Holding Space as a Therapist, Sometimes it’s Heavy.

Rarely do we as therapists transparently share about the challenge of holding space for others while navigating our personal challenge of sorrow, grief, depression, anxiety, or stress. It’s a topic often avoided for many reasons. One reason, I believe, is that our profession and many organizations have not fully made space to acknowledge just how demanding this work is, nor established systems that take care of the caregiver, so thank you tends to feel like an afterthought or a check the block. So many barriers and challenges have made it difficult for therapists to show up in spaces that restore, renew, and empower us to also focus on our wholeness and wellness.

As a young therapist, nearly a decade into the profession, I know that holding space for others cannot come at the expense of my own wholeness, healing, deliverance, and wellness. Not selfishly, but necessarily.

Four years ago, after losing my cousin-sister, Rahsheedah, and after the tragic loss of a mentor and friend who helped me navigate this profession with excellence. I made a conscious decision to deliberately invest in my wellness journey. This decision brought some career challenges and internal conflict because I had also placed the profession first; many will see reliability in this, and others will not, but truthfully, we can all find ourselves in a space where we unintentionally overwork while others underwork. We burn out holding space for others, with no one to hold space for us.

That choice has fundamentally changed how I show up for my clients. I’ll be honest, this was not something I learned in my clinical training or along my professional journey. What I learned and heard, in every leadership and clinical training, was to “practice self-care or have boundaries.” But what if self-care or lack of boundaries wasn’t the issue? Truth: self-care isn't enough to offset heavy caseloads, weeks of unfinished documentation, systemic barriers, or organizational stressors that quietly erode your bandwidth, passion, or capacity.

I realized that the space where I spent most of my day needed to be a space that actively took care of those who care for others. As I stepped into leadership roles, I made it my responsibility to prioritize my teams' well-being. That meant recognizing when they were not well, adjusting schedules when necessary, having difficult but honest conversations about burnout and my responsibility as a leader to ensure balance and wellness, and asking a simple but often neglected question: What do you need from me to be supported? It wasn’t a perfect process; sometimes I fell short in taking care of my subordinates and myself, something I have spent time practicing forgiveness for.

I now focus on spaces and practices that promote wellness for myself, my peers, and my subordinates. Beyond my 8–10-hour workday, I also began creating and engaging in spaces that allowed me to truly learn about wholeness and wellness, not just survival. That intentional investment has reshaped my leadership, my clinical presence, and my capacity to hold space in ways that are sustainable, ethical, and deeply human. A way that focuses on quality care over quantity, something I’m grateful I’ve learned early in the profession.

This has never been a perfect process. As I sit at my computer on a Sunday, typing notes, coordinating client care, managing training, and scheduling vacations, workouts, and health appointments for myself, I’m reminded that this profession may never be easy, but I’ll be well while I’m in it!

As a more mature therapist and leader, I recognize a crucial responsibility I have to my clients and to therapists themselves. To intentionally create and advocate for spaces that care for the therapist. Whether within the organizations I serve or in the broader community as a therapist and life and wellness coach, this responsibility feels both necessary and urgent.

I have chosen to hold space for my peers, my subordinates, and my leaders. To name burnout when it appears, to normalize limits, and to remind us that sustainability and our wellness matter, it is not secondary to our caseloads, documentation, or other clinical responsibilities. Because if we don’t create these spaces for one another—who will?