The Cycle of Role Dysfunction in School Counseling

Are you feeling overwhelmed in your role as a school counselor, perpetually stuck in a cycle where the better your perform, the more you're given to do? You could be caught in a cycle of role dysfunction, and you're definitely not alone. 

This episode is a heartfelt deep-dive discussion about these challenges, and how to tackle the emotional labor, compassion fatigue, and general misunderstandings about the function of a school counselor head on. 

Mentioned in this episode:

School for School Counselors Mastermind 

No-Stress Self-Care Challenge

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

Hey there, school counselor, tell me something. Do you ever feel frustrated because you're good at your job? Do you ever feel annoyed because you feel like you get punished for being amazing? Have you ever felt like that? I want to dive into something that we've developed in our school for school counselors world called the cycle of role dysfunction. We've developed this model of role dysfunction as a really great opportunity to discuss our workloads and expectations on campus, and I think you're going to find this conversation very, very interesting. Before we get started with that, though, I want to do probably my favorite part of the podcast, and I hope it is yours too. I'm going to share one of the new reviews we just received for the school for school counselors podcast.

Speaker 1: 1:03

So grateful to the folks who have stepped up and submitted their thoughts on the podcast just to keep this train rolling, just to keep the algorithms pushing this out to the folks that need to hear it, to provide some information, perhaps some inspiration and encouragement in these winter months coming up, the close of the semester and the start of 2024. So big thanks this week to Firewife12, who submitted a review titled Nailed it. They go on to say I have been a school counselor for 15 years and feeling a bit burnt out. Your podcast validated how I was feeling, gave me useful tools and it just felt great to find a like minded podcast. Thank you, firewife12. I simultaneously love and don't love the review. I don't know if that's a fair thing to say. I love the kind words. I'm glad that we're able to be a light in all of the madness of a very esteemed school counseling career, it sounds like. But I am sad that you're feeling a bit burnt out. I hope that's temporary for you. I hope that you come out on the other side stronger than ever and please do not hesitate to contact me or my team if there's anything we can do to help you. Thanks again for your podcast review. All right, so diving back into this idea of the cycle of role dysfunction, we have our no stress school counselor self care challenge going on right now. You can access that on our website, school for school counselorscom. Slash self care all one word in the course of the content that guides you toward developing your own personalized and customized self care plan. That's actually worth a crap.

Speaker 1: 2:59

We talk about this idea of the cycle of role dysfunction. Now this is not empirically validated. This isn't as far as I know, even anything that's like formal. It's just kind of something that we came up with as we were talking with school counselors in our world, understanding what folks are going through and from our own careers. Imagine a shape with five circles kind of going around in the ring. We're going to start at the very top circle and we're going to work our way around.

Speaker 1: 3:31

So the first stage in the cycle of role dysfunction is that you're given a set of responsibilities that include things that are beyond the intended scope of a school counselor. Raise your hand if you have responsibilities that are beyond your intended scope. I'm imagining, as I'm recording this now, every single hand going up. I get it. I don't know that I've ever met a school counselor that hasn't had some sort of a responsibility that did not fall outside of their intended scope. It's just sort of the way it goes right and really it's not the most terrible thing in the world to be given some other things to do, for better or for worse. Campuses sometimes have to do things out of alignment of you know the perfect model, just to get things done. I think that's something that you just have to learn as you're working in education. If you walk into a role expecting it to be a textbook example, you're going to be very, very disappointed. But on the other hand, we also know that there are some school administrators, some school campuses and districts who don't give a lot of thought to these extra responsibilities and really start piling them on top of school counselors as sort of a catch-all. Well, you know, we're not really sure what they do all day, so we're sure they can handle this, that kind of mentality At least that's the way it comes across to us. And so, as we're given those extra responsibilities, we move on to phase two.

