TRANSCRIPT
I was recently asked if I could make a video on the subject of self-care and avoiding burnout. Well, in a way, I sort of addressed this video in my video on why I quit being a psychotherapist, but in a way, I didn’t address it. And part of the reason I said I didn’t address it is I had to think about it. Did I burn out as a therapist? Many people have commented on that video, “Oh yeah, you gave six reasons why you quit being a therapist. Really, you burned out? That’s why you left the field?”
And when I thought about it, I realized no, I actually didn’t burn out on being a therapist. But if I had continued being a therapist, I probably would have burned out. In fact, the reason that I quit, in a way, if you want to just sum it all up, is that I realized I was heading toward burnout.
So how did I avoid burnout? Well, part of the reason I bring up this whole subject for me is that that time when I quit being a therapist wasn’t the only time that I’ve quit a profession. I’ve actually quit quite a few things in my life, and when I think about it, they all come together with certain underlying principles for me.
What I see as the biggest way to avoid burnout is to keep doing what is interesting to me. For other people too, to keep doing what’s interesting, to keep one’s mind occupied and active, to be in a position in life where you keep learning and growing. And when you find yourself doing things that are repetitive, where you’re not growing and learning so much, where it’s not so much interesting anymore, where things are starting to become repetitive and rote—which is, in a way, what was kind of happening with me as a therapist—I realized for myself that it’s time for me to move on to find something new in my life.
Now, I do know people that are kind of junkies for interesting things. They’re always moving to a new thing really, really quickly—every six months, every three months, every year—something new, something new, something new. And I have seen situations where people who do that can be avoiding more intimacy, avoiding greater depth in whatever it is that they’re participating in. But I think sometimes also that can have a healthy side too, where people aren’t really fully engaged with their own values and whatever it is that they’re doing. So they’re moving along, trying to figure out what will work for them, and I think that’s another way to avoid burnout.
Because what I’ve seen for myself is that when I start doing things that are not really in line with who I am on the inside, with what my values are—not just my mind and my intelligence and my ability to grow intellectually, but also my ability to grow emotionally—I start to feel like I’m misusing myself. And I find that, well, it can be really hard to quit doing things, but it’s much harder if I find I am misusing myself, misusing my mind, misusing my heart, misusing my talents, misusing my reason for being on earth.
I think of another example for myself. When I made, well, at that point it was four documentary films, mostly on the subject of recovery from psychosis and schizophrenia without medication. It was a subject that fascinated me for many, many years. And actually, when I quit being a therapist, I transitioned into that as work—into making documentary films.
Well, what happened is I found myself going all around the world, showing my films, doing lots of question and answer sessions with audiences, giving lots of lectures at psychology conferences and all sorts of different groups in many, many different countries—sometimes with translators, sometimes with me speaking other languages like Spanish, mostly in English though. But what I found is that while at first it fascinated me, there was something about it on a lot of different levels that really engaged me. After a while, I started finding that I was being asked a lot of the same questions again and again and again.
And while in a way, at first, meaning for a few years that was okay because it gave me a chance to really think about what my answer is, to really refine my message, to really come up with good examples that could reach an audience, well, there was sort of an arc in my learning process where eventually I started feeling like I was one of those pull toys where you pull it and you know it makes the same sound every time. Like, there’s the sheep—you pull it and it goes “baa” every time. Well, I started feeling like after a while I was going and saying the same things over and over and over again, and to me, that wasn’t so interesting.
Now, part of what made it really hard, in a way, to leave that documentary film work and going around the world being a sort of expert on psychosis—also part of what made it really hard about quitting being a therapist and having my own private practice—part of what was so hard is like, “Oh my God, I’m giving up my income.” There was a lot of sacrifice involved, and I’ve seen that with a lot of people in all sorts of different professions. Probably the mental health profession is the area that I know the best, but I’ve seen people who are becoming burned out or actually are deeply into being burned out, but they don’t want to leave because they don’t want to let the money go. It’s like, “What else am I going to do to make money?” I’ve heard people say that. I’ve heard therapists actively tell me that they’ve said, “You know, I kind of lost interest in being a therapist 20 years ago, 30 years ago, but I reached a point in my career,” they said, “where I could suddenly start charging a lot more money because I had a lot more expertise, I had a lot more reputation, popularity, fame even. Also, I had a lot more people who were referring people to me. I had a lot more contacts out in the world.” So it’s like, “Ah!” And I kind of felt this in a way too. It was like, “Wait a second.” I was, well, when I decided to quit being a therapist, I was already almost a decade into being a therapist. When I decided to quit, it still took me a while before I wrapped up my practice and closed it down. It took me a little over a year.
