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When Burnout Ends Your Therapy Career: An Interview with Ofra Obejas

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When Burnout Ends Your Therapy Career: An Interview with Ofra Obejas

Curt and Katie chat with Ofra Obejas, LCSW (Retired), about the emotional realities of burnout and retirement for therapists. Ofra shares her honest reflections after realizing she could no longer sustain the work she loved and choosing to close her practice after 20 years in the field. She describes the “death by a thousand cuts” that made therapy increasingly difficult to sustain, explores the myths of self-care, and challenges the profession’s expectations that therapists should be endlessly available. This candid conversation sheds light on what happens when even the most dedicated clinicians reach their limits—and what therapists can learn from her experience in leaving the field with integrity.

Transcript

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(Show notes provided in collaboration with Otter.ai and ChatGPT.)

About Our Guest: Ofra Obejas, LCSW (Retired)

Ofra Obejas, LCSW Retired, has just closed her practice after 20 years and many letters after her name. Over her career, she provided individual and group therapy to thousands, was on the faculty of a university therapy training program, and presented CEs to hundreds. Despite this clear proof of her expertise, she feels like a failure, a fate she wishes to save newer therapists from.

In this podcast episode: Burnout, Boundaries, and the End of a Therapy Career

Curt and Katie talk with Ofra Obejas about reaching the end of a therapy career due to burnout. Ofra opens up about how the work slowly depleted her, the professional myths that prevented her from taking better care of herself, and the systemic challenges that make sustainability nearly impossible for many clinicians. She also discusses the lessons she hopes to pass on to newer therapists—about boundaries, values alignment, and redefining success in the helping professions.

Key Takeaways for Therapists on Burnout, Boundaries, and Leaving the Field

“A therapist has a shelf life. I found out exactly what mine was—twenty years.” – Ofra Obejas, LCSW (Retired)

Burnout is not a personal failure—it’s a mismatch between the demands of the work and the resources, values, and supports available to sustain it.
Therapists are rarely taught how to acknowledge the emotional impact of their work or the cumulative toll of sitting with others’ pain.
“Self-care” as marketed (yoga, vacations, massages) cannot undo chronic overwork or emotional depletion.
Professional culture often reinforces harmful ideals: never abandon a client, be endlessly compassionate, and meet every client need no matter the cost.
True sustainability means aligning your practice with your real bandwidth, values, and life circumstances—even if that means drastically reducing your caseload or stepping away.
Therapists need to question outdated ethics training that equates self-sacrifice with professionalism.
Leaving the field can be an act of integrity when continuing would mean violating your own wellbeing.

“I think that there is a lot of failure in our trainings, and a lot more conversation needs to be had about how to make the work sustainable.” – Ofra Obejas, LCSW (Retired)

Resources on Therapist Burnout and Sustainable Practice

Contact Ofra at ofra.mtsg@gmail.com to continue the conversation.
The Trauma Therapist Network (Laura Reagan, LCSW-C)
Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide: Episodes on burnout and boundaries
- Topic: Burnout
- Topic: Self-Care

Relevant Episodes of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide

Meet the Hosts: Curt Widhalm & Katie Vernoy

Curt Widhalm, LMFT

Curt Widhalm is in private practice in the Los Angeles area. He is the cofounder of the Therapy Reimagined conference, an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University and CSUN, a former Subject Matter Expert for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, former CFO of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and a loving husband and father. He is 1/2 great person, 1/2 provocateur, and 1/2 geek, in that order. He dabbles in the dark art of making “dad jokes” and usually has a half-empty cup of coffee somewhere nearby. Learn more at: http://www.curtwidhalm.com

Katie Vernoy, LMFT

Katie Vernoy is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, coach, and consultant supporting leaders, visionaries, executives, and helping professionals to create sustainable careers. Katie, with Curt, has developed workshops and a conference, Therapy Reimagined, to support therapists navigating through the modern challenges of this profession. Katie is also a former President of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. In her spare time, Katie is secretly siphoning off Curt’s youthful energy, so that she can take over the world. Learn more at: http://www.katievernoy.com

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Transcript for this episode of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide podcast (Autogenerated):

Transcripts do not include advertisements just a reference to the advertising break (as such timing does not account for advertisements)

… 0:00
(Opening Advertisement)

Announcer 0:00
You’re listening to the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide, where therapists live, breathe and practice as human beings. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, here are your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy.

