supportive allowed me to see that not only were the comments not great - they were actually harmful.

I was in an incredibly vulnerable state and because I was raised to not question authority, I took what those nurses said as fact. This cut me off from my intuition and made me question everything about my body and my ability to care for my baby.

I eventually learned that I had postpartum anxiety and OCD. (I also learned that my son had a lip tie and his inability to latch correctly was actually the cause of my lack of milk production.) I followed the typical medical protocol and got on meds. I went to therapy and I did my best to heal. But healing often reaches a limit when it’s done in isolation.

For the first four years of my healing journey I barely scratched the surface. It wasn’t until I found this beautiful community and was witnessed by other women that the deeper work truly began.

Healing Was Never Meant to Happen in Isolation

My own healing changed the way I think about what it means to help another person heal.

Individual therapy can be incredibly powerful. There is something deeply healing about having another person sit with you, co-regulate with you, help you understand what happened, and reflect back the things you may not yet be able to see for yourself.

But community offers something different.

There is something powerful that happens when we tell the truth in a room full of women and are met not with judgment, advice, or someone trying to fix us—but with recognition.

Sometimes another woman can see what we have normalized for years. She can reflect back the parts of us we learned to question, silence, or abandon. We hear another woman’s story and recognize something of ourselves in it.

And slowly, in the safety of being witnessed, we begin to trust ourselves again.

This is one of the reasons I’ve become so passionate about creating opportunities for women seeking online therapy in California to experience healing in community, too. An online group allows women across California—including women looking for group therapy in San Diego—to gather in an intentional space without geography determining who gets to sit in the circle.

As humans, we are wired for connection. And I think we’ve been siloed for far too long.

An Invitation to Becoming

This is part of what inspired me to create Becoming, an 8-week online healing circle for women in California.

Becoming is for women who are ready to move beyond understanding their patterns intellectually and begin reconnecting with the wisdom of their bodies, their intuition, and the parts of themselves they may have learned long ago not to trust.

We gather not because any one of us has the answers for another woman, but because there is something profoundly healing about remembering ourselves in the presence of one another.

If you’ve been doing your healing alone for a long time, maybe you were never meant to do all of it that way.

Whether you’ve been searching for online therapy in California, group therapy in San Diego, or simply know that you’re longing for a different way of doing your healing work, I invite you to learn more about Becoming.

I’d love to welcome you into the circle.

Learn More About Becoming →

Alicia Taverner, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist who helps couples heal after infidelity, years of resentment, and the exhaustion of feeling stuck in the same painful patterns.

Her work helps partners begin to understand each other again, rebuild appreciation, and create lasting change with a focused, supportive approach. Alicia uses brain based techniques, including Brainspotting and ketamine assisted psychotherapy, in an intensive format that gives couples more room to heal without the start and stop of weekly sessions.

Learn more about Alicia’s work with affair recovery intensives, relationship therapy, and ketamine therapy, or visit her About page.

When Did You Stop Asking Yourself What You Needed?

The First Time I Learned to Abandon Myself

The first time I learned to abandon myself was when I was 4 years old. I can still hear the inflection in my mother’s voice telling me not to be too loud. This was my indoctrination into patriarchy. My dad was just home from work and he needed time to wind down. In our house his energy was protected above everyone else’s and my mom ran interference keeping me and my brother quiet while he napped, worked, or watched TV.

My mom also worked outside of the home, and on Wednesday evenings she worked late and my dad took care of us. He picked us up from daycare, fed us dinner, bathed us when we were little, and put us to bed. Looking back now, I remember that my mom always left a meal that she prepared on her day off in order to make his life easier.

She did a lot of things to make his life easier which taught me that men’s lives should be made easy by the women that love them. I carried a lot of those things with me into the early years of my marriage. I prepared all the meals, did all of the household chores and shopping. I planned most of our social activities and made sure we spent an equal amount of time with each set of parents. I also worked full-time.

When Being a “Good Wife” Meant Taking It All On

When we had kids and I felt weighed down by postpartum anxiety and OCD, I finally began to realize how much of what I was doing was never discussed. I had unconsciously taken on the brunt of the responsibility in my home while my husband had meals ready, clothes ironed, and lunches prepared for him. This was how women showed love in my family and this type of love was passed down several generations.

When I started to do my own healing work it became obvious why adding a baby into our lives was so challenging. Even if I hadn’t been struggling mentally - I was already working 40+ hours a week, handling all of the household responsibilities with very little outside support. Going back to work while still sleep deprived hit me like a tidal wave. Not only was I drowning in intrusive thoughts and panic, but I had set myself up to fail by trying to be a “good wife.” Taking it all on was what I learned to do in order to be loved.