Speaker 1: 5:15

Phase two is you feeling obligated to meet your students' needs even though you've not been given the time or resources to do so. Classic school counseling conundrum right, you have all of these things you're expected to do. You have all of these students you need to be seeing. You got to go out there and fix everybody. Right, you got to go fix all the problems. You've got to be holding some small groups, some parent education, building advisory boards, developing community service projects, receiving outreach efforts, all the things. And then they start piling all this extra stuff on top of what you're already doing, things like lunch duties, car rider duties, substitute teaching, teaching what is essentially an SEL class in a master schedule All of those things are extra stuff and even though you don't have the time or the resources to really fulfill what is a true school counseling role, you feel obligated to keep pushing through. Students need you, they need the things you have to offer, they need the support that you can coordinate, they need the resources, they need the mental health support, and so you really start working harder and harder and harder, trying to cram all of these things into the time that you've been given each day.

Speaker 1: 6:45

This is an example where our nurturing and caring dispositions really can be a positive for sure, because they help us serve students well. They help us really be empathetic and active listeners. It helps us problem solve and try to find solutions with students. But these characteristics can also be taken advantage of, and we know that in our work. Folks think well, you know, they're always willing to help, they love the students. Often we hear well, we just need to do what's best for kids. Right? If you've ever been told that, just do what's best for the students, as though that's going to solve all these other problems, it's going to create an extra two or three hours in the day, right? It's so funny the way we talk in education sometimes, but heartbreaking all at the same time. So we've been given these sets of extra responsibilities. We're feeling obligated to meet students needs even though we don't have the time or the resources we didn't even talk about that the budgets, the materials, sometimes even the meeting space to have confidential counseling sessions.

Speaker 1: 7:56

Then we move to stage three, which is where you're called to handle numerous emergencies, despite these overwhelming non-counseling duties. Now, if you could see the printable for this, you would see that the word emergencies has quotation marks around it, because we often get called to situations that everyone else seems to think is an emergency, but maybe not so much. Right? A student feeling sad isn't necessarily an emergency. A student feeling angry isn't necessarily an emergency. It all kind of depends on the perspective of who's calling for you, right as to whether it's a true emergency or not. So we're running around trying to put out all these fires on top of these extra non-counseling duties we've been given With the lack of time, with the lack of resources and with this compulsion to do the best we can do for our students all day long. This is when you hear counselors talk about going all day without having eaten lunch or working all day without having visited the restroom. Right, it gets super unhealthy and it can get there pretty quickly.

Speaker 1: 9:18

Stage four of the cycle of roles dysfunction is scrambling to feel the role of two to three people, sacrificing your own needs throughout the day. Just what I was talking about Sacrificing your own physical needs, sacrificing your own emotional and mental well-being needs, trying to do the job of three to four people. Some of you right now are out there carrying caseloads of students that really require the services of three to four school counselors, without all the extra jobs piled on top of it. I get it. I am very intimately familiar with that situation and it's tough. It is tough to strike a balance, it is tough to figure out what absolutely needs to be done, how to triage all the things that are coming your way, how to do enough without hurting yourself but without also letting your students down. It becomes this real balancing act and almost like a mind game In a way. It's really intense, pretty dysfunctional, and it's no wonder that school counselors talk about feeling overwhelmed, about feeling stressed the majority of their time on campus. It's absolutely no wonder.

Speaker 1: 10:41

Stage five in this cycle of role dysfunction says you appear to be doing it all and you're praised for being a super counselor. And really I'll pause right there and say secretly I think that's what we all aim at. We all tend to be go getters, we all tend to be high achievers. I mean we raised our hand and said I'll get a master's degree to do that. That took some gumption right, that took some drive and some determination to get through that. So I know that you're a purposeful, driven school counselor. I know that about you and so secretly I do think that we want to be seen as this super counselor. It's not just on the factors outside of our control. Some of this is also on us a little bit, but nevertheless we're seen as the super counselor. And so the expectations and responsibilities increase. They continue giving us more to do, more responsibilities, more ways to really help our campus succeed or achieve or propel our students toward their best outcomes.