Curt Widhalm 0:12
Welcome back, modern therapists. This is the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide. I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy, and this is the podcast for therapists about the things that go on in our practices, things that go on in our professions. And we’ve recently had an interview with Lynn Grodzki and Margaret Wehrenberg about some of the concepts around how one would go about ending their practice, getting towards retirement, leaving behind a career that people love and we had kind of just in the luck of timing of things had one of our friends and former podcast guests Ofra Obejas also come to the end of her practice and retirement and being able to add to the stories that go on in the modern therapist’s pantheon of the universe, the library that we have, and so we wanted to have Ofra on and talk about her experiences and her thought processes. And this is less of a how to retire, and more of a this actually happens. And these are the stories that go along with it. So thank you so much for joining us again, Ofra.

Ofra Obejas 1:07
Pleasure to be here.

Katie Vernoy 1:26
I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because I think there’s a lot that we can reflect on at the end of our career, and I know you and I have had several conversations, both kind of in our email exchanges that I love, as well as when we can get together for coffee to really talk about the struggles of being a therapist. So I’m really looking forward to your reflections as you’ve finished up your career as a therapist. But before we get to that conversation, I want to talk with you about who are you and what are you putting out into the world?

Ofra Obejas 1:58
Well, like you said, I’m a recovering, retired, retired, I’m a retired LCSW, and I just closed my practice after 20 years as a therapist. And it was not planned. It was abrupt. One day, I just gave my clients a three months notice, and three months later, I had my last session. You usually have experts on, as you mentioned, the experts on how to retire, and I’m not here as an expert. I’m here as a cautionary tale, I hope. More of an expert of what not to do if you don’t want to run out of gas, like I just one day found that the tank was empty. And I hope to be as candid as I can, because I don’t think I can be canceled because I already canceled myself. So we’re good.

Curt Widhalm 2:43
What you’re putting out into the world is nothing and hopefully enjoying it.

Ofra Obejas 2:50
I am loving it. I had somebody who told me, nobody can say that you retired a day too soon.

Curt Widhalm 2:59
So normally, when we have guests on, we have a little bit of back and forth where we send questions and have kind of a rough outline of what we’re going to follow. We have kind of the traditional questions that Katie and I ask at the top of the episodes here. But I just want to dive into your story today. You’ve been in contact with us. You’ve emailed us after a number of our episodes, we’ve gotten to know you and your reflections on a lot of things. So I guess my question is really just what happened?

Ofra Obejas 3:29
Well, I have been trying to find out and asking myself the same question, and hope that when once I did retire, I would have a very clear answer. I have several answers, and they all have to do with how I started and designed my career, and things that went along the way that I didn’t watch out for, as well as things that happened to everybody. So one very obvious thing is death by 1000 cuts. You know, nobody, nobody thinks about the day to day of what it’s going to be like to do this work, and we always have to start working for somebody else. We call it the burnout track, for a reason. I don’t think I can say new things, except that I worked in three community mental health agencies. And each time, myself and my co workers were trying to discern if the agency was more toxic than it was insane or the other way around. And usually both, both categories were a winner. And some people decide to leave the field after working in an agency like that. And I thought, no, I it was just the wrong implementation. I’ll start private practice. And it was a calling. It was what I thought was I was meant to do in the world. You know, you you always ask your guests, what do therapists get wrong? And I want to say we got a lot right. I can quote a lot of celebrities who credit therapy with changing their lives, and I would add not just life changing, but life saving. And I certainly know that I have changed my some of my clients lives, not everybody, but I have wonderful letters from clients who tell me exactly how I changed their life, all the more sad that I got to a point where I just cannot continue to do it one more day. The death by 1000 cuts, I think that we all know it. It’s the trying to collect fees, it’s the the continuing education that we have to do, the never ending expenses, the ongoing correspondence with the IRS. I have this vision on my deathbed that people ask me, What are my your last words that you want to leave the world? I would say, tell the IRS I’m going to pay that last thing. I just came back from vacation, and it was another letter from the IRS, and just insurance claims, whether or not you’re in network with insurance a client sent a claim for reimbursement, you’re going to get audited. I’ve been subpoenaed and not to mention the constant scheduling and rescheduling by clients, sessions that start late and you know, run over time, and then notes, the notes the… So, long story short, too late. Death by 1000 cuts.