When Did I Stop Asking Myself What I Needed?

By allowing the part of me to take over that believed she needed to earn love through self-sacrifice, I was held captive by the wants and needs of others. I would try to anticipate what they needed and then use up what little energy I had left to show up for them. I rarely stopped to ask myself what I needed. This made me feel frustrated and resentful.

What I know now is that I was taught to self-abandon from a very young age. I was taught to be a “good girl” and to sacrifice myself for others. It took a while to finally meet myself and begin showing up in the world as my true self - not who others wanted me to be. I was deathly afraid of losing people that I loved through the process.

I did lose a few who were only there to benefit from my over-giving, but I also gained an entire community of people who love the real me. Not for what I can do for them, but because they can trust me to say no when I’m too depleted. They honor and appreciate not having to guess or wonder if what they might ask for is too much, and I love knowing the same about them.

What Parts of Yourself Did You Leave Behind?

I sometimes wonder how different our lives might be if, instead of teaching little girls to be good, we taught them to know themselves.

What if we taught them that the discomfort of someone they love does not automatically mean they have done something wrong? That they are allowed to have needs that inconvenience other people. That love does not have to be earned through usefulness, sacrifice, or making themselves smaller. That saying no does not make them selfish. That their anger, desire, intuition, pleasure, grief, and longing all carry information worth listening to.

Many of us weren't taught those things.

Instead, we became incredibly skilled at reading the room. We learned to notice the subtle shift in someone's voice, anticipate what would make things easier, and adjust ourselves accordingly. Eventually, we became so fluent in everyone else's needs that we stopped speaking the language of our own.

And then one day, we find ourselves asking: What do I actually want? What do I need? Who am I when I'm not trying to be good for everyone else?

Those questions have become some of the most important questions of my own healing.

Because healing self-abandonment hasn't meant that I stopped caring for other people. I still love deeply. I still give. I still take care of the people I love. The difference is that I no longer believe I have to disappear in order to do it.

I get to belong to myself, too.

Group Therapy in San Diego: An Invitation to Becoming

Maybe that's where the work begins—not by becoming someone new, but by remembering the woman who existed before she learned who she needed to be in order to belong.

This is part of the work we will explore in Becoming, my 8-week online healing circle for women. For women looking for group therapy in San Diego, Becoming offers a space to do this work in community from the privacy of your own home.

This isn't a group about becoming better at meeting everyone else's needs. It's a space to begin turning your attention back toward yourself—to explore the patterns you've inherited, the roles you've learned to play, and the parts of yourself you've quieted along the way.

Together, we'll practice listening beneath all the noise of who you should be so you can begin hearing your own knowing again.

You don't have to blow up your life or stop loving the people in it.

You may simply need to stop leaving yourself out of it.

If something in you recognizes herself in these words, I would love to welcome you into Becoming.

Alicia Taverner, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist who helps couples heal after infidelity, years of resentment, and the exhaustion of feeling stuck in the same painful patterns.

Her work helps partners begin to understand each other again, rebuild appreciation, and create lasting change with a focused, supportive approach. Alicia uses brain based techniques, including Brainspotting and ketamine assisted psychotherapy, in an intensive format that gives couples more room to heal without the start and stop of weekly sessions.

Learn more about Alicia’s work with affair recovery intensives, relationship therapy, and ketamine therapy, or visit her About page.

Trauma Therapy for Women: Why You Keep Repeating the Same Relationship Patterns

She enters into relationships quickly - you’re either in her inner circle, or you’re out. There is no in-between. Romances begin over drinks in an evening and it’s not until the end of the next week that he’s going back to his place for the first time since they met. 

They quickly become inseparable and everything feels so good. 

They ask little about each other’s past. She’s captivated by his charm and infatuation with her. It's months before she meets any of his friends, learns more about his background, and starts putting a full picture together about who he really is. 

She slowly begins to forget about the life she had before him. It feels good to be wanted in this way - she feels like she’s his everything and he tells her as much. 

A few months later his rage spews onto someone who snags a parking spot from him, she feels afraid but since his anger wasn’t directed at her, she reminds herself of all the fun they’ve been having and how he's probably just stressed about work. 

Over the next few months she starts to see the anger surface more and more. Work has been really busy and he just wants to keep seeing her as much as possible. Of course this is why he’s short. She continues to find ways to excuse his outbursts which are now starting to happen more frequently. 

