Dear Mental Health Clinician: Don't Panic While the World is Burning Around You

After a summer hiatus, I return with a renewed focus on supporting mental health clinicians of color who are creating new pathways of healing. This season explores how to thrive professionally while navigating global crises, political instability, and the feeling that the world is burning around us.

• Challenging the misconception that solidarity requires personal suffering
• Unlearning the programming that we must sacrifice our well-being to honor others' pain
• Recognizing that revolutions require resources, not just sacrifice
• Understanding that regulated nervous systems can still experience righteous anger
• Avoiding displacing anger toward people who remind us of oppressive systems
• Noticing when fear and panic pull us away from self-care
• Finding your unique role in creating change without "burning everything down"
• Acknowledging that not everyone is meant to be at the front of protest lines
• Continuing to resource yourself financially and emotionally during difficult times
• Keeping revolutionary work grounded in love rather than fear

Chapters

• 0:00 Returning After Summer Hiatus
• 1:08 Thriving When the World Burns
• 3:47 Unlearning Self-Sacrifice for Solidarity
• 6:08 Resources and Stability for Revolution
• 9:02 Finding Your Unique Revolutionary Role
• 11:50 Staying Resourced and Grounded

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hey y'all, this is Angela Tam and I am starting a new episode, a new season, after a long summer hiatus, which was amazing, by the way. We traveled to Banff. We did a trip to Jasper in the same little run with our RV and other various camping trips. So, after a long hiatus, I have come back with a little bit more clarity around how I want to dedicate this next season, and I don't know how many episodes I want to do so. This will be an in-process, and I don't know how many episodes I want to do so. This will be an in-process in real-time kind of thing, where I want to cycles especially my mental health clinicians of color, who are creating new pathways of healing in their own lives that they might have not had templates for, and are working with other folks of color, and so I just wanted to dedicate this next season of episodes to you. If you are a private practice owner, if you are group practice owner, if you are an associate level or intern level clinician, all of this can apply to you. My first topic that I want to explore is how we can thrive in our work when things around us are burning, when the world around us is seemingly falling apart of dictatorship, fascism, and where martial law can be enacted at the drop of a hat, even bypassing certain legalities, and the person, who shall not be named, who's in office right now, is enacting pretty heinous things and really flexing his power moves for the sake of powering down folks to exerting power. There's multiple genocides happening around the world, and it seems like the world is burning up, at least in the northern hemisphere, where one of the biggest fires is in or near the Grand Canyon, where we just traveled during spring break. Well, how do we, as mental health clinicians, run a business, grow a business, invite people into our world as clients, as people who are seeking therapy? How do we market ourselves? How do we keep showing up when the world is seemingly falling apart? And some things that I want to share with you. You will already know, and some things might be unfamiliar to you, so I want you to hang in there as we're in this episode, and I want to share with you about the first thing, which is some of the misconceptions we have around, being exposed to so many of the forward realities around us, and how we should show up.

Speaker 1: 3:47

One of the things that I've learned and been conditioned to act on is that if things are going to shit around us, I should also burn too. If the world is burning, I should burn too. I really don't. I'm not in touch with the sufferings of the world unless I'm suffering too, and I can't, I'm a sellout if I'm just doing really well and I'm thriving while the world is burning. And I know we don't explicitly believe that, but I believe that there's something about self-sacrifice and martyrdom, that just things in this country to build a life for me. And they sacrificed my parents, sacrificed their own happiness and worked really meaningless jobs to them so that I could have some financial stability in my life. And that was my kind of blueprint of what it meant to respond to crises. If there's a crisis, we must increase our work and decrease our joy, and that's how we can show solidarity. And for me, I really had to unlearn that programming of sacrificing our well-being in order to be in solidarity with those who are suffering. In fact, I know that, and you know this too is that if we were to have a revolution and I believe that that's happening already Revolutions require resources.

Speaker 1: 5:55

Revolutions require us for us to show up with the best versions of ourselves, not rooted in fear and panic and anxiety and existential dread existential dread, but in love. Revolutions are grounded in love. Relationships are the foundational layers of revolutions, and trust and safety is too, and so community building is going to be key in revolution making. And community building comes from interconnectedness, which comes from love, and it comes from people really thriving. And if we are unable to meet our basic needs and we're quitting our jobs and walking away from financial stability, it's impossible for us to, and in community making spaces for revolutionary gatherings and organizing. It requires for us to really be grounded and have a sense of responsibility for what we're doing and what we're doing, and I think that's what makes it so important, and I think that's what makes it so important for us to be able to be stable nervous systems.

Speaker 1: 7:10

That doesn't mean nervous systems that are cool, calm and collected, as you know. That's not what regulated nervous systems look like. Regulated systems, nervous systems look in this season, when there are atrocities around us, like righteous anger that can show up, not being displaced towards people who remind us of dictatorship, fascism and systems of oppression, like, for example, white men, and not displacing our anger towards people like white men who remind us of that, but really working with the parts of us that are coming up, that prevent us and pull us away from taking care of ourselves, and working with those parts that are being triggered and bring us back into a space of fear and panic, and bring us back into a space of fear and panic. And so my encouragement, or my invitation to you is to notice what parts are pulling you away and are causing you to flee, which is a stress response, fleeing and burning everything down around you so you can start all over. You know, I have a lot of clients that are in tech and they feel like everything is so meaningless working for these bigger tech companies and they just feel like it's hard to reconcile their daily lives and hard to watch suffering around them, and so I've worked with a lot of these clients to transition, you know, through different industries. Perhaps some of them are leaving tech, but some of them are choosing to stay, and there is no right answer. Right, there's no right answer whether or not you should keep your job or to leave. But what I know is that, whatever the answer is, whenever there's a burn it down mentality, I should burn it down and just start all over and find something directly meaningful and related to the revolution.

Speaker 1: 9:31

It takes away from recognizing that everyone has a unique place in the revolution, that not everyone was made to be at the front of the picket lines and to be organizing protests, that everyone has a role to play, even folks that are seemingly so far from the revolution spaces and therapists. For us, we can sometimes seemingly be directly close to healing spaces related to revolution, right Like we can work with folks who are organizing we can. Part of our work is activism because of our healing work that we could bring to activism spaces, and so part of not burning it down and walking away from everything and hiding or just running away entirely is to recognize I have a place in a revolution. I might not know what it is yet, but I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing and be intentional about finding what it is that I'm supposed to do to be a part of this revolution, about finding what it is that I'm supposed to do to be a part of this revolution.

Speaker 1: 11:02

And in that time it is imperative that we resource ourselves, that we continue to get clients, that we continue to market ourselves, we continue to make money, because revolutions require money and resources, other resources time, energy, spiritual resources and resources other resources time, energy, spiritual resources and I'm going to continue to do what I need to do to be really resourced and to be really grounded and to work through whatever's coming up in my body to metabolize the grief, the collective rage, the collective depression and sadness and panic and dread that's happening around us, so that we could keep our revolutions grounded from a place of love and emotional regulation emotional regulation. So I hope that you know today's podcast was really helpful and I look forward to talking to you soon. I'll see you next time in our next episode. Thanks for tuning in. Bye.