I don’t know too many people in the helping professions who think what they do is ‘enough’. Need is high, resources are limited and there’s always more people queuing to get in the door. Add escalating social and economic pressures and it can feel impossible to meet demand.
The work itself is often complex and there aren’t a lot of clear wins to offset the immersion in human suffering. There’s also a growing expectation that everyone should be alert to, assess and monitor a growing list of risk factors that may vary widely from the presenting concern.
People who choose to support others often have a deeply held feeling of responsibility, a strong sense of integrity and fair chance of perfectionism. It’s a fine line between a feeling of not doing enough and not being enough. There’s likely to be pressure and expectations coming from other areas of life as well. It’s a recipe for exhaustion, burnout and good people leaving their fields.
And sometimes this is all compounded by messaging from senior managers, ministers, media or the public, amplifying the internal pressure to be angels, mind readers and miracle workers where one mistake is one too many.
Being surrounded by other helping professionals can offer a sense of community. But it can also reinforce unrealistic benchmarks. When everyone else’s work is challenging it can be hard to appreciate the impact of the work because when we look around it’s just normal. Much of the work is also done alone with the client, not shared.
It’s a lot. And can do harm if we don’t have active counter measures in place. We need to make space to disentangle our desire to do a good job from internalising impossible expectations. We need room to continually reset, be human, have some days be better than others, have missteps, awkwardness, and more to learn.
And to do that, we need each other. We can help each other catch the internalised pressure because it’s not always easy to see it from the inside. We can collectively celebrate the wins, no matter how small.
When we create cultures where mistakes and setbacks are approached with grace and curiosity, we can share the load rather than make one person’s burden heavier. It’s not about adding a new task on top of the rest, it’s about softening the edges of what’s already there with a little shared kindness.
Helen Mentha 