Katie Vernoy 6:31
When I’m listening to you, I hear the meaning and purpose that you found in work, that you have these amazing clients who have made big changes, who have done a lot to be able to improve their lives, save their lives, all of those things, and yet the death by 1000 cuts really seems like all of the other stuff got in the way. It didn’t matter how meaningful the work was. What is, what’s the solution? Maybe I’m jumping too early to solutions. But what do you think that that you could have done differently, or that therapists get wrong about that?

Ofra Obejas 7:11
No, that’s that’s the question in everybody’s mind. So many therapists keep saying, I’m burned out. I’m burnt out. I don’t know what to do about it. And our field does not do a very good job of addressing burnout or identifying what real self care is. So just to backtrack a little bit, I’ll say that a lot of times we are not conscious of how much the work takes away from us. We know that therapist is about the relationship, right? That’s a no brainer. How many more studies do we need to see that say the most significant factor in the effectiveness of treatment is not whether it was CBT or DBT or IFS therapy or ASS therapy, it’s the relationship with the therapist. And yet, so many training programs completely ignore it and look at the relationship as a customer service transaction. The therapist delivers an intervention, the client responds to the intervention, and that really leaves out the understanding that we are in a relationship, and it has two directions. We do get impacted by our clients. How can we sit in, day in and day out, hour after hour and not be impacted by their pain, their suffering? Or if a client decides to do some reenactment and use us as a punching bag, do we not feel abused? And this day in and day out without being taken care of, you know, we take care of it by saying, Oh, this is counter transference, so we need to manage it like, you know, we’re not strong enough if we get impacted by our clients. And I have to tell you that what I found out that without addressing it, a therapist has a shelf life, and I found out exactly what my shelf life was, and it was 20 years. And I’ve seen therapists with a shelf life of two years who transition pivot to being more coaches or doing courses, but they can’t keep doing it after two years. Or people who sort of turn off the emotional part of their practice and just keep you know, they use compassion, they use active listening, but they’re not really engaged emotionally with a client. And I have to say that one of the hardest times in my practice was the last three months when I had nothing left in the tank, and I still had to deliver 60 sessions, and I did not phone them in. I did them all the way I would do them. I gave a good termination, but the toll that it took on me, I would just like nothing left completely numb, depleted, and I can’t say in enough in enough ways, I ran out of runway. I was just done. And I think that our profession does fail to prepare us for that emotional reality of the work.

… 10:06
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Curt Widhalm 10:09
Now, a very cynical view of this would just be, why didn’t you engage in more self care? Why didn’t you just pick some sessions to phone in a little bit and just kind of ride through a rough patch?

Ofra Obejas 10:20
I wish I could. I just, I can’t.

Katie Vernoy 10:24
It’s against Ofra’s nature to phone anything in.