Speaker 1: 11:50

And then the cycle begins again. You have more responsibilities beyond your intended scope. You still feel obligated to meet students needs without the time or resources you need to do that. You continue to get called to handle these so-called emergencies, despite all of these extra non-counseling duties on top of your school counseling role. You scramble to fill the role of now, four or five people. You're still sacrificing your own needs throughout the day and you again get praised for being an amazing team player. Have you been hit with that one before? Let's be a team player, let's be a super counselor, let's do what's best for kids and around and around the cycle we go.

Speaker 1: 12:38

I imagine you're probably nodding your head at this right now. Right, it is all too common in our field and I think in the education world as a whole. Really, education has often two little money, two little resources. At the campus level, we're being asked to do more and more with less and less, and it's just kind of an epidemic right now. If I'm being honest, all of this role dysfunction tends to lead to, eventually, a couple of things. Number one I think it starts really pushing us toward an intense feeling of needing to advocate. We feel like, if we can just make our case, if we can just make the argument well enough, that others around us are going to see the light, they're going to recognize the error of their ways and they're going to correct the situation.

Speaker 1: 13:37

And sometimes that happens. There have been many school counselors who have been successful with that approach. We hear from them from time to time in our School for School Counselors Facebook group, but I will tell you that is the exception. That is certainly not the norm. We often, too, start feeling belittled at work. We feel like our situations are being denied. We try to raise awareness of this role dysfunction and we get responses like oh, you're just exaggerating. Oh, you just don't want to work that hard. Oh, you're not a team player. Oh, you must not be in it for the kids. Have you ever heard anybody say that to someone on your campus? It's absolutely heartbreaking, but that's the reality of the things that are happening in schools right now.

Speaker 1: 14:30

I think too, within this cycle, we are just piling on top of an intense load of emotional labor that we're already carrying. One thing that folks don't realize about school counseling is that we carry a lot of weight for our students and for our parents. We bear some of that burden. No matter how wonderfully trained we are, no matter how well we're able to hold boundaries with our students and our parents, there are still pieces of those stories that weigh us down right, that lay heavy on our hearts, that are hard to shake off. At the end of the day, we see the worst that our campuses have to offer at times, and it's difficult to walk in the middle of those kinds of messes with students and not be affected by that. We carry a tremendous emotional load on our campuses but it's often not recognized because it doesn't have a productive element to it. There's not something that you can produce to prove that emotional load, and so it's really easy to dismiss the whole idea of it, to deny that it even exists. When we're working in the cycle of role dysfunction and we have all these other things that continuously get piled and piled and piled, we're adding to that emotional load. We're adding to that compassion fatigue that we may be developing. We're adding to, perhaps, the beginnings of some burnout, those kinds of things just like our reviewer was talking about in their podcast review that we read at the beginning of the episode.

Speaker 1: 16:19

This is a very, very real phenomenon and something that, in my opinion, the school counseling world has not done a good job of getting on top of. We do a good job, relatively, talking about mental health needs on campus. We do a pretty good job of talking about counseling techniques. We love talking about curriculums and resources and things like that, but we're really not doing a good job on educating others about what it's like to work as a school counselor. We are not shining the light on the differences between what it is to counsel in schools versus teach in schools, versus serve in schools. Those are three distinctly different roles on our campuses. We have not done a good job of really outlining the differences between what we do and what everyone else does.

Speaker 1: 17:20

Again, I think we're behind the power curve in a way, because much of what we do happens behind this cloak of confidentiality. We can't bring out a stack of case notes at the end of the day and say, well, I mean, I got 15 through, let's see how many I get through tomorrow and start cranking them out like an assembly line. Our work doesn't work that way. It's just not feasible. We're up against some difficult things for sure. Here's the good news I feel like we got really negative really fast and I don't want to make this sound like school counseling is a drag. It's drudgery. There's so much piled on us. Why do we even do this? I hope I haven't given that impression, because I do think that your job is one of the most impactful jobs on the planet. Think about the number of students that you are poised to make a difference for. Think about the number of lives whose trajectories could change because of a few simple conversations, perhaps guiding students towards solutions where their whole outlook, their whole path for their life is altered in the best way possible. There's some tremendous potential there, and I think that's what draws us to the field in the first place.

