The Invisible Emotional Load of a Therapist: How to Hold Space Without Being Consumed

In this episode of the Practitioner's Heart podcast, host Poh Gan explores the 'invisible emotional load' that therapists often carry. Drawing on Mahayana Buddhist psychology, Poh shares insights into how thoughts and emotions are like dust on a mirror—transient and not defining who we are. The episode discusses practical techniques for therapists to manage stress and emotional weight, offering a blend of theory and actionable advice. Poh also emphasizes the importance of recognizing and releasing emotions, ultimately fostering a practice of compassion without being overwhelmed. The episode includes practical examples, insights into handling empathy and compassion fatigue, and guidance on maintaining emotional clarity and balance.

00:00 Introduction to the Practitioner's Heart

02:21 The Emotional Load of a Therapist

04:15 Understanding Emotions Through a Buddhist Lens

06:42 The Concept of Emptiness in Buddhism

09:14 Practical Applications in Therapy

12:43 Managing Emotional Reactions

15:55 Therapeutic Presence and Compassion

22:28 Concluding Thoughts and Practices

25:26 Closing Remarks

Transcript

Hey, welcome to the practitioner's heart offering practical Buddhist wisdom for a sustainable practice for therapists and healthcare workers. If you are keen to learn more and deepen your practice beyond the theoretical understanding of Buddhism. If you are finding it hard to calm your little active mind after therapy work, I welcome you to join me to dive a little deeper.

Each episode I'll be sharing some common issues that therapists may face when integrating and practicing awareness, compassion within themselves, and also supporting clients. I'll be sprinkling some pearls of wisdom that I've learned from my master and teachers that will be helpful as internal resources for the helpers in us.

I'll also be interviewing other therapists who are on these spiritual paths together to share their experiences of how they integrate and practice wisdom and compassion in their daily lives. I want to let you know that you're not alone. You are part of a bigger community who aspire for greater soul alignment, growth, purpose, and awakening, that we can strike a balance of juggling our busy modern life as therapists with a clear mind and an open heart.

I hope to inspire more practitioners to explore deeper spiritual meaning and purpose on our path to enlightenment and awakening. I am your host, Poh Gan, a psychologist, a Buddhist practitioner, a parent of two children, a fellow human being with a busy mind, but with a great inspired vision for collective awakening.

Let's begin.

Hi, welcome to the Practitioner's Hearts podcast. I'm your host, Poh. Today I'll be talking about the invisible emotional load of a therapist, and how we can continue holding space for other people without being consumed. This is a very real scenario for a lot of us. You know that feeling at the end of the long day in the therapy room, when you close your laptop ready to turn off the light, there's this moment of half a breath and maybe like that stories that you've held， feel like they're still inside your body, like when you are going down the stairs or the hallway, your mind is still fairly full about the session, you are reflecting about how you have shown up in the session.

Or, sometimes that clients grieve, still circling in your chest, or a certain phrase that you keep repeating in your mind and that look in their eyes and still kind of imprinted in your mind's eyes. And as you walk back to your car and your breath still feels a little bit tighter, not in a dramatic sense, but like enough for you to notice

and maybe when you get home and your partner asks how your day was, there's a split second, you don't know how to answer because your emotional world feels full and tangled. You know, like it's just a little bit unsure, a little bit clouded and tight. And that is the part that I wanted to talk about today because it is a little bit tricky and I wanted to share, a little bit more about the Buddhist's lens on how to view those emotional load that we carry with us sometimes. And what are the heart practice that we can practice so that we can be less consumed by our feelings?

So a lot of us, when it comes to this invisible emotional load, we usually respond in one of two ways. Sometimes we either push it away, distract, numb or move on, or we get pulled in, we get sucked in, and we ruminate and worry and over carrying them and thinking about them again and again. And then when we realize that, we're deep into that thought or feelings, and we're trying to pull ourselves back in again maybe there is a third way.

There is a quieter way where it doesn't requires us to shut down or drowning in that emotions, and it would be lovely if we could meet this invisible emotional load with a spacious strength, the kind that doesn't deny the weight and also doesn't collapse under it. In Mahayana Buddhist psychology, there is a gentle teachings that help us to understand this.

All our inner experiences, our thoughts, feelings, and sensations are like dust on a mirror. The emotions, the thoughts, the mental images, the heaviness, the echoes of the therapy room, even the exhaustion, they are real, but they are not the whole story. So the dust are like our sensations, our feeling tones, our interpretations, our emotional reactions.

Those are the moving parts that come together in a moment to make sense of the experience. They are the conditions around us. But because they arise from conditions, they also change with conditions. This teaching, it's called emptiness the true understanding of emptiness is not just like, ah.

