Therapy for Therapists: What Compassion Fatigue Is Really Asking of Us

What does compassion fatigue feel like for a therapist? • Why do I feel numb or irritated with my clients? • When is it time for therapists to have therapy of their own?

Therapy for therapists is often talked about as good professional practice, but I think it is something deeper than that.

Being a therapist requires us to continually sit close to grief, betrayal, trauma, fear, heartbreak, and loss. We ask our clients to turn toward difficult emotions, listen to their bodies, notice the places they disconnect, and make space for what they have spent years avoiding.

But therapists need somewhere to do that work, too.

For me, understanding therapist compassion fatigue has meant looking beyond caseloads, vacations, boundaries, and traditional ideas about self-care. It has meant asking what happens to all of the emotions that arise in me while I sit with another person’s pain—and what happens when I continually ask my nervous system to push those responses away.

Yesterday was just another typical day in America for me. I woke up, got my kids ready for the day, and headed to the gym. I got my nails done, had a parent-teacher conference, got my kids to their after-school activities, and had a few sessions with clients. Before heading out for my own tennis practice I scrolled social media and saw a few reels about yet another horrifying story of rape culture - the Cornell rape case was all over the internet. I could feel the familiar mix of outrage and sorrow enter my body. I googled Cornell 7 to find a CNN story and get the basic facts about the case.

I didn’t have time to fall apart over it the way I did when I heard about the Motherless website. I closed my phone, closed my eyes, and sent a little prayer to the victim knowing I’d return later. After tennis practice I sat in my driveway and opened my phone. I read Lissa Rankin’s substack post, The “Free Pussy” SnapChat at Cornell & Why We Can’t Become Numb to the Next Horrifying Story of Rape Culture.

But after reading it, I did feel numb. I didn’t throw open the door to my home in outrage and tell my husband angrily about what I had read. I didn’t pick up my phone and text my friends to tell them about my devastation and heartbreak. I walked in, sat down, and asked my son about his day. We talked about what time my daughter would be home and ate dinner. 

Life just went on. 

Since having a kundalini awakening in 2022 and becoming fully embodied I can’t dissociate for very long. It’s been less than 12 hours and sitting down to write about compassion fatigue in therapists brings up a well of emotion as I think about my own process yesterday. 

I have to be careful about the amount of news and social media I ingest. Stories like the Cornell rape case, Motherless and the Epstien files wreck me. My body physically hurts, and I cry - sometimes for days. 

There are times when I wish I could turn it off and not feel so deeply, but I know that this is what makes me fully human. 

My soul came here to feel. 

It came here to love and be loved, and to help others remember how to do the same. My ability to feel what another person feels is what makes me a good therapist, but it’s my soul’s calling that makes me an amazing healer. 

But what happens when the things that make you amazing at your work - your love, humanity, connection, and compassion become the things that your nervous system tries to protect you from? 

Why Therapists Need Their Own Space to Process

In 2008 I became an intern at a community mental health center, and I had my very first session with a client. I was given a folder with hand-written information about the person I’d be seeing which included a completed intake. Reading it over, I learned she was 30 years older than me, and was seeking therapy after the death of her best friend. When I walked in and sat across from her, I immediately felt tightness in my chest and a constriction in my throat. The air felt dense and thick with grief. 

The session is a blur as I try to remember it now, but I recall not knowing exactly what to say. I defaulted to asking her to tell me about her friend and their relationship. I nodded as she filled the space with sadness and tears. My chest and throat ached from the softball sized ball of grief I felt in my own body. 

After the session I met with my supervisor to discuss how it went. She told me how to assess clinical depression and how to make an appropriate referral for a medication evaluation.

I didn’t say anything about the physical response I had in that session or in the subsequent sessions. At the time I believed my job was to help my client stop feeling so much grief, and if I carried some of it with me then it was a sign I was helping. For years I’d feel responses in my body to the emotions my clients expressed and I called it compassion. 