Fast forward 5 years later… 

She is now on my couch. They’ve had a child together and the last couple of years have been hell. He goes from blowing up at her to telling her she’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him. She’s tired of being devalued, insulted, manipulated, and gaslit. 

She’s ready to end the relationship but constantly wavers in her decision. He’s never hit her, and when things are good, they’re really good but she’s worried that their child will grow up thinking this is normal. 

Bending over backwards to keep him happy feels like a full-time job on top of her own work and caring for their child. She feels trapped and she can see the cycle very clearly. 

She’s read all the books, she’s listened to the podcasts, and by the time she comes to see me she can also identify that this pattern comes from her childhood. She can clearly see that life in her family of origin was traumatic and that was where she learned to fawn and shapeshift into who her caregivers needed her to be in order to avoid their abuse. 

This was also where she learned that relationships are supposed to be hard. 

“If I know better, then why do I keep doing the same thing?” 

Why Trauma Therapy for Women Looks Beyond Thoughts

This is one of the most common questions I hear from women who walk into my office.

They've done everything they know to do. They've read the books, listened to the podcasts, journaled, meditated, and spent years trying to understand themselves. Many have already been in therapy and can clearly identify how childhood experiences shaped the way they relate to others.

Yet they continue to find themselves in relationships that feel painfully familiar.

This is one of the reasons I believe trauma therapy for women has to go beyond insight alone.

Understanding your story matters. Naming what happened matters. But healing doesn't happen simply because you know where your patterns came from.

Our nervous systems don't speak the language of logic.

They speak the language of experience.

Trauma Lives in the Body

One of the biggest misconceptions about trauma is that it only refers to catastrophic events.

Trauma can certainly include abuse, violence, or neglect, but it can also develop from growing up in a home where love felt unpredictable, emotions weren't safe to express, or your needs consistently came second. This is known as complex trauma. 

When this happens, your nervous system adapts to perceived threats.  In order to regain homeostasis and create a feeling of safety within the body and the environment you can take on various roles. 

Maybe you learned to become the peacemaker.

Maybe you became hyper-independent.

Maybe you learned to anticipate everyone else's needs while ignoring your own.

These are brilliant survival strategies and they likely worked for a very long time. 

The problem is that what once protected you as a child often becomes the very thing that keeps you stuck as an adult.

Why Women Stay in Relationships That Hurt

One of the questions women ask themselves most is:

"Why didn't I leave sooner?"

The answer has little to do with how strong they are and everything to do with the confusion they’ve felt in their nervous systems. They often confuse familiarity with safety. 

If chaos was familiar growing up, calm can actually feel uncomfortable.

If love had to be earned, relationships requiring constant proving may feel strangely normal.

These are trauma responses and while there are various ways to heal and change these responses, the most important approach is one that comes from a place of self love, self-compassion and understanding. 

Trauma therapy for women isn't about convincing yourself to make different choices through willpower, shame, or by just trying to change thought patterns alone. 

It's about helping your body experience safety in a completely new way.

Healing Requires More Than Talking

Traditional talk therapy can be incredibly helpful because it creates awareness, offers language for your experiences, and helps make sense of your story.

But after a certain point many women reach a ceiling when it comes to awareness. 

You understand your patterns.

You just can't seem to stop repeating them.

This is where somatic approaches become so powerful.

In my work, I often integrate Brainspotting, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and somatic therapy because these approaches help us access the places where trauma is actually stored.

Instead of trying to think our way into healing, we begin listening to what the body has been trying to communicate all along.

As new experiences of safety emerge, the nervous system begins creating new neural pathways and the old patterns no longer feel like the only option. 

You Are Not Broken

If you've ever looked back at your relationships and wondered how you ended up there, I want you to hear this: You are not broken.

Your nervous system adapted in exactly the way it believed it needed to in order to survive. And while those adaptations are no longer useful, they also don’t have to define the rest of your life. 

Healing isn't about becoming someone new.

It's about remembering who you were before survival became your full-time job.

Ready to Begin Healing?

If this story felt familiar, know that you don't have to continue navigating these patterns alone.

I offer trauma therapy for women through individual therapy and Becoming, my experiential healing circle for women. Together we'll explore the protective patterns that once kept you safe, reconnect with the wisdom held in your body, and begin creating relationships rooted in safety rather than survival.

If you're ready to stop repeating the same story and begin writing a different one, I'd love to support you.

→ Schedule a free consultation
→ Learn more about Becoming

Alicia Taverner, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist who helps couples heal after infidelity, years of resentment, and the exhaustion of feeling stuck in the same painful patterns.