Everything is empty, and so don't worry about it, and then spiritual bypassing, but it is actually fundamentally, radically, knowing that our inner experiences is not fixed, not permanent, not who we fundamentally are. And because all of these, like dust covering the mirror, beneath those dust and grime and dirt, there is something unshakeable-

our pristine awareness, our inner clarity, our original Buddha nature. In Tara Brach's words, our basic goodness, the truth of who we are. This is not something mystical. It is deeply human. It is that groundedness that you touch when you pause in the moment, when your whole field of awareness and mind becomes wider and expansive.

This pristine awareness is like a mirror, really steady, reflective, never harmed by what passes across it. That is actually what allows a bodhisattva practitioner, someone who dedicated to or committed to ease suffering in themselves and others, will practice in their mind, in their heart, so they practice because they understand the fundamentals that all our thoughts and feelings and sensations are not permanent. They are able to meet those strong emotions without being consumed by them. Not by armouring up or disconnecting, but resting in that deeper clarity of recognizing what is mind and what is true nature.

So it helps to understand why emotions feel so heavy at times. And then it perhaps can loosen more quickly when we stop clinging. I wanted to introduce this idea about the Heart Sutra. So, in Mahayana Buddhism, we talk a lot about Heart Sutra. In the Chinese version, it is about 268 words, but it is like a condensed version of the vast teachings, the most fundamental, profound teachings of Buddhism into a simple insight. Our thoughts, our emotions, our mental images, our identities arise and pass. All of what we experience as " self", this "I", this "mine", this "me", this ego and it's actually a fluid ever-changing process.

And it introduce this idea about all our moment to moment experience to something called the five aggregates. In ACT sense is, you know, what we see here, touch, taste, smell, coming into contact with them, all these sensations that move through us. For example, when we think, "Oh, I'm so overwhelmed."

So it is actually, there are so many parts moving at once. So the body experience that sensations of maybe tightness in your chest and that feeling of unpleasantness, and the perception, the meaning we give to the sensations. Then the emotional reactions that come with it, how we habitually interpret these sensations and our habits, our impulses, and maybe the protective parts, how we have evolved over time or learned through our learning history that colored the lens that we interpret those sensations and perceptions. And then the awareness that holds it all. From coming into contact with the sensations, the sensory aspects, and then we create all of these feelings and then the perception and mental activities start to twirl and swirl, and it starts to activate the way of thinking that is matched with our thinking patterns that becomes who we think we are. Or maybe that's the personality, right? So it becomes this impression of that solid, air quote, " thing" like a fixed emotional identity or a emotional state. But the truth is this is a constellation of all conditions.

There is no fundamental fixed "self", and this is what emptiness points to, not nothingness, but it's the conditionality. All our experiences, including our emotions arise because of that causal conditions, the story that you heard, the look on your client's face, your own history, transference and counter transference or fatigue

or the nervous system resonating with the person. And neuroscience agrees that, you know, a cycle of pure emotional reaction, in our body, perhaps that physiological wave only lasts for 90 seconds, 90 seconds. But everything after that is a story, the meaning, the tightening, that resistance, that's the thing that our mind colored into it, like our usual habitual patterns of thinking, interpret these emotions and the patterns of clinging and grasping that we've learned to do around the feelings. So I guess, in Buddhist psychology, we would say that the suffering is not in the emotions. It only passes through us 90 seconds, right? But it is the clinging, our human habitual tendencies of clinging that creates the suffering.

As therapists, we talk about this all the time, right? With our clients, and we allow the persons to experience the feelings because we have to feel it to heal it, in some way. 

but there is a very easy trap that we all fall into when we feel this initial physiological wave of emotions moving through us, we sense those sensations and then we are conditioned to like, "I shouldn't feel like this," " This is too much."

What if this gets in the way or like, I have to stay regulated, I have to press it down, I need to move on. The load actually becomes heavier than it needs to be. But when we bring ourselves back, when we are all in, in the feelings, versus if we can step back and remember this conditional nature of feeling s, and then we can breathe again.

We can soften it and we can say to ourselves that this sensation arose because of what I held today. It will move and I can do something to move this energy through me. This is not the whole of me. This is where the load becomes more workable and I think, I don't know about you, but I tend to practice experiencing those emotions as information, as guidance.

It helps us to really attune to our clients' feelings in a relational way. That tightness in your chest, might be the client's unspoken fear, that heaviness behind your eyes might be the grief that they haven't spoke about yet. They don't have words for them yet. That subtle pull in your gut, maybe that gut brain saying, "Oh, something is not right!"

Or, the beginning of a rupture. This sensitivity is actually a gift, not a burden. Previously in my energy management sharing, I talked a lot about what is compassion and what is empathy we can get 'empathy fatigue', but we might not um, perhaps a term 'compassion fatigue' as some sort of misleading term.

Because when you are in the unblended state of compassion, you are fully aware of the experience, it is you coming into contact with the feelings, but not fused by them. And you can recognize the feelings, but not fully in it. Whereas empathy is more like feeling and reflecting about the person's pain and actually feeling it.

