Navigating Private Practice Burnout as a Psychologist: Finding Connection Amidst Disillusionment and Exhaustion

This month, we reach the conclusion of a year of working with Carol Sanford, social innovator and regenerative paradigm educator. 

It’s been an intense year of exploring regenerative themes and principles for psychology practices. The premise underpinning this work is:

“Find your paradigms and disrupt them.”

The experience of disrupting your own understanding of the world isn’t a comfortable one, yet it’s the most common longing of the people that we work with in our programmes and in coaching.

This past year, two common manifestations of this longing for a fundamental shift have shown up as disillusionment with psychology as a profession or exhaustion in their private practices.

 As we work alongside people who are exploring these powerful themes, it occurs to me that disillusionment and exhaustion might be portals through which we can come back into connection with the more enduring Universal energies, as well as one another.

 Sharon Blackie, psychologist and author, connects this journey with the power of Place:

“This is not a journey that takes place in our heads. It is a journey that takes us out of our heads and weaves us back into the shimmering web of life - life with all its beauty and its chaos, its caresses and its stings, its dangers and its blessings." (from ‘If Women Rose Rooted.’)

Those taking the journey from disillusionment and exhaustion to reconnection and wholeness might contemplate the power of Place in their own stories: 

•  What places have I cherished in my life?
•  How have places shaped my life and my stories?
•  Where and how can I deepen connection with Place now?

After so long being disconnected from one another over the last couple of years, as well as carrying the intergenerational burdens of cultural disconnection from the natural systems surrounding and inhabiting us, tonight we have a gift awaiting those of us in the Northern Hemisphere.

Beyond the day when the sun stands still (also known as the winter Solstice), we can witness two more celestial events.

Tonight we will be accompanied by the waxing crescent moon, the smallest sliver of moon before the new moon, said to be the time when the moon is at her most aged and wise. Alongside this dark and reflective moon, we will be able to witness the Ursid meteor shower at its height.

The story of shooting stars is mostly considered from the perspective of the viewer but consider the journey of the meteor for a moment. 

After billions of years travelling the cold Universe, this elemental piece of Universe enters the scorching atmosphere of a blue planet and bursts into sparkling brilliance for a moment. To the human eye, we see this flash and brilliance and imagine that’s the end of the journey.

However, from the perspective of those elements, that flash represented a fundamental shift in state and their entry into a planetary living system. The elements of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur, brought by these pieces of stardust, are the building blocks of all life on Earth.

They become part of us, as we are parts of the universe. 

In reality, such elemental paradigm shifts can only happen in connection with one another.

Tonight, when the sun stands still, we are accompanied by the moon at her most aged and wise, and we will be showered with the stars that make up all life on Earth. 

In the morning, we welcome the return of the sun and look forward to more powerful paradigm shifts together on our next trip around that star.  

I look forward to being rewoven into the shimmering web of life alongside you all. 

"May Yule good and Yule food, follow you through the year."

With warmest wishes,

Wendy

Originally published 21 December 2022.