Her work helps partners begin to understand each other again, rebuild appreciation, and create lasting change with a focused, supportive approach. Alicia uses brain based techniques, including Brainspotting and ketamine assisted psychotherapy, in an intensive format that gives couples more room to heal without the start and stop of weekly sessions.

Learn more about Alicia’s work with affair recovery intensives, relationship therapy, and ketamine therapy, or visit her About page.

Therapy for Therapists: Why Mental Health Professionals Need Their Own Healing Space

You spend your days helping other people untangle their lives.

You sit with grief that has no words. You witness betrayal, trauma, childhood wounds, anxiety, depression, and heartbreak. You help your clients regulate their nervous systems, understand their attachment patterns, and reconnect with parts of themselves they have spent years avoiding.

You hold hope when your clients have lost it. You pour your heart into meaningful therapeutic relationships. You create safety for people who have rarely experienced it, holding space hour after hour, day after day.

And then you close your office door and go home.

Who holds space for you?

As therapists, we become so accustomed to being the helper that we can forget we are human first. We know the theories. We understand the interventions. We can recognize attachment patterns, defense mechanisms, and protective parts from across the room. We spend years studying human behavior and helping others heal.

But there is a difference between knowing the path and walking it.

One of the greatest misconceptions in our profession is that because we understand psychology, we should somehow be immune to the struggles our clients experience. We tell ourselves we should know better. We should have figured this out by now. We shouldn't still feel anxious, overwhelmed, reactive, insecure, or uncertain.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Therapists experience loss. We experience trauma, navigate difficult marriages, parenting struggles, health concerns, perfectionism, burnout, grief, and seasons of questioning who we are. Our own attachment wounds continue to emerge in new ways as life unfolds, inviting us back into our own healing again and again.

Healing isn't something we complete after graduate school or even after years of practicing therapy. It isn't another certification to earn or another training to attend. Healing is a lifelong relationship with ourselves—a willingness to remain curious about the places we've protected, avoided, or explained away.

That's why therapy for therapists isn't a luxury.

It's an ethical investment in both ourselves and the people we serve.

When we continue doing our own work, we become more emotionally available, more grounded, and more capable of sitting with our clients' pain without becoming overwhelmed by it. We become less reactive, less defensive, and more present.

Most importantly, we become safer therapists.

Why Therapists Need Therapy Too

One of the most common questions I hear is,

"Do therapists really need therapy?"

My answer is always the same.

Absolutely.

Not because we're more broken or less capable than our clients. 

But because of the unique emotional demands our profession asks of us.

Every week we invite people into the deepest and most vulnerable places of their lives. We ask them to trust us with memories they've never spoken aloud. We witness the impact of childhood abuse, infidelity, neglect, addiction, loss, trauma, and profound loneliness. We become emotionally attuned to dozens of nervous systems every single week.

That level of presence asks something extraordinary of us.

Our nervous system is one of the primary tools we bring into the therapy room. Clients don't simply hear our interventions, but they experience us. They sense when we're grounded, curious, regulated, and emotionally available.

They also sense when we're distracted, overwhelmed, rushing, or carrying something unresolved ourselves. Even if they never mention it, therapy has a way of slowing down when our own unfinished work quietly enters the room.

I often tell therapists that we cannot take our clients deeper than we've been willing to go ourselves.

I’m sure you’ve had a day where every client that walks through your door ends up bringing up the thing you are right in the middle of processing yourself. Those days are the medicine we need to remind us to do our own work. 

Clients eventually arrive at the edge of our own healing. When they do, it isn't our education that determines what happens next.

It's our nervous system.

It's our capacity to remain present without rescuing, avoiding, intellectualizing, or becoming overwhelmed ourselves.

This doesn't mean we have to be perfectly healed before helping others. None of us ever will be.

It does mean we have a responsibility to remain committed to our own healing.

Without intentionally creating space for our own work, we begin accumulating emotional residue. Experiences that seem manageable at first slowly build over months and years until they begin influencing how we show up—not only with our clients, but also with our partners, children, friends, and ourselves.

Judgment toward ourselves slowly becomes judgment toward our clients and we trade curiosity for certainty. Compassion has the ability to shift into irritation and instead of listening deeply, we find ourselves reaching for interventions because sitting with uncertainty has become uncomfortable.

These changes rarely happen overnight. They are gradual and quiet, which is why they are easy to miss. 

