Avoiding Therapist Burnout: What Most Somatic Therapy Training Programs Won’t Teach You
Maybe you’re already a therapist and you feel completely burnt out in your work. You followed this career path because you dreamed of helping others heal. But instead, you’re spiraling into a state of overwhelm and questioning whether you can even do it anymore.
Or maybe you’re considering going to school to become a therapist, but you’re worried about the toll it could take on your life. You hear stories from other people in helping professions about how burnt out they are, and you don’t want to spend years of your life and thousands of dollars pursuing a path that might leave you drained and unhappy.
Wherever you’re coming from, I see you.
I’m Chelsea Horton, a Board Certified Dance/Movement Therapist and the founder of Healing Embodied, and I’m here to talk about why so many therapists get caught in the cycle of burnout and how we can do things differently to break the cycle.
Why are therapists, the very people who are supposed to be experts on self-care and healing, sacrificing their own well-being for the sake of their careers?
In this article, I’m digging into some of the root causes of therapist burnout (the ones no one really talks about) and proposing a radical new way to approach training and education for people in therapeutic professions.
Burnout and Turnover Rates in Therapeutic Professions
First, let’s look at the facts…
The turnover rate in behavioral health professions is troublingly high, averaging about 40% but ranging in some cases up to 70%, according to OnShift. (For context, anything over 35% is considered high turnover.)
So, we know therapists are leaving the field at rapid rates… But why?
Because they’re burnt out.
Burnout rates are on the rise among mental health practitioners, according to the American Psychological Association. For psychologists specifically, more than 1 in 3 report feeling burnt out, and those just starting out in their careers report higher levels of stress.
Burnt out therapists are less effective in their work
Burnout isn’t just a problem for therapists — it also affects the client experience.
A 2024 study looked at clinician effectiveness for clients experiencing symptoms of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and found that the effectiveness of a therapist’s work can notably decrease when the therapist reports feeling burnt out.
Addressing and preventing this cycle of burnout is crucial, not only for the sake of therapists and practitioners, but also for the very people we’re dedicated to helping. But most conventional pathways people take to become therapists don’t meaningfully address these issues.
Most therapists aren’t taught how to avoid burnout
Avoiding therapist burnout starts with the way you train to become a therapist or therapeutic practitioner. It starts with you and with the people who help you develop your skills.
To develop a career as a therapeutic practitioner that actually feels sustainable and whole, you have to start by cultivating that wholeness from the inside out. Unfortunately, this isn’t the way therapist training and education is approached in most cases.
Becoming a therapist typically requires following an academic path that involves getting at least a master’s degree. And while this route is valuable, it typically won’t teach you the skills you need to maintain a healthy and empowered emotional life as you work with clients. In fact, the rat race of grad school often encourages the cycle of burnout. Many new therapists graduate already feeling profoundly spread thin, and the cycle just continues.
We all carry emotional wounding and trauma
Most therapists (like most people) carry emotional wounding and trauma. This might even be part of what inspires someone to become a therapist. But most education and training paths don’t help therapists untangle and address these core wounds and traumas. So, many therapists enter into their client work carrying old patterns, beliefs, and stories that contribute to an unsustainable relationship to the work itself.
Maybe you’re carrying an unconscious desire to rescue or save your clients.
Maybe you have a tendency toward martyrdom, or sacrificing yourself for the sake of others.
Maybe you were parentified as a child, and now you carry a hidden belief that your needs and emotions don't matter.
You might even be carrying around unhelpful beliefs about your self-worth, like…
“My worth is tied to my helpfulness.”
“My worth is tied to my effectiveness as a therapist.”
“My worth is tied to my ability to save others from pain or discomfort.”
When these patterns and beliefs go unaddressed and untended, they can sneak their way into the therapeutic relationship, spurring on the cycle of burnout without us even realizing.
If you believe deep down that your value is tied to your ability to rescue others from pain and that your feelings should take a backseat to the feelings of others, this sets the stage for deep emotional burnout in your career before you’ve even started working with clients. It doesn’t matter how much education you have or how many strategies you’ve learned for helping clients through a crisis — your own internal patterns will influence and ultimately decide what kind of relationship you have to your career. Your work as a therapeutic practitioner will always feel unsustainable at a core emotional level until you address the maladaptive beliefs you carry.
Unfortunately, most conventional therapy training programs won’t help you do this. They can teach you how to facilitate and give you tools and processes for intervention (which is all valuable and important), but they usually don't address the emotional patterns that loom and linger in the background for many therapists and people in helping professions.
What happens when therapists don’t address their wounds
Believe it or not, it’s possible for someone to become a therapist without ever having undergone any therapy or healing work of their own. But when practitioners don’t address their own patterns of wounding before trying to help others heal, the burnout cycle will inevitably take hold.
You’ll likely end up feeling perpetually exhausted and overextended because you’re pouring everything you have into your clients even when you have nothing to give.
You may end up carrying the emotional burdens your clients share with you, because you haven’t yet learned how to hold strong emotional boundaries.
You might even unintentionally rush your clients through the healing process, because their outcomes are tied up with your sense of self-worth. Or you might absorb your clients’ pain or feel compelled to carry their burdens for them. Maybe your patterns show up as a lack of commitment to self-care, so you end up struggling to recover and regenerate between client sessions or on your days off, leading to an ever-decreasing sense of vitality in your work.
When your practice is guided by these patterns, it leads to burnout on every level — emotional, psychological, physical, and even financial. This is not a sustainable way to engage with clients, and it’s so much less than you deserve as a practitioner.
When you burn out, you and your clients both lose access to the true potential of your work.
When you burn out, the efficacy, passion, and depth of your work decreases.
If you want to do this work for the long haul and provide a service that leaves a legacy and stands the test of time, you have to address the patterns that lead to burnout, self-sacrifice, and codependent dynamics in the therapeutic relationship.
Because your job isn’t to take away your clients’ pain. Your job is to help your clients learn how to safely feel their pain and alchemize it into their own power.
At Healing Embodied, we have created a first-of-its-kind, accredited practitioner training program that helps you do exactly that.
The Healing Embodied Practitioner Training Program is shifting the paradigm
Serving your clients should not mean spiraling down a path of burnout and depletion. Cultivating a thriving career that allows you to help others heal and transform their lives does not mean having to give up your own well-being. It also doesn’t mean having to sacrifice high-quality education and training.
Along with my co-founder, Sarah Rot, I designed the Healing Embodied Practitioner Training Program as a robust alternative to what’s missing in other training and certification programs of its kind. Not only is this 12-month program fully accredited and rigorous, it also helps guide you through the inner work needed to create an empowering, life-affirming, and lasting relationship to your career. This program is rooted in the belief that you matter in the therapeutic relationship and that when you embody this belief, your work will transform.
This is at the core of what we teach in the Healing Embodied Practitioner Training Program. We don’t just teach you the skills for deeply effective facilitation, we also teach you how to serve from a place of empowerment and wholeness instead of wounding and martyrdom.
If you want to learn how to serve others without losing or sacrificing yourself, apply for the Healing Embodied Practitioner Training Program today.
You can also download our free training, How to Not Burn Out as a Therapist, or sign up for our mailing list to stay updated about the program. We look forward to connecting with you and helping you build a career that lights you up instead of burning you out.