Ofra Obejas 10:28
Thank you. You’re so kind. It’s, I couldn’t do it, but, but self care? No, I hear, I hear the question, and what we describe as self care is usually something that could be scheduled in at the end of the week, and kind of put in the bank as credit, like I’ll have a massage at the at the end of the day Friday, and that will take me over to the rest of the week. That’s not realistic self care. If I had a session and I worked more with children and with adults, where one client just wrecked the room and threw sand in my eyes. And, you know, five minutes after that, I gotta go to the bathroom and go to the next one. I’m dysregulated. I need to do self care right then and there. I cannot go on and say, Well, you know, I’ll have a massage on Friday. I’ll have yoga later. I’ll do a kale smoothly for lunch. That’s one of the biggest myths of self care, is that something could be done later, and something that can last and okay, you know, I’m good for the week. You’re not good for the week. You know, client, just throw a ball in my face. I’m not good that. I don’t care what I did five minutes earlier. I do hear the question, Curt, why didn’t you do anything? And that is…

Curt Widhalm 11:43
I guess I was trying more to poorly reflect how a lot of our field reacts to when we reach some of these feelings that you’re talking about. I mean, there’s a lot that goes on in our field that is somebody in your position, this is an individual failing on your part, that you aren’t doing enough for yourself, and you should be able to sustain this. Because we all know therapists that are working until they’re 70, 80, 85, 90, years old, and they can do it. So why can’t you? And really what I’m I guess maybe a more helpful way of asking this question is you saw something in yourself that saw that it was not worthwhile to continue this grind. And I’ve seen your comments and heard reflections of Katie’s conversations with you, secondhand for Katie over the years, and have a lot of respect for how professionally you take yourself and your practice. If you can’t do it, what’s the hope for the rest of us?

Ofra Obejas 12:58
Well, you don’t know me well enough because you know in again reflection what happened to me, what it has happened, I realized that I did not put myself as an enough of a priority, that I I was trying to act like a super woman, that I can just do it and do it and do it and not pay attention to my own feelings and my own needs. You had another guest on your on your podcast, Laura Reagan of the Trauma Therapy Network, and what she discovered when she was feeling burnt out, she said that she went to her own therapy, and their therapist said you are not taking time to feel your own feelings. And Laura Reagan closed her direct practice, and she’s doing a podcast and Trauma Therapy Network, but not one on one clients, and she worked with trauma. You can only do that for so long without taking a lot of time for your own feelings. I my bandwidth got a lot smaller in the last couple of years, and I really should have looked at what I’m able to do and reduced my caseload. It wasn’t very high, but realistically, I could not see more than two clients a week, and I did not honor that need for myself, and I did see more than two clients. I had a very difficult time breaking off relationships with clients. I tried to convince parents to graduate their children and they just wouldn’t I, I begged clients to terminate and they wouldn’t. And I really did not find a good way to say I need to reduce the case load, because I did not take care of my own feelings. I, you know, the stress is added up and poor boundaries. I’m the first person to identify myself as having very poor boundaries allowing clients to access my devices, text, phone, emails, 24/7 not that I would respond 24/7 but you know, the mental load has been taken once you saw them, once you see the message, getting endless, endless requests to have clients ask me to be their secretary. What time we meeting? Can you give me my your address again for my Uber driver? What we’re meeting today? What time? It’s like get a calendar, use your schedule. What is that Acuity scheduling and I had always tried to be more understanding, you know, we were always, you know, endlessly available and endlessly compassionate. And I I was taught in graduate school that you are the container. You never abandon a client no matter what, even if they can’t pay you, that’s not a justification to abandon a client. And they’re just bonkers things that they taught in graduate school and in subsequent supervision. And I just did not heed my own call of, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re just not a super woman, and I guess it’s you could call it hubris, you can call it pride, or just kind of a learned habit that I have to not worry about it, you know, I can, I can plow through. And so it turns out that because of my own inability to set boundaries and my own ignoring of my needs, I’ve reached the end of the runway.