Before long, you find yourself scrolling therapist Facebook groups wondering why you're suddenly dreading sessions, feeling resentful toward clients, or asking colleagues if burnout is simply part of the job. But instead of looking for an echo chamber, this is an invitation back to your own work. 

The Hidden Emotional Burden of Being a Therapist

Most professions allow people to leave work at work, and even though we’d like to think that we can just close the door to our office and start the weekend without taking any of the residual energy leftover from clients, we don't have that luxury.

Every day we absorb pieces of other people's lives.

The couple navigating the aftermath of an affair.

The teenager who was abused by someone they trusted.

The veteran living with PTSD.

The woman grieving a miscarriage.

The executive silently battling depression while appearing successful to everyone around him.

The child caught in the middle of a painful divorce.

These stories don't simply disappear when the session ends.

Even when we've learned excellent boundaries, our nervous systems have still spent hours co-regulating with people who are suffering.

Over time, that takes a toll.

One of the unique challenges of being a therapist is that confidentiality often limits how much we can process our work with others. We can't come home and tell our spouse about the heartbreaking session we just had. We can't call a friend and describe the details that have been weighing on us all afternoon.

Unless we have a quality consultation group where we can talk openly and honestly about what we’re carrying, much of what we carry remains part of our internal world. 

The public often imagines therapists sitting comfortably in a chair, asking thoughtful questions, and offering helpful advice.But what they don't see is the emotional labor happening beneath the surface.

The constant attunement, careful monitoring of body language and shifts in breathing.

We watch closely for the subtle signs that our client’s protective parts are becoming activated in the room and the dissociation that is almost imperceptible. 

There are also the moments when we recognize our client's pain because we've lived something similar ourselves.

Therapy isn't emotionally exhausting because we care too much. It's exhausting because all of this genuine presence and attunement requires enormous emotional energy.

And unlike many helping professions, our work often happens in isolation.

There is no team huddle after a difficult session. We often don’t have time to debrief after hearing devastating news because we have 10 minutes between sessions to write a quick note, use the restroom, and take a drink of water. 

There is no opportunity to release the emotional weight we've been carrying throughout the day.

Instead, we take a deep breath, glance at the clock, and welcome the next client into the room.

Over months and years, those experiences accumulate and without a place to process them, they don’t just disappear. 

They settle into our bodies.

When Unhealed Parts Begin Showing Up in the Therapy Room

One of the greatest gifts therapy offers therapists is helping us recognize our own blind spots.

No matter how experienced we become, every one of us has shadows, or parts of ourselves that remain outside our awareness.

These parts don't disappear because we've read the research or attended another training.

If anything, our knowledge can sometimes make them even harder to recognize.

We can explain our attachment style and we understand our internal family systems. 

We recognize our protective strategies and know exactly why we are reacting.

But knowing isn't the same as healing.

Our unprocessed experiences often emerge in subtle ways.

Perhaps you notice yourself becoming unusually protective of one client.

Maybe another client's story leaves you feeling defensive, impatient, or emotionally flooded.

Perhaps you find yourself pushing a client toward a decision because sitting with their uncertainty feels too uncomfortable for you. 

Sometimes our own unresolved grief makes it difficult to stay present with someone else's, and we find ourselves avoiding further exploration because we don’t want to inadvertently expose our own grief. 

Sometimes our fear of conflict causes us to avoid challenging clients when they most need honesty.

Sometimes our perfectionism leads us to believe we're responsible for every outcome.

These moments aren't signs that we're bad therapists.

They are invitations.

They point toward places within ourselves that still deserve attention, compassion, and healing.

Without our own therapeutic space, these patterns can quietly evolve into countertransference that shapes the work without us realizing it.

Therapy gives us the opportunity to notice these reactions before they begin influencing our clients.

This is a commitment to practicing with humility. 

The truth is, our clients don't need therapists who have all the answers.

They need therapists who know themselves well enough to recognize when their own shit is entering the room.

Signs You May Benefit from Therapy as a Therapist

One of the hardest parts about being a therapist is that we become incredibly skilled at recognizing emotional pain in everyone except ourselves.

We notice subtle changes in our clients' body language. We recognize when they're intellectualizing instead of feeling, and we can identify protective parts, attachment wounds, and nervous system activation almost immediately.

And yet, when those same patterns begin showing up in our own lives, they're surprisingly easy to explain away. We say things like, 

"I'm just tired."

"I've had a busy week."

"This season will pass."

Sometimes that's true.

But sometimes those explanations become ways of avoiding our own inner world.

The reality is that therapists are sometimes the last people to recognize when something inside them is asking for attention.