We are triggered and activated our own past experience of the same wound or thinking what I would feel if I were in the other person's shoes. So there's actually subtle difference there. So in Mahayana metaphors, some of the Bodhisattva practices are deeply practical. If your heart space can be like a vast ocean, then emotions, whether it is yours or your clients, are like waves that rise and fall, ebbs and flow on the surface, right? And if your heart can be wide open earth, this earth space that is boundless and spacious, then experience can rise and settle without shaking your ground.

And if your awareness is like a clear mirror then the feelings that we experienced can be reflected with compassion and openness without them sticking to you or becoming who you are. The more we can attune or practice being in that state, then that is the sweet spot of therapeutic presence:

attune but not tangled; empathetic, compassionate, but not overwhelmed; present, but not consumed. So what it looks like in the therapy room, it could be like this, for example. A client's pain echoes in your chest and you notice your shoulders tighten. Instead of pushing through it maybe is a soft acknowledging and noticing. Sometimes I use that to reflect to the client how I experience what they have told me. Through that process, it helps the client to experience and be more aware of another person's perspective or give a name to what they are experiencing.

And then suddenly there is a space of, "Hey, my feeling here and what am I going to do about it?" And there is a space between you and the emotions. Another example could be sometimes we are feeling responsible for our client's outcome. Maybe that is a familiar tension around your chest or your shoulder.

That's the time to investigate and observe. Here is perhaps, a protector part of me showing up. Maybe that is because of what happened today. Maybe you just finished a safety plan with your client and your body is reacting to that responsibility and that tension. So check in with yourself, do I need to release this?

And to have that clarity that this is not the whole of me. So that you can be a clear vessel to the experiences and open spaciousness to hold the experience without becoming fused with them. So this is the experience or the Bodhissatva inner practice of "Observe, at ease", and to gain wisdom and clarity in the moment-to-moment experience. When we are opening up ourselves to experience the emotional experience, and releasing them consciously, we can regulate our nervous system to be more in a ventral vagal tone, which is more kind of like a open state instead of fully absorbed in the feelings. If you're consciously releasing them, then they don't store in your body, right? I think that's why I often talk about the rituals of sending loving kindness and compassion to your client that you have just finished. Releasing them actively, that is not the part that you need to hold in your life. Once you have done all you needed to do, and once you finished the notes and that's all. You don't have to keep carrying them anymore, and recognizing that is not yours to carry.

Another example is that at the end of the day, after multiple swirls of like emotions from multiple sessions, on the drive back home, instead of analyzing, you can imagine your awareness widening, much like how the ocean can hold many waves without becoming any single one of them.

It's just the ocean, not the waves. Actually in the deep, deep ocean. I've spoken to one of my friends who is a oceanographer, and she said, in the deep, deep ocean, it's actually very still and steady. There's not a lot of movement. What is moving is actually just the surface of that ocean. If our heart space can be like the ocean, then it'll be more expansive.

So the emotions are like the waves and they will soften and you return home to yourself I think those are the examples that as therapists, we can practice the bodhisattva practice, not as spiritual bypassing, but actually seeing them clearly and holding them gently. It's just like one of my masters, shared before. When you watch a 3D movie for the first time and when you see and feel the bullets coming against you right in front of your face, they seem so real and you feel like you need to dodge them and moving your body side to side.

As if you can actually dodge the bullets, but once you realize a few times and that they can't hurt you, they're not real, would you still have to dodge the bullets? Do they still impact you the same way they do? So maybe not. And one of the examples that I practiced in the past when every time when I was in that deep grief and loss, of losing my mum and that image of my mum on the death bed became quite a significant trigger for me.

And I'll be very teary every time when I was thinking about that. But in my practice as I realized that, " This is not real." And then as I slowly recognizing that there are the image in my head, not the actual reality, things start to shift. And I am no longer responding to them as if they are real in my head.

So here is my soft invitation for your week: where might you practice being the mirror instead of the dust? Where might you pause even for a breath and remember that what you are experiencing, what you're feeling, is a wave arising from causal conditions, not an identity, not a fixed "you".

Where might you let your awareness widen just enough to return to that deep, vast ocean, that clarity underneath it all, and I guess, not as homework, not as performance, but a practice of kindness for this part of you that has been caring so much. Let's see if we can be kind to our body and soften the edge of those emotions and the load we carry.

I will see you in the next episode. Meanwhile, keep your heart open, keep your mind clear and steady, and be your amazing self awakening yourself and others.

As we close our practice for today, I want to thank you for sharing this time. If this episode resonated with you, the most meaningful way to support the podcast is to share it. Share it with a colleague, or live a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps our community to reach other people who need it.

Until next time, keep your heart open, keep your mind clear and steady. Go be your amazing self as you awaken yourself and others.

See you next time.

Just a gentle reminder that our conversation today is for inspiration and education only. It's not a substitute for therapy or clinical supervision and our time together doesn't constitute a therapeutic relationship.