The woman who lost a child, the couple on the brink of divorce, the infidelities, the betrayals, the car accidents and sexual assaults. One session at a time I’d open the door and my heart to whatever my clients brought me. When those 50 minutes were over, I’d walk to the bathroom, wash my hands, refill my drink, and stretch for a couple seconds before greeting the next client. 

When Holding Space Starts to Change You

A couple years before I began my own healing journey, I started to notice that at the end of my longest days with clients, my body would feel physically exhausted. I’d go home and try my best to be present with my family. I’d have trouble sleeping and wake up the next morning feeling hung over without having drank any alcohol. My whole body hurt and I had a headache. I bought expensive chairs to support my spine, took breaks to eat and take walks between sessions, and eventually I’d stop giving myself fully to my clients. 

I began to feel some callousness about the things I’d hear on repeat. Miscommunication between a couple was just par for the course. The pain they felt would subside eventually if they began to understand their patterns and changed their behaviors. I became bored and numb during sessions. 

When I started to feel numb I’d plan a vacation or take time off, thinking that a change of scenery would help me feel renewed. Most of the time it did. But it was only because I’d have several days of disconnection from my clients. I’d do my best not to think about them and stay focused on my trip and the people I was with. When I returned it wasn’t long before the same pattern emerged. 

When I started using psychedelics everything in my life changed, including my career and the way I showed up for my clients. I woke up the morning after my second journey feeling like there were bees buzzing through my veins. I could actually hear the vibration of my own blood and energy coursing through me. It was as if the medicine connected all the tracks that had been separated through social conditioning and childhood trauma and made my entire being feel whole and connected.   

Being embodied and feeling fully alive meant that I could no longer move into numbness without my body sending off warning bells and red flags. I could no longer stuff down the responses I had to my clients. It turned out the pain that showed up in my body had nothing to do with my chair or need for a vacation - it had everything to do with what I was holding and not responding to in my own internal landscape. 

In grad school and in my internships I had learned about countertransference and how it could impact the way I interacted with my clients if I wasn’t careful. I learned it could drive me to make the session all about myself, cross boundaries, or reject clients if I wasn’t careful. I was taught to shut off any of my own responses and only reflect back what I saw in my clients, and it was often seen as shameful whenever a fellow student brought up their own feelings toward a client in group supervision. 

As I began waking up to myself and my body I also began to wake up to the culture I have been living in. The way I was taught to manage my countertransference was not happening in a vacuum. My training existed in the same culture I did - the one that had taught me how to override my body, ignore or contain inconvenient emotions, keep focused on productivity and perform the roles that were expected of me. 

The paradox is such a mind-fuck. Being taught to help people tune into their internal and emotional experiences while simultaneously being taught to be suspicious of my own. This creates an unspoken us-them dynamic in the therapy room. The therapist is supposed to play the role of the healthy one, the one who supposedly has all their shit together and the client is the person struggling and needing our help. 

There are so many things wrong with this, but I’ll save my rant about colonization and the white men at the forefront of psychological advancement for another time. Ailey Jolie wrote a great article about that here.

The Problem With Asking Therapists to Leave Themselves Outside the Room

In order to maintain that distinction I was taught to leave parts of myself out of the room. The thing no one taught me was that in order to avoid compassion fatigue, I had to lean into the very things I had been taught to avoid and shut down. My own body and emotions have always provided a wealth of information about the processes that were happening in the room. 

I'm not a mirror simply reflecting back what I'm seeing. I am a human who feels deeply when someone tells me something horrifying. I no longer want to remain the “healthy one,” and I no longer want to uphold the “I know. You don’t.” mentality that plagues our culture. 

When I use this lens to look back on that very first client experience, what I now see is that my assignment was never to help her feel less pain. It was to help her feel her grief in a safe and supported way. She was actually the one with all of the experience because she knew grief in a way that I didn’t. My lack of knowledge and inexperience made me stop talking and make space. The tightness in my throat and chest alerted me to her deep sadness and pain so that I could attune and respond to her with care. 

