Go to Bed When You’re Tired: Therapy for the Therapist

Today I feel completely overloaded. It’s not that there is so much more to do than there was yesterday, or more going on in my life. It’s just, I think, that due to my new little girl, I have not had an uninterrupted night’s sleep for 13 months now, and it is starting to take its toll.

Thinking that the way out is through tackling as much as I could head-on and making mental lists as I went, seizing on the baby’s morning nap as a chance to do several more things at once, many of them involving ‘preparing’ for things I am nervous about, I managed to overlook the totally obvious for quite a long time before I found myself saying, not “I’ve got so much to do! Can you do this? Can we do that? We need help!” but “I am so tired I don’t know what to do with myself”. Put that way it was fairly obvious what to do in order to ‘prepare’ for anything at all. I went and lay down.

I’m filing this under mindful awareness, which seems like an exalted term for going to bed when you’re tired. But it sometimes seems like such hard work to keep aware on a simple and basic level. The thoughts suck me in and go at a million miles an hour. It’s thrilling, terrifying, creates adrenaline — which is what I think I need in order to get things done.

To tell the truth, even the nap didn’t work. I didn’t fall asleep for as much as a second. I found myself already in my counselling room, thinking about clients and future sessions. But then I made a small switch. I switched chairs. I sat in my own nice empty space, in my own therapy room. How nice, I thought, to have this time and this place, this deep listening, just for me. 

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