We are so accustomed to holding everyone else that we forget someone needs to hold us, too.

So how do you know when it's time to return to your own therapy?

You Feel Emotionally Drained Instead of Fulfilled

Therapy is deeply meaningful work. It asks a great deal of us emotionally, but despite its challenges, it should also feel energizing.

Not every day or every session. 

But overall, there should still be moments of curiosity, connection, and purpose. If you consistently leave your office feeling completely depleted, something may be asking for your attention.

You come home craving absolute silence. Your partner asks a simple question and you find yourself feeling irritated. Your children want connection, but all you want is to be left alone.

You begin wondering, "Why does everyone need something from me?"

While this can certainly be a sign of burnout, it can also point toward something deeper.

Sometimes you’ve become so practiced at caring for others that you’ve quietly stopped caring for yourself. Sometimes your own unmet needs begin protesting in the only way they know how. Through the body - through exhaustion, resentment and emotional withdrawal. 

You Need More and More Time to Recover

Everyone benefits from vacations and we all need rest. But if you find yourself constantly looking forward to weekends, holidays, or extended breaks and still find yourself feeling tired even after you’ve taken a break, it may be worth further inquiry. 

Ask yourself:

"Am I tired because I'm working hard?"

Or...

"Am I carrying something that is no longer serving me?"

There is a difference. One requires rest and the other requires healing. If you give yourself time to sit with the feeling of exhaustion for 10-15 minutes instead of pushing it away and moving onto the next thing, you may find a part of you asking for attention. 

You Find Yourself Becoming More Reactive

Perhaps you notice yourself feeling unusually defensive and reactive to people around you . Maybe you're becoming impatient with clients who remind you of someone in your own life.

Perhaps one client's story stays with you for days while another barely affects you.

Or maybe you catch yourself hoping a particular client will finally make the decision you believe they should make.

These moments aren't evidence that you're failing. They are an invitation from your internal system to explore and care for yourself in a way you haven’t for a long time. 

Every strong emotional reaction deserves curiosity and our clients often illuminate the places inside ourselves that are still waiting to heal.

You're Beginning to Lose Compassion

This one is often difficult to admit.

Most therapists enter this profession because they genuinely love people and curiosity comes naturally. Compassion feels effortless.

Until one day it doesn't and you begin to notice yourself silently rolling your eyes, feeling impatient, or wondering why a client keeps making the same choices. 

You may notice yourself feeling frustrated when someone cancels or feeling irritated that another crisis has come up in a client’s life or in the lives of family or friends.  

If you've found yourself here, you're not alone. But compassion doesn’t disappear overnight. It’s often buried beneath layers of exhaustion, unprocessed grief, and nervous system overload.

The goal isn't to judge yourself.

It's to become curious about what your own system is trying to tell you. 

Another common pattern that can be difficult to spot is believing that insight and willpower are all that's needed for change. I've heard therapists say, "If I want something badly enough, I just make it happen." While that mindset may have helped you succeed professionally, it can become a blind spot in relationships and in the therapy room. When you’ve learned to override your own nervous system in the name of achievement, you may unconsciously expect others to do the same. What looks like a lack of motivation is often a nervous system trying to protect someone from pain. 

Sometimes what you call "discipline" is actually a protective strategy you’ve relied on your entire life. It served you well and helped you succeed. But when you assume everyone else has access to that same strategy—or that it's even healthy for them—you risk missing the deeper reasons they're struggling.

You Feel Like an Imposter Despite Years of Experience

Imposter syndrome is incredibly common among therapists.

Ironically, it often becomes stronger as we gain experience.

The more we learn, the more aware we become of everything we don't know.

But sometimes imposter syndrome isn't actually about competence.

Sometimes it's about trust.

Do you trust yourself?

Do you trust your intuition?

Can you sit with uncertainty without believing you're doing something wrong or do you constantly look outside yourself for reassurance?

I've noticed that therapists who have done deep experiential healing often become much more confident—not because they suddenly know everything, but because they've learned to trust themselves and are ok with not knowing it all. 

Their confidence no longer comes from having the perfect intervention, it comes from believing they can remain present with whatever unfolds.

Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Vicarious Trauma: Understanding the Difference

These three terms are often used interchangeably but they are not the same, and understanding the difference matters because each one requires something different.

Burnout

Burnout develops gradually and it often looks like emotional exhaustion, cynicism, reduced effectiveness, and the feeling that you simply don't have anything left to give.

Burnout is frequently connected to workload, unrealistic expectations, poor boundaries, or constantly giving without receiving.

