Keep It Coming

I have noticed a significant increase in people’s depressive symptoms on my caseload and my body is feeling theirs on top of my own. Thing is, I don’t feel it until after they leave bc my body runs Therapist-Mask.exe when having sessions back to back.

It’s one thing to be depressed, and entirely another when you take another person’s depression on. I think it’s because I’m already feeling depressed myself that when I come back to me, it’s like a fucking symbiote— it latches on to what is there already and doesn’t let go.

It isn’t that I haven’t been able to look at this before and address it, but like it’s the one part of the job that’s right below documentation that hurts me (I also have ADHD, so documentation without my meds is actual torture and should be listed as a crime against humanity).

I, too, need a place for this extra stuff and it’s not hard to hold, it’s just painful afterwards when it doesn’t dissipate because of my own bullshit, lest you think I’m complaining about my caseload. No. I’m complaining about my body’s inability to let things go

My body has a tendency to stim on emotions, which is a therapy blessing and curse. It stays until my body is satisfied, ie me doing something about it. But bigger issues within the field aside, I cannot address my emotions fully immediately after a session, I have to compartmentalize, which rn is just taking it all and moving it somewhere else. Then, after, I can parse through what I was left with.

Depression in particular is the worst because of how I described it. It’s like a symbiote, it’s hard to tell where mine starts and the symbiote ends. I want to give it space, but it isn’t mine to deal with after hours, you know what I mean? And so I just don’t. It was CR but their hiatus is important for THEM too, I can’t and shouldn’t expect them to be balls to the wall all the time. I shouldn’t put my eggs in one basket, I know.