Katie Vernoy 16:39
When you talk about being endlessly available, the container, not being able to discharge, terminate clients unless they are ready, or all of the responsibilities that we hold as therapists, I feel like there’s maybe arguments being had. I don’t know the right word, where we as therapists either go to the radical self care, I’m going to have, you know, 72 hour cancelation policies. If someone sneezes wrong, I’m going to terminate them, if they whatever, right. There’s, there’s that pushback, and then there’s, I think, where you, Curt, and I sit a little bit more of, what are the ethics, what are the laws, what are the things that are being said? How do we honor those responsibilities? And I think Curt, and I have even had arguments on the podcast about where that line is, where the line from responsibly upholding the ethics and duties of being a therapist versus self care and self sacrifice. You know the where those, where those things sit along a spectrum, and I’m when I hear you, I you were in that place of self sacrifice, in that place of customer service, in that place of I’m following the highest standard of my profession, and it wasn’t sustainable.

Ofra Obejas 18:09
Absolutely it’s not sustainable. And I keep going back to what they did not teach us in grad school. And that’s a joke that we have.

Katie Vernoy 18:17
Yeah, and they teach us a lot of stuff in grad school.

Ofra Obejas 18:19
Yeah, they did. You know, well, we always hear, Oh, they didn’t teach us about business, how to run a business in grad school. And I always say, because it wasn’t a business school. You don’t hear people graduate from business school and say they didn’t teach us how to be therapists in business school. But they really don’t address the toll that it takes to sit in hour after hour, day in, day out for years, and not look at the impact that it has on us as people in relationships, and referring to any difficulty that we have is something that we need to resolve the, you know, I have already mentioned the countertransference, or looking at, you know, the myths of self care. And I know I’m repeating things that I’ve already said, but I got some really strong ideology in grad school because I went to a social work program and a very progressive social work program, and it’s, you know, we are here to fix the world. Curt, I remember you made a joke about the social worker of ethics that says self care is something their therapist is responsible for, and like profession that says this is a systemic problem. Why are you responsible for it yourself? But just the guilt tripping into never letting anybody down and never, never not meeting the needs of the client. If you end up homeless and take it on the street, at least you met the client’s needs. I think that there is a lot of failure in our trainings, and a lot more conversation needs to be had about how to make the work sustainable. And you know, we’re sort of passing the buck or kicking the can down the road. You know, I’ll let the clients take it out on me, and then I’ll sit in session with my own therapist, and they’ll take it out on them. And what are they going to do turtles all the way down. You know, what, what are we doing to to break this, this ridiculous cycle? And, you know, so people go to a business coaching program, they think that they’re going to be happier if they make more money, at least, you know, at least the money will take care of you. But to quote the great philosopher Jerry Seinfeld, if the work is not fulfilling, the money won’t be either, you know. And I was telling people I was retiring, oh, you know, why don’t you just ask for, you know, raise your fee. Just, you know, have fewer clients and raise your fee. Yeah, because, because that’s really going to solve everything.

… 21:01
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Curt Widhalm 21:02
What I’m hearing is a lot of the advice that we have in the field to address some of these problems. Go into private practice, raise your fees, work with clients who are easier, for lack of a better way of saying it. A lot of this common advice that we have in our fields isn’t meeting some of the fulfillment that you were looking for. And I want to maybe hone in on this a little bit more as far as the passion is gone. Now, I think that there’s this paradox that, you know, we get people into this field as you know, this is a calling. This is a passion. On one hand, you’re saying that it shouldn’t be this way. It should be something that we take more seriously as what, what’s, what’s the alternative.