Speaker 1: 18:44

What we've got to hold on to is the idea of advocating from the inside out. This starts to lean into the boundaries that I was talking about earlier. Most people think that holding boundaries means you're kind of planting your flag on the ground and you're saying these are the things I will do and these are the things I won't do. Just help people see boundaries, or they see them as these are the things that are acceptable and these are the things that are not. Unfortunately, I think that's a really skewed viewpoint on boundaries. I don't know that that's really what boundaries are about. I don't really see them as just a hard and fast no, I don't see them as this is the way I'm going to stop something from happening. I really wonder if boundaries are more about taking some responsibility to set the stage for the good things to happen. Let me tell you what I mean by that. When we set a boundary, let's say, for instance, I'm not working more than half hour past the end of the school day, that's a boundary. When we first talk about that, it sounds like a boundary of I won't do that, and maybe it is. Maybe that's where that comes from. But if we unpack that a little bit more, suddenly we realize that this unwillingness to work more than 30 minutes past the end of the school day is really designed for well-being, because we know that unless we are healthy as school counselors, we're not going to be very helpful for our students, right? So when we're setting that boundary, it's not so much about saying no as it is about saying this is what I need to set the stage for good things to happen.

Speaker 1: 20:43

Often, when we hear school counselors talk about advocacy, they talk about you know, you've heard me talk about this before, if you've listened to the podcast printing out the list of appropriate and inappropriate school counselor duties, shoving it under their principal's nose and saying now, do something about it. I'm going to tell you right now. Those conversations never go well. I don't think I have ever spoken to or met a school counselor who tried that approach and had it work. More often than not the relationship turns a little contentious. It gets a little dicey, a little mistrustful and things kind of start going downhill. From that point I would not advise that tactic. Instead, we can start looking at how we advocate. Now I don't want to belabor this point. This podcast episode is getting pretty lengthy as it is. You can catch some of our other episodes to understand our viewpoint on advocacy. But basically what we teach is not advocating from the outside, in which would be you know these lists it would be barking at your principal about what you should be doing or what you shouldn't be doing, because even your use of time data can be an outside in advocacy approach if it's used incorrectly.

Speaker 1: 22:05

What we talk about is advocating from the inside out. We talk about laying the tracks for some healthy and productive relationships before we ever start having these conversations. We talk about building trust with your administrative team. We talk about taking the time to develop the clout on campus that you need to have these kinds of conversations and truly be heard. So often we jump into our role and just assume that everyone knows where our heart is they know where we're coming from and they just want to keep us from being the best school counselor we can be, but the truth is that's rarely the case. The truth is we're working within broken systems. We're working on campuses where our campus administrators don't quite have the pull and the influence that we first perceive they might have. They're working with limited budgets, they're working with limited staffing. They're often doing the best they can, even if it doesn't look like it from our vantage point, and so we've really got to be careful to keep that in mind. We have to develop these relationships with a sense of curiosity and openness before we start building these walls with these so-called boundaries. If that makes sense, maybe recording another podcast episode about that coming up here very soon, because I feel myself getting really riled up as I'm talking about this and I realize I haven't talked about advocacy for a little bit, so stay tuned for that.

Speaker 1: 23:44

But some things that you can do to begin the process of advocating from the inside out. Number one trust yourself. Trust your instincts, trust your feelings, trust your misgivings about your situation. It doesn't mean you immediately have to act on them, but trust them. Work really hard to not explain things away If you're feeling overly tired, if you're feeling really stressed. Don't try to explain those away. Many a school counselor has reached burnout because they relentlessly tried to talk themselves out of their feelings, their fatigue, the emotional weight of the job, and they arrived at burnout faster than they ever expected. So don't do that to yourself. We need you in this game to be able to advocate for your students. So trust yourself.

