Remembering yourself in times of fear...

Home sick with a cold.

The clinic where I work is a high pressure environment. In addition to meeting 31+ clients every week and providing them with individual psychotherapy sessions, we are required to maintain an updated case file on every one of our clients. This entails a huge amount of paperwork that often feels overwhelming. Unfortunately, the culture of outpatient mental health clinics is such that paperwork and productivity are sometimes more important to the administration than the actual one-to-one work with our clients in sessions. I recently fell behind on some paperwork and was informed, in what felt like a punitive way, that I needed to catch up. Even though I eventually caught up, this incident pulled the rug out from under me. It scared me, and the fear made me equate the lapse in my paperwork with the actual work I do as a therapist, raising intense feelings of self-doubt and self-criticism. It took a wise friend to remind me that I needed to remember who I really was, and that my real work does not equal paperwork.