But the reason that I share this is that, well, I realized, “Oh my God, I worked so hard for so many years to build a viable, functional private psychotherapy practice where I was in charge. I was finally starting to make money, and I was like, ‘Oh, how disappointing is this? How depressing! I worked so hard to get to this point where I’m financially stable and independent, and now I don’t want to do it anymore. It’s like, how can I quit?'”
I remember a friend of mine who was an older psychotherapist. She told me, she says, “Daniel, you know what you’re doing,” and she said, “I admire you for it.” She said, “You are retiring.” And she said, “I should have retired a long time ago, but I didn’t know what else to do, and I didn’t know how to make anything resembling this amount of money.” I remember thinking, “Well, am I retiring?” I certainly liked it a lot better than people in YouTube comments writing, “You just burned out.” It’s like, “No, I didn’t really burn out.” In a way, I was retiring, but in a way, I wasn’t retiring because I didn’t have the money to retire. I couldn’t live on the amounts that I’d saved up, and certainly not live forever, especially the idea of retirement being, “Oh no, I can just go to some Caribbean island and relax forever.” Well, I couldn’t do that.
Really, what I was doing was transitioning into a new phase in my life. And so to talk about this subject of self-care, this is where it dovetails really nicely with the subject of avoiding burnout. The main act of self-care that I have done in my life, especially as it relates to avoiding burnout, is knowing who I am on the inside, honoring myself, growing to love myself more, love my real self—not my fake self, not the junky side of myself that wants to just avoid things and displace things and project and not be connected to myself and just live for…
Hedonism or pleasure, but to really love the true self of me on the inside and to nurture and develop that relationship. For me, that I see is what gave me the strength to quit being a therapist, for instance, before I reached burnout. In spite of knowing that I was going to kill my income, that I was going to be suddenly poor out in the world, it was like I was pressing the restart button on my life. And that was terrifying. But what gave me the strength to do it is I had me on the inside.
So although I was leaving a career, a profession, a vocation, a love, a way in which I connected with people in the outside world, I was leaving that identity. But I wasn’t leaving my real identity, which was me. I was leaving an external identity, and what I was going to carry with me was a stronger internal identity.
So when it comes to self-care, the real self-care for me is to care for my inner self, to nurture my inner truth, to work out my historical traumas so I’m less screwed up, so I have more of an open connection with who I really am, where it’s easier to love myself, where I don’t hate myself as much. And what I’ve seen is when people don’t love themselves as much, when they hate themselves more, it’s easier to get stuck in the blind alleys of life. It’s easier to get stuck doing things that we don’t like. When we don’t like ourselves, it’s easier to do things that we don’t like and to feel comfortable with that.
That’s how I was raised as a child. I was raised to not like myself very much, not to love myself very much. Therefore, it was a lot easier for me to spend my days doing things that I didn’t like because since I didn’t like me, why should I like what I’m doing on the outside? The more I liked me on the inside, the more I loved who I really was, the more it was actually a requirement for my life to do things that I liked. And in a way, that’s the ultimate preventative for burning out. How could I burn out if I loved myself so much that I refuse to do ultimately what I’m not so interested in anymore?
And that’s a double-edged sword because by loving myself that much and needing to fight for having a life, an interactive life in the world where I loved what I was doing and who I was, it didn’t make my life very comfortable. So that actually can be pretty stressful. The more we care for ourselves, sometimes the less we fit into this very screwed up outside world that expects certain things from people.
I remember when I quit being a therapist, a lot of people told me, “Why are you doing that? You’re making a mistake. You’re going to regret it.” I’ve heard that many, many times in my life from people, usually who I didn’t respect or admire that much. They were not my role models, but they told me about my decisions, “You are going to regret that for the rest of your life.” And I look back at those people and I realized that most of them were actually burned out in their existences. They were burned out in their romantic relationships. They were burned out in their careers. They weren’t really growing that much. They were sort of like barnacles on a rock, just stuck there for eternity. They’d given up in a way.
And for me to keep growing on the inside, to keep engaging, if you want to call it my own self-therapeutic process, my process of becoming a more healthy, mature person, that’s been the answer for me. And it’s still an ongoing process, and it’s not easy because my life keeps going through new phases. And it’s very confusing. The more I go through more phases as I get older, the more I realize I don’t relate to what I see out in the world so much. And certainly, the world doesn’t relate to me. They can’t put me in a little box.
But underneath it, through it all, through the stress, through the insecurities that I still have, the self-doubts, oh my god, why can’t I just be normal and do what other people are doing? Why can’t I just be comfortable with being burned out like almost everybody I see around me? Well, the more that I keep going on this path, the more I realize I love myself continually in a greater way, and also I have more to offer the world.