For professionals
in the field of mental health, “self-care” has become a popular buzzword that
gets thrown around like butter at an all you can eat pancake breakfast. Feeling
overworked? Practice better self-care! Is your physical health declining due to
lack of exercise? There’s probably a self-care strategy you haven’t tried yet.
Coming down with a case of empathy fatigue? You probably should have practiced
better self-care. These messages culminate into one, overarching ideal that in
order to be successful as a psychologist, you should be ever striving toward
yet another buzzword notion: the “work-life balance.” It doesn’t take long for
graduate students hearing these messages to conjure up ideas of regular
exercise routines, protected sleep time and dutiful hours spent with textbooks
in the corners of the library. But this picture in our minds, as wonderful as
it may seem, is not always reality. Even students who feel that they’ve
established positive “self-care” practices may still feel that their lives are severely
imbalanced during more stressful times, such as finals week or while applying
for internship.
We all but preach
to our clients and our cohort mates the importance of self-care and quieting
the demanding inner voice that self-deprecatingly tells us we’re not trying
hard enough. But with ourselves, this message is often much more difficult to
internalize. And the repercussions for this message become increasingly severe,
in my opinion, for female psychologists that are balancing multiple roles in
life. I would posit that as women psychologists (and doctoral students in
psychology), we are especially hard on ourselves when it comes to the topic of
navigating our personal and professional lives. As a second year doctoral
student with two practicum placements, a full load of coursework, a new
marriage and my attempts to prioritize my own physical fitness, I have found
myself searching for other women in my field that can serve as beacons of hope
that someday my roles as a therapist, a wife, a friend, a mentor, a teacher, a
student and a citizen will all become easier to hold in perfect harmony. Then I
will know exactly what it feels like to have struck this mythical “work-life
balance.” However, the more I’ve sought
the wisdom of my professors, supervisors, mentors and friends on this topic,
the more I have heard one resounding theme: There is no such thing as
“work-life balance.”
I am going to
assume that after reading that last sentence, you are feeling some of what I
experienced when I first heard an early career, licensed female psychologist
and professor in my department say those words in a panel that I recently held
on this very topic. To say that her words were met with some pushback is an
understatement. In fact, I felt myself become quite hostile toward the notion
that she might disparage my dreams of one day uncovering the elusive secret
that I assumed all female psychologists have been let in on- as though an
underground society exists for these women, who have somehow arrived at a place
of existential superiority that I can only hope to somehow fall into on my way
toward licensure.
As she continued
to share her thoughts during the panel, this same psychologist polished off her
sentiment with: “I’ve learned to bury the word ‘balance’ right next to
‘perfection’.” I sat there stunned and dismayed. If there is no such thing as
‘balance’, just as there is no such thing as ‘perfection,’ then what is my goal
as I seek to keep all these balls in the air? The implication seemed too
daunting: If I am not robbing myself of a full night’s sleep by waking up at 5
am to squeeze in a work out before a 9 hour day of classes; if I’m not texting
my husband recipes for dinner in between the back to back appointments I have
at my practicum site; if I’m not coming home and cleaning the entire apartment
before reading endless chapters of psychoanalytic texts before collapsing into
bed, then what does it look like to be doing this phase of my training well?
As a
perfectionist, I don’t need help putting pressure on myself to keep my life in
“balance.” I can easily find ways to guilt myself into thinking that I haven’t
(fill in the blank) well enough as I attempt to tackle the many roles and tasks
an average day entails for me. Through the panel presentation that I held this
semester called “Courageous Conversations: Exploring the Work-Life Balance as a
Woman Clinical Psychologist”, one truth was reiterated again and again by the
various early to later career psychologists that spoke: There is no right way to balance it all, and that’s okay.
I
don’t know about you, but I find that incredibly encouraging. What if there
isn’t such thing as perfectly balancing one’s roles as psychologist, partner,
friend, and advocate? What if it were okay that sometimes our lives will
require us to focus more exclusively on one role than another? What if we’re
all just figuring it out as we go along? Beginning to think this way requires a
major cognitive overhaul. If you’re into cognitive behavioral therapy, I
believe this is what we would call looking for the alternative. For me, my
alternative belief started when I took my professor’s advice and I buried the
word “balance” right next to “perfection.”
- Written by Mae Adams Shirley, M.S., M.A.
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