Ofra Obejas 21:58
We all hear the saying, you know, follow your passion. Do what you love. You’ll never for work a day in your life. And the passion can dull after years, especially with day to day difficulties that you really don’t expect. If you think you’re following your passion, then it’s going to be heaven day you know, day in and day out, you’re going to be so happy that you helped people. That’s not recognizing how depleting the work can be, how some parts of the work could be hard. I have a saying that I call a part of my practice, middle phase hell, when i Hey, do you know what I’m talking about? I haven’t had new clients come in for a while, and I haven’t had old clients terminate, and everybody’s in middle phase, and it could be boring. I mean, it’s maintenance, it’s support. I said to colleague, if I have to watch one more kid arrange the furniture in the dollhouse, I’m going to stick needles in my eyes, just it’s, it’s not that exciting. So, so there has to be a variety. And we, we get new certification, so we look into new modalities, and that’s wonderful, but the idea that if this is your calling, it’s going to be fun, it’s going to be still hard day to day. And I would challenge anybody listening, whether or not they take insurance when you are on the phone with an insurance company for two hours, and they kept transferring you for one person to another, and you have to repeat all your contact information every time. If you don’t feel like doing some self harming, and you’re human.

Katie Vernoy 23:51
Well, and don’t forget then they then you all of a sudden get that hang up, and you have to start again.

Ofra Obejas 23:56
Yeah, yeah. Like what just happened? And those are, those are realities and and, yeah, there’s a lot broken in the mental health field. And never there has been a worse time, in my opinion, to start private practice, because we are competing with forces that a solo practitioner cannot compete with, with the advertising budget of Worse Help, or, you know, the Rulas, Headways and Almas that you know, then anybody can use their insurance. And with online therapy, you are in the same pool with everybody who’s a therapist in the United States, with the inner inter state packed anybody can provide therapy to anybody, and how are you going to distinguish yourself? So it’s it’s a tough time, and I know a lot of coaching programs try to sell you the solution, but I haven’t found, personally, I’ve tried a few and I haven’t found one that was really helpful.

Katie Vernoy 25:01
With the business coaching, let’s just step there for a second. What are the things that you found especially unhelpful in the business coaching that you’ve seen for therapists?

Ofra Obejas 25:13
Of the myriad things these programs use a transformational model of woop, W, O, O, P, the W is for wishes and wants; what do you want, what do you want? O for outcome; visualize what the outcome will be when you get what you want. The next O is obstacles; identify obstacles that will come up and P; plan on how to resolve these obstacles. But all the problems that I’ve been in were just wo, W O wish and visualize the outcomes and completely ignoring obstacles and planning for how to overcome them. And of course, you know what happens then, if you didn’t get the results that some people claim they have, it’s your fault for not believing hard enough, for not being clear enough on what you wish for. And you know, it’s sociopathic when you start blaming the people in the program for not believing enough or Well, yeah, obviously you don’t want it bad enough, so it’s your fault and shaming. You know, Curt, I think that you you do EMDR therapy. Imagine if a client said to you, I know we’ve worked on my trauma, but when I get reminders of the trauma, I still get triggered. And you said to them, Well, you know we have identified the self limiting beliefs that cause you to feel this way, and you just insist on holding on to them. What can I tell you? That is what these programs do. They they claim to have found the answer to mindset change, and all you need is mindset change. And to throw another big word out there, it is vulgar positivism, not toxic positivity, which they bring on with a shovel, but vulgar positivism, which means over simplifying the idea that there are different elements that go into positivism. There’s taken away the human behavior and emotions and saying, oh, you know, we can just boil it down to raise your fee and schedule clients. And there’s no such thing as market conditions. And there’s, you know, a biracial therapist in the Bay Area can can have the same fee as a Christian counselor in Fresno, and nothing else matters. And of course, this is bonkers.

Katie Vernoy 27:38
It’s totally bonkers.

Ofra Obejas 27:40
Total bonkers. And, you know, people say, No, I’ve raised my fee. I quit insurance, and the phone stopped ringing. Well, you know, you’re just don’t believe enough that people will pay your fee. So, you know, write affirmation two hours a day instead of one hour, and sign up for the next program when we’re going to tell you the real secret to mindset change. But I know I’ve, I’ve followed people in these programs, and there is a lot of damage when people do quit insurance and they can’t pay the rent anymore, not on their office, on their own home, and they end up leaving the program, going back on insurance for lower reimbursement. And just feel like, you know, I must have something has to be wrong with me, because I can’t get those results that other people say they get. But when I call people without when I’ve recently had to find a lot of referrals for all my clients, I found out the therapists don’t really make what they say they make, so we’re lying to each other that is not helping each other at all.