Sometimes the answer is changing your schedule, saying no more often, or taking a real vacation. Other times it is revealing something deeper. 

Sometimes your own perfectionism, people-pleasing, or inability to disappoint others keeps you trapped in patterns that no amount of self-care will fix.

You can't breathe your way out of boundaries you aren't willing to set.

Compassion Fatigue

Compassion fatigue is different.

It happens when you've spent so much time caring for others that your emotional reserves begin running dry.

You still want to care, but you don't have access to the compassion that once came so naturally. This doesn’t mean that you’re a bad therapist, it means that you haven’t tended to the parts of you that really need it. 

Vicarious Trauma

Vicarious trauma changes us.

Listening to trauma day after day reshapes the way we see ourselves, other people, and the world. You may notice yourself becoming more fearful, hypervigilant, suspicious, or jaded.

Your worldview begins shifting because you've witnessed so much suffering. When your nervous system has been deeply impacted by the work you do, it shuts down. But this is an invitation to see that need to shut off as an opening to tend to what’s underneath. 

Healing from vicarious trauma requires more than a vacation, it requires intentionally processing what your body has been carrying.

The Blind Spots We Can't See Alone

One of the greatest myths therapists tell themselves is: "If something was really affecting me, I'd know."

But that's rarely how blind spots work.

If you could see them clearly, they wouldn't be blind spots.

Protective parts are remarkably intelligent. They convince us we're simply being productive, responsible, helpful, or professional.

When, in reality, they may be protecting you from vulnerability, grief, shame, fear, or disappointment.

I've worked with many therapists who could beautifully explain exactly why they behaved a certain way. They had extraordinary insight but insight alone wasn't creating change.

Trauma isn't simply stored as a story in the mind, it is held in the body and the heart. True healing asks us to move beyond understanding and into embodiment. To notice what happens in our bodies when a client reminds us of our parents or when a couple's conflict echoes our own marriage.

When someone's grief awakens our unfinished grief or when another therapist's success activates our own insecurity, these moments aren't failures. They're invitations to return to our own work because we are human, and the greatest gift we can offer ourselves is a place to take our own healing. 

What Therapy for Therapists Looks Like

If you've ever been the client as a therapist, you know it's a unique experience.

You sit down on the couch and immediately notice the therapist's office. You wonder what modality they practice and find yourself analyzing their questions. You recognize the interventions they're using, and sometimes you even catch yourself wondering what they might be thinking about you.

It's difficult to turn off the therapist part of your brain because you know the language and understand the theories. You also know exactly how to answer the questions. You can decide how much you want to reveal, how deep you want to go, and if you're not careful, therapy can become another place where you perform instead of a place where you heal.

I've heard therapists say they left years of therapy feeling understood, but not transformed. They gained insight, learned coping skills, understood their childhood, but something felt unfinished. 

That's because there is a difference between understanding your story and allowing your nervous system to experience something new. Therapy for therapists shouldn't simply provide another intellectual understanding of why you are the way you are. It should create experiences that allow your mind and body to integrate what you've known all along.

That kind of healing can't be rushed, and it can't happen if we spend every session talking about our lives instead of fully experiencing them.

Why Traditional Talk Therapy Sometimes Falls Short

Please don't misunderstand me—I believe talk therapy has tremendous value. We all know that the therapeutic relationship carries the most weight when it comes to healing. Having someone sitting across from you validating your experience and co-regulating with you is wonderful. 

You gain insight, psychoeducation, and have someone to put language to your experience. But you already have a great deal of insight. You can explain exactly why we react the way we do.

You know your attachment style and maybe even understand your protective parts but you still find yourself repeating the same patterns. This is not because you’re unwilling to change, it’s because trauma isn’t stored as information. It is stored in the nervous system. 

You can hold the thought in your mind that you are safe while your body continues to react as though it’s not. You have a knowing that your partner truly loves you while your nervous system braces for abandonment every time there’s a conflict. You teach emotional regulation all day long but still struggle to regulate yourself when your own attachment wounds are activated. 

This is why so many therapists begin searching for approaches that move beyond insight alone. 

Why Bottom-Up Healing Matters

One of the biggest shifts in my own healing came when I stopped asking, "Why am I like this?" And started asking, "What is my body trying to tell me?"

For years, I had insight and understood the theories. I could explain my patterns but true healing never came. 

Healing happened when I began experiencing my emotions instead of analyzing them.

