When You're Feeling Disconnected -Bring Yourself Back

Therapists are tired in a way that sleep doesn’t seem to fix anymore. To be fair, most folks seem to be experiencing this in some way, shape or form due to the tremendous pressure we've all been under the last few years. Yet due to the nature of their work, I see more fatigue in the mental health field than I've ever seen.

I see a lot of therapists trying to remain emotionally present, regulated, ethical, empathic, grounded, attentive, attuned, productive, and somehow still functional once they leave the office.

Many were trained to work almost entirely from the neck up. Listen carefully, reflect accurately, track patterns, understand attachment, understand trauma.

But understanding something cognitively and living inside a regulated body are not the same thing. I think many therapists are beginning to realize this.

Not because they suddenly stopped believing in talk therapy. Talk therapy matters deeply. But many clinicians are discovering there are moments when clients understand exactly why they are anxious, dissociated, reactive, shut down, hypervigilant, or emotionally flooded… and yet their body is still carrying the pattern.

And honestly, many therapists are carrying patterns too.

The field itself has become intensely cognitive: screens all day, notes, telehealth, insurance documentation. Endless exposure to trauma narratives without enough support for what happens physiologically to the clinician while absorbing all of it.

Some therapists are functioning in chronic sympathetic activation and calling it professionalism.

Some are dissociating slightly and calling it exhaustion.

Sometimes disassociation can be helpful: overriding your own nervous system may feel like a strategy that necessary to stave off vicarious trauma. Yet doing this for too long they may no longer even recognize what embodiment feels like anymore except maybe during vacation… and sometimes not even then.

This is part of why so many clinicians are beginning to search for somatic interventions, body-based trauma training, nervous system regulation tools, polyvagal approaches, grounding techniques, breathwork, movement practices, and trauma-informed somatic therapy. Not because they’re abandoning psychology. In many cases, they’re trying to make psychology more complete.

There is also something else happening that I don’t think gets discussed enough.

A lot of therapists have spent years helping clients identify emotions while being deeply disconnected from their own bodies. You can track another person’s activation in seconds but haven’t noticed their own jaw has been clenched for six hours. You know the theory of regulation while running on caffeine, shallow breathing, muscle tension, and adrenaline.

Eventually your body starts asking to be included in the conversation.

And for many clinicians, somatic work becomes less about adding another intervention and more about rediscovering some form of internal contact with yourself again.

At Clinical Yoga Institute, we see many therapists arrive at training after years of doing excellent clinical work while also feeling profoundly depleted. Sometimes they come because they want better trauma tools for clients and sometimes they come because they’ve realized insight alone is not resolving certain patterns in session. Sometimes it just they are burned out and can feel it physically.

Usually it’s both.

What’s interesting is that embodiment often changes the therapist before it changes their clinical work.

Breathing differently between sessions. Noticing activation sooner, feeling when a client is becoming overwhelmed instead of intellectually analyzing it afterward, learning that regulation is not weakness. Beginning to experience the body less as a vehicle carrying the brain around and more as part of the therapeutic process itself.

There’s something deeply relieving about realizing you do not have to think your way through every moment of healing.

I think many therapists are moving towards somatic movement because they’ve spent years working at the level of story and cognition and are realizing trauma often continues expressing itself through physiology long after insight has arrived.

And maybe therapists are exhausted partly because many have been asked to hold space for humanity while remaining disconnected from their own embodiment at the same time.

That’s a difficult way to live for decades. Read More