Katie Vernoy 28:47
Yeah, I think we’ve have a lot of conversations that that reflect on this. I think we’ll, we’ll link to those in the show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com. And I think we keep coming back to this theme of our profession doesn’t prepare us, whether it’s in grad school or business coaching programs or whatever, or the philosophy that this should be a calling, and if you just have the right mindset, everything will be fine. And it really comes to these individual solutions of I’ve got to figure this out. I’ve got to figure out how to be better. If I can’t do this, I’ve done something wrong. And even in some of our conversations, Ofra, you’ve talked about I failed. I this was my failure, and I’ve pushed back: No, it’s not like I’ve really wanted to try to get to this place of what is, what is the systemic solution, if there even is one. Because to me, no matter what my mindset is, there’s still the piece that made me me. I care about people, I want to help them, and I have all of my flaws and foibles that potentially mean that I’m going to be a people pleaser with my clients periodicly, or at least feel it. Maybe I won’t act on it, but that mental load. And so is there, is there a systemic solution to support clinicians, or are there things that you think would be helpful for clinicians who want to navigate this, maybe better than you did?

Ofra Obejas 30:19
You know, obviously I stand by my my claim that I failed, because I have not figured it out. I did not find a way out of having to to just shut down my practice. And I know this might might sound cynical to new people who are listening. I’m saying there are, there are ways to avoid burnout. And I’ll just say it very, very succinctly, burnout, in a nutshell, is a mismatch between what you need to do your job and the resources available to you, whether it’s time or support or equity or recognition or whatever, and mostly for me, it was values, when there was a mismatch between my values and when I worked in agencies, what they were asking me to do, they went against my values, and in my own private practice when I was working against my values. So the answer to burnout, or to avoid burnout, isn’t to become a content creator or an entrepreneur, which we can absolutely do, but that is not the answer to burnout or take a vacation, because the after the vacation, you’ll come back. The answer is to look at what are my values, and is my job aligned with these values. Am I doingm am I am i doing work that reflects my values? And I should have, much earlier on, really reduced my caseload, and, you know, easy for me to say, you know, maybe I didn’t need the money. Maybe I had other ways to make money. And so many therapists have side hustles, so which great for all of us. I was a teacher, a supervisor, a consultant. You know, we all do a lot of different things so that we don’t have to have a caseload that is more than we can manage. I believe case loads need to be very small, and the harder they are, the smaller they need to be. It is not sustainable to have a heavy, complex, big practice, heavy, complex cases. I worked with children. It is very dysregulating to work with children and with the whole family system. It’s a it’s it’s complex, it’s more people. And I don’t know a therapist works with children who could do it for more than 20 years. I have not heard of anybody who could sustain that. That is just too much. But you know, we think of case loads as 20 clients a week, 16 clients a week. And for me, just to honor what my needs were, how to look at my own values and what I could do and what I can bring in. It should have been a lot smaller than that. And do I call myself a therapist if I only see four clients a week? That’s that’s a question that everybody should ask themselves. What is it for you? What is your identity. What are you trying to do? So my failure was to failure to recognize that I was doing more than I could, that I could sustain. That that would be my answer to everybody. Look at what your values are. Look at what you can sustain, and don’t do something just because you’re told to, I know you had guests on your show that looked at helping supporting clients and having a caseload of 30 and and you also had pushback from listeners saying, I don’t think that they’re going to support me in having 30 clients. I don’t believe that they can do that. So yeah, so good good for new people coming in and saying, No, I will not have 30 clients. I don’t care what my agency is telling me to do.

Curt Widhalm 34:04
For those people who their various responsibilities in life do push them up against their values, and people who need to pay rent, who have bills, who have student loans, what would you tell them with the wisdom that you’ve come to at this point in your life and your experiences?

