Written by: Karin Brauner, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
When we go to work, we expect to be in that job for a long time, maybe even for life, right?
But what happens when our job is looking after people’s mental health?
Is it our job to keep a client in counselling forever or to work ourselves out of the job?
I believe it’s the latter.
I’ve sometimes said to clients things like, “I think you’ve been doing better for the past few weeks, and am thinking whether it might be a good time to end. If anything else comes up you can always come back.”
Of course, that means that I have a free time slot and lose some income. But let me worry about that, I might say to clients.
If we start working for only the financial benefits, we might want to keep a client that is ready to go on without us, forever. That wouldn’t be ethical.
As therapists, we must consider a variety of issues and topics when we take on clients: is this going to be long term work, can this be worked through in a few sessions, what benefit are the clients getting from their sessions?
I tell my clients often that I don’t know how long it will take for us to work through their presenting issue. This is for various reasons:
I don’t know how easy it will be for them to get used to talking about their issue, or how long it will take for them to reveal the details necessary to piece together the context of what’s bothering them and why it’s here right now.
The unconscious is an interesting thing, and sometimes we have to dig very deep to find out the origins of a client issue. It will take time, and only time itself will tell when we find it.
There might be breaks, holidays, and other situations that make our time together longer.
I’m sure I could add more things to that list, but in the end, we know, as counsellors, we are working towards an ending with our clients.
The end goal is to help them understand what ails them, and how to manage it better through discovering and using strengths already in them, as well as learning how to set boundaries and meet their needs.
I believe that clients have strengths that they might have hidden away due to life circumstances, but they are there. It’s like Freud said, psychoanalysis is like an archaeological dig where we are piecing together different things we find on location, and as we find more and more things, we are making sense of what’s there. We can eventually get the whole picture.
Getting the whole picture then allows us to understand ourselves better, find a more compassionate way of viewing ourselves, our loved ones and our circumstances.
In turn, this allows us to be able to deal with the situation life throws at us, past, present and future, in a way that keeps our mental health in check.
This is why we work ourselves out of the job: because we get people to a point where they’re back in control of their lives.
That is why we do what we do.
I feel privileged to have counselling as my calling, my profession. I feel honoured to hear people’s stories and make sense of it all with them. To see them flourish and be able to deal with what life throws at them.
What other professionals might “work themselves out of a job?”
Karin Brauner, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine Karin Brauner is passionate about helping people get on track – or back on track – in their personal and professional lives through practical tools and inspirational conversations in a variety of settings. Karin teaches tools that she’s learned and developed throughout her own life and career. She knows how hard things can get, but also how great things can be once you move through to the other side. She now shares the knowledge she’s gained, through various mediums, to show people a path to better self-care, support when processing their past, and working out their present so they can lead an improved life and thrive in their personal and professional relationships.