Speaker 1: 24:47

Number two document your use of time. I talked about that earlier. Sometimes that can be a double-edged sword. We need to handle that data carefully. Again, we've got some podcast episodes on that, so feel free you can hop over to our website, schoolcounselorpodcastcom, and you can actually search the episodes for the keyword you're looking for. So go, search for the data episodes and listen to those.

Speaker 1: 25:12

Use of time data can be an effective ally for advocacy, but it can also be your worst nightmare if you've used it the wrong way. So be careful with it. For now, just start collecting it, get really intentional with it, develop those habits, get your systems down and really understand what you're doing with the data that you're collecting. If you need help with that, jump into our data discussions cohort in our School for School Counselors Mastermind. It is a game changer, for sure. We'd love to have you over there.

Speaker 1: 25:44

But another type of data that you can collect is what I call what I missed data, and this is just a quick list each day of all the things you could have done had you not been pulled into other things that really probably shouldn't have been your job. So how many individual counseling sessions did you miss that day because you got called into doing an extra round of lunch duty? Or how many small groups have you had to cancel because you were suddenly called to be the administrator on duty while your principals went to a meeting, whatever it is, keep a list of those things. I call that my what I missed data. That's going to be a powerful, powerful tool for you coming up in the near future. Number three do maintain those boundaries, but keep the purpose of the boundary in mind. Number set the stage for the best possible outcome. Develop those boundaries with an eye toward facilitating the best for all parties involved. How can you maintain a boundary so that you're not only taking care of yourself, but you're also still able to get the job done? You're also able to serve students well.

Speaker 1: 26:54

Get creative, think outside the box on this kind of stuff. Again, if you need a sounding board for this kind of thing, hop into our mastermind y'all. This is what it's built for. Our weekly consultation chats contain more of this conversation than you can probably imagine, and we're getting very, very good at that. So if you need some ideas or if you need some support in that area, come join us. And last and I swear I just glanced at the bullet point and didn't even realize this was coming seek support. That's a no-brainer for sure, and I won't go into the benefits of our mastermind again, but I'm telling you I talk about this all the time, not because it's a sales pitch, but because I am a true believer in the transformative power of quality consultation for school counselors and I want that for all of you in one way or another, because we are stronger and smarter when we're together.

Speaker 1: 27:55

All right. So that was a mouthful on the cycle of role dysfunction for school counselors. It'll be some great information for you to kind of sit and reflect on as you're entering this week of Thanksgiving breaks, of a little bit of rest, hopefully, and rejuvenation before we get back into the hustle and bustle of the end of the first semester of the school year and before I go, I just want to let you know how grateful and thankful I am for you, for not only being a supporter of the mission and the dream of School for School Counselors, for it being a listener to this podcast, which, by the way, number one school counseling podcast on the planet. We just passed 100,000 downloads and I can't wait to see where we go next. That's all thanks to you and for your positivity, your optimism and your professionalism.

Speaker 1: 28:55

I don't know how we keep attracting the best of the best in the school counseling world, but by golly we're doing it and I am not complaining. It's amazing and it's all because of you. So I want you to know I'm thankful for you. I'm thankful for your wonderful emails, your podcast reviews, your comments. I'm so thankful when you share School for School Counselors resources with your colleagues. That's the highest compliment you could possibly ever give us, and I just really, really hope that you're able to spend this upcoming break with people you love, feeling safe, feeling happy and feeling fulfilled.

Speaker 1: 29:40

And if there's anything my team and I can do to help you along in that journey in the school counseling world, please don't hesitate to let us know. In the meantime, hop into our no Stress Self-Care Challenge. You can find that again on our website, schoolforschoolcounselorscom. Slash self-care all one word. This upcoming break is going to be a great time to really reflect and think about your self-care plan for the upcoming holiday season as well as the start of 2024. All right, keep listening. I'll be back soon with another episode. Until then, I hope you have the best week. Take care.