My body remembered what my mind had long forgotten. My healing required more than conversation. It required learning to listen to the wisdom of my body. I learned to listen without overriding it, without always having to explain it, and without judgement of it and I’m forever grateful to the community of healers that showed me the way. 

The Modalities That Have Changed My Own Life

I don't recommend approaches simply because I've been trained in them. I recommend them because they've profoundly changed my own life. Every modality I use with therapists has first been part of my own healing journey.

That matters to me.

I never want to ask someone else to walk a path I haven't been willing to walk myself.

Internal Family Systems (IFS)

IFS comes from our own innate wisdom and I was healing using this modality even before I knew what it was called. One of the greatest gifts of IFS is that it helps us move away from self-judgment.

Instead of asking, "What's wrong with me?"

We begin asking, "What part of me is trying to help?"

This non-pathologizing approach helps us understand perfectionism, procrastination, people-pleasing, overworking, and emotional numbing as protective strategies that are all developed for very good reasons.

Understanding those parts allows us to approach ourselves with compassion instead of criticism and does away with the need to relive or reprocess traumatic experiences. 

For therapists who have spent years believing they should know better, this shift can be incredibly freeing.

Brainspotting

Brainspotting has been one of the most profound healing modalities I've experienced personally.

Sometimes words simply aren't necessary and trauma is held as sensations, images, emotions, or implicit memories that exist beneath conscious awareness.

Brainspotting allows us to access those deeper layers without forcing the mind to explain what the body already knows.

For therapists who spend their lives analyzing, Brainspotting offers permission to stop figuring everything out and simply experience what emerges.

Again and again, I've watched therapists discover that the deepest healing happens when they stop trying to control the process.

Somatic Therapy

Many therapists have spent decades living primarily from the neck up. Our profession rewards us for thinking critically, solving problems, conceptualizing cases, and making meaning out of complex human experiences. Those are beautiful gifts, but they can also become the very thing that keeps us disconnected from ourselves. Somatic therapy offers an invitation to come back into relationship with the body—to notice our breath, our tension, our impulses, and the subtle language of the nervous system. Rather than asking us to think differently, it asks us to experience ourselves differently, trusting that our bodies often know things our minds haven't yet caught up to.

Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP)

One of the most transformative tools I've incorporated into my own healing journey has been Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy.

For many therapists, the greatest obstacle isn't a lack of insight.

It's the protective strategies that make surrender feel unsafe.

KAP temporarily softens those defenses, allowing people to access experiences, emotions, and perspectives that may have remained inaccessible through talk therapy alone.

Rather than simply thinking differently, therapists often experience themselves differently, and because KAP creates a window or neuroplasticity in the brain for several days, somatic therapy, brainspotting, or IFS are even more impactful. Healing becomes embodied rather than conceptual.

Of course, KAP isn't appropriate for everyone, but it is an amazing tool I love using when thoughtfully integrated with psychotherapy because it can create profound opportunities for growth.

Why I Offer Therapy Intensives for Therapists

One thing I've consistently noticed is that therapists often wait far too long to prioritize themselves.

They're busy.

Their schedules are full.

They have clients depending on them.

The idea of squeezing another weekly therapy appointment into an already overflowing calendar feels impossible.

Even when they do attend weekly therapy, they often spend the first twenty minutes transitioning into the session and the last ten minutes preparing to leave.

Just as something meaningful begins to emerge...

Time is up.

This is one of the primary reasons I love working in an intensive format. Traditional weekly therapy is incredibly valuable, but it can also feel like stopping a movie every twenty minutes. Just as your nervous system begins to settle and something meaningful starts to emerge, the session comes to an end and you have to shift back into your responsibilities. Therapy intensives allow us to stay with what is unfolding rather than interrupting it. We have the time to move beyond the initial layers of intellectual understanding and into the deeper emotional and somatic experiences where lasting change often occurs.

Many therapists leave an intensive saying something they've never experienced in traditional therapy:

"I finally stopped analyzing myself."

For me, that's one of the greatest compliments I can receive.

Because transformation rarely happens when we're performing.

It happens when we finally feel safe enough to be human.

Alicia Taverner, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist who helps couples heal after infidelity, years of resentment, and the exhaustion of feeling stuck in the same painful patterns.

Her work helps partners begin to understand each other again, rebuild appreciation, and create lasting change with a focused, supportive approach. Alicia uses brain based techniques, including Brainspotting and ketamine assisted psychotherapy, in an intensive format that gives couples more room to heal without the start and stop of weekly sessions.

Learn more about Alicia’s work with affair recovery intensives, relationship therapy, and ketamine therapy, or visit her About page.