Ofra Obejas 34:27
Again, easy for me to say, but I was I would also say that I was working in one mental health agency, community mental health agency where I was quitting and another person told me, Oh yeah, we don’t all have a spouse who can support us while we’re looking for another job. And I said I will clean my neighbor’s toilets and not have this job. So I don’t care what I need to do. You know that there are side hustles that use the knowledge, and everybody can find their own and just, you know, of course, there are so many with our therapy license, and I don’t know what to say about the low pay of the one to one therapy. And I think nobody has found a solution for that. There’s the intensives, the in reading or intensives. But you know, how many people can you have every weekend pay $5,000 for the weekend? I mean that that runs its course. I don’t have an answer other than here’s how not to burn yourself out.

Katie Vernoy 35:30
It feels like a maybe not unsolvable problem, but it is kind of an unsolvable problem. There’s, there’s looking elsewhere for income to stabilize whatever that is. It’s could be a, you know, a job as a bank teller, right? Like, who knows what that other job is. It can be something that is consistent, lucrative, or even just enough to be able to pay the bills. There’s figuring out how to create a caseload that maybe can be larger and not having those deep, intense cases. It’s hard to feel hopeful in the current environment, with insurance premiums probably doubling for people with a lot of potentially parity or benefits that are going to go away. So there’s, there’s not even the Hey, I’ll just be a therapy mill and and see 20, 30 you know, run of the mill, anxiety, depression, clients from insurance. So I don’t think I have a question, because I feel like it’s just a comment about the state of the world, and I just want to honor that you did what you could and just hit a wall and had to leave, and you did it in the best way that you could. For your own particular situation how have you, how did you come to I need to retire versus I need to take a sabbatical, or I need a long vacation, or I need to get a new certification, or I need to lower my caseload. How did you get to that decision that retirement was the only answer?

Ofra Obejas 37:07
For about five years, I’ve played around with, what if I have a different population? What if I see more people in the morning and less in the afternoon? Fewer days, more days. It’s, you know, rearranging the textures on the Titanic. And I realized it’s not about that. It’s about the day to day work. It’s about the dysregulation that happens with the intensity of my cases and the number of cases that I have. And I realized that I can’t do it anymore. When I had good sessions and clients said, you know, this was a breakthrough for me, or, you know, the things that you hear, it’s like, yeah, good, good session. And I felt like saying, good for you, and I don’t care. I am completely numb. I’m happy for you. I’m happy that I facilitated it, and it doesn’t make me feel anything, and I’d rather do anything else than I’m doing right now, to continue gardening or reading a book or doing my stupid puzzles than going to a client session. So you know, maybe this is time.

Katie Vernoy 38:17
Got it.

Curt Widhalm 38:21
You are not venturing into the coaching space and telling people all of the answers to fix all of the problems that you’ve identified, but you are offering something else. Can you share what it is that you’re willing to do?

Ofra Obejas 38:39
Of course, I if this conversation inspired anybody and they want to continue talking with me, I will be happy to have a conversation, and who knows what, what is going to come out of it? And I, I did shut down my professional email, but just for this podcast, I will create an email address Ofra, mtsg, at Gmail, where people welcome to write to me, and if it’s within a reasonable amount of of emails, I will respond, just happy to continue the conversation. If somebody wants to argue with me, I’m happy to listen to all the arguments, and I appreciate you two very much for continuing these conversations, which are not always inspiring and in a kind of a positive way. Oh, look at how great our field is and how much hope there is, because I did want to open it up for people who feel like I do that, yeah, this is a hard field, and we did not get the support that we need in just so many ways to do our job well.

Curt Widhalm 39:51
And we will include that in our show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com. You can find our show notes over there. Follow us on our social media. Media, join our Facebook group, the Modern Therapists Group, to continue on with this and other conversations, and until next time, I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy and Ofra Obejas.

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