This is the way that I’ve learned to sit with my own feelings and it’s an invitation for you to sit with yours. 

Compassion Fatigue Isn’t Always About Doing Too Much

My belief is that when we therapists experience compassion fatigue, the act of pushing down our own emotional responses is actually what makes us feel exhausted. 

It takes a lot of energy to show up and act as if another person’s story doesn’t impact you. Without the proper guidance, outlets, and space to safely feel and respond to your client’s stories and pain, pushing it down and disconnecting become the safety your nervous system chooses and over time the exhaustion takes over. 

Compassion fatigue keeps you from holding the frame for your clients. It pulls you out of your own energy and you stop holding them accountable. You stop challenging them where you’ve stopped with yourself. You being tired isn’t just about being tired in relation to them. It’s about being tired in relation to yourself and your own unprocessed emotions. 

Therapy for Therapists Means Having Somewhere to Put What We Carry

But Alicia, I don’t have the time/money/energy to process my emotions. 

These are the things I hear most about why people can’t possibly allow themselves to feel. But truthfully, they just don’t feel comfortable allowing themselves to feel. Tears are free, and in the beginning it might take longer than you’d like to move through something, but eventually you get good at it. It does take energy, but so does pushing it all down. 

My practice has completely changed as I have learned to allow LOTS of space for my emotions. 

I cry in my car after I drop my kids off at school, and in my driveway when I get home. I cry on the phone with my friends and we even spend whole weekends dedicated to feeling and processing while our kids aren’t around. When I’ve had a long day at work, I come home and instead of watching tv on the couch I sit in the bath and invite my body to tell me about all it’s been holding. Sometimes that leads to tears, and other times it leads me to my own deeper processes around the triggering things I’ve heard that day. 

When a client tells me that they have lost someone they love, I don’t try to hide the tears that well up in my eyes. And when someone who has spent years healing and growing with me as their therapist tells me they’ve finally fallen in love, I let those tears come too. And guess what? I haven’t taken over a session or made it about myself by letting myself feel. It’s a simple connection of humanity that says, I see you and I care for you, therefore I feel for you. 

Their grief doesn’t become my grief, and I don’t need them to take care of me or my emotions. I can feel deeply and know what belongs to me and what belongs to them.

But Alicia, isn’t that overwhelming? 

Yes, sometimes it is. But you know what else is overwhelming? Walking around like a zombie, feeling numb and disconnected, scrolling past horrific news stories on your phone because you no longer have the capacity to let another one in. 

When I allow myself to feel the weight of what I’m seeing and hearing and truly emote, I come out on the other side with more capacity for love and connection to others. As the news about Jane Doe and the Cornell 7 will continue to unfold in the coming weeks, I’ll allow my body to show me how it wants to process. For now, I’ll let the tears fall - a symbol of the preciousness I carry that helps me remain human, embodied, connected, and alive. 

What Therapy for Therapists Can Look Like

Being a therapist is a sacred practice. It requires that we attach, attune, and remain open to our client’s stories, and those stories have the ability to trigger our unhealed parts. But where do we go to do that work? In January I’ll be opening the doors to my Healing Circle for Therapists, where a small group of us will gather weekly for 6 sessions to slow down, turn inward, and make space for what we’ve been carrying. There will be a short guided meditation and an invitation to sit with some of the uncomfortable truths we inevitably find ourselves experiencing. We’ll use brainspotting and IFS techniques to guide us inward, each person engaged in their own private internal process while surrounded by a community of therapists doing the same. And since doing your own work shouldn’t be a luxury, pay-what-you-can pricing will be offered. If we are going to continue asking our clients to turn towards themselves, listen to their bodies, and feel what they’ve spent years pushing away, we need a space to do the same. 

If you’d like to hear more about the January Therapist Healing Circle when registration opens, join my mailing list and I’ll send you the details.   

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.

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.