Emma looks quickly at the clock when she turns her key in the lock. It is 9:57 p.m. She sighs as she pushes the door open and quickly goes to her room to drop off her bags before going into the kitchen to prepare dinner, her second meal of the day since leaving at 6am. She fills a saucepan, turns on the stove, and drops some pasta before opening her laptop to check emails and work on her class readings. It is 10:03 p.m.
Emma's eyes glaze over as she scrolls through the endless text screens and her head nods until she is woken up by a text from her boss: “Hey Emma, I just had someone called. Can you open tomorrow morning? "
Emma answers immediately: "Sure, see you tomorrow!"
She looks at the time on her phone – 11:13 pm. She panics and runs to the stove to turn it off. Greeted by a pot with no water, she throws away the burnt noodles and closes her laptop. She has only finished one of her five readings, but has to get up tomorrow morning to be able to work. Then she has six hours of lessons and an internship the next day.
It is 11:30 pm. Emma lies in bed with her eyes closed and her stomach empty. Her mind races and ponders the various clients she's worked with and how they're holding up. She thinks about which customers might have which urges – and what she could do to help them, if at all. She thinks about the classes she didn't complete readings in and wonders if she can do without the readings. She considers herself a consultant and wonders if she can ever be successful when she's already struggling.
It is 12:25 pm. Emma is asleep, but she will wake up in three hours to prepare to do this again.
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As a second year PhD student who is also working on an inpatient treatment program on site, I have found that it can be difficult not to sum up every piece of life and form a great challenge. It seems that everything I am involved in is geared towards becoming a mental health advisor. It can be difficult to immerse yourself in clinical experiences and separate the emotional intensity I experience in the field from my schoolwork, my personal life, and all other aspects of life.
In our area it is our daily bread to be emotionally present and available and to work on the sensitive issues of other people's lives. However, being able to keep in touch with a client can be challenging, especially if you burned out the day before, or during that morning's events, or at the previous client's – not to mention school, work, and other life chores. Taking the time to check in with yourself, support yourself and separate one facet of life from another is a skill that I have found useful when used in a real and purposeful way.
Overview
"Tap in dedication" is a technique that has been adapted by theater artists when it comes to very intimate work on stage. It has been used for scenes that range from a staged slap to simulated intercourse, and the purpose is to give actors a chance to demonstrate their willingness to do sensitive and potentially harmful work.
My experience with this technique resulted from my theater work during my undergraduate studies under the direction of Carin Silkaitis and Gaby Labotka, the latter being a certified intimacy director with intimacy directors and coordinators. They introduced the technique of "unlocking" for those of us on the show, focusing on respect, safety, and wellbeing for ourselves and for those we worked with. We have used this technique regularly in scenes of overt sexuality, abuse, trauma, and death.
We would physically pat each other on the hands like a "high ten" to say to each other: "I am ready to get involved in this work with you." When work was done on that scene or sequence, we performed that action again to provide a physical symbol that communicated, "We did the job, and now we are stepping out of it to be ourselves."
Adapting this technique for consultants is a good addition because of the issues of respect, safety, and wellbeing – something we help professionals serve clients, but may not always apply to ourselves. In counseling, it is important to find ways to respect ourselves and our work, because if we don't, it can become all too easy to suffer burnout, experience vicarious trauma or even disrespect our clients.
I have combined the technique learned in the theater with aspects of dialectical behavior therapy to help professionals participate mindfully in their careers and to give them the time to check in with themselves before and after a day of work. In the event of a particularly difficult session, counselors can also quickly apply this technique between clients. It can even be used with some customers, depending on their location.
The aim of the technique as I am describing it is to give advisors, advisors in training and other helping professionals the opportunity to deal with sensitive issues, to be present and to be responsible for the difficult work engage who they can Participate daily and leave the work at the door when you get to the end of the day. Bringing problematic work home with them can be detrimental for caregivers, as it can affect their self-sufficiency and negatively affect the relationships they have outside of work. Ideally, using this technique will make it easier for clinicians to fully immerse themselves in their work life and help them separate this time from their personal life.
The technology
Practice Self Care: Start by walking in or coming to the place where work is done for the day. Next, take a moment by doing some action that will calm and regulate you. This could be a cup of coffee or tea, enjoying a snack, reading a few pages of the newspaper, doing a crossword puzzle – anything you can find to help you feel relaxed or calm down. If this is a technique that you plan to use several times a day, between sessions, or just as needed, an activity that takes less time may serve you better.
Practice mindfulness: Once you have completed your self-care activities, it can be helpful to anchor yourself in your work environment. For example, take a few minutes to practice a five-sense grounding technique: identify five things that can be seen, four that can be heard, three that can be touched, two that can be smelled, and one that can be tasted.
Emergency tolerance skills can also be beneficial. An example is radical acceptance – take the time to accept one thing that you cannot change about your daily routine, while also acknowledging that you can influence your own presence during the day. A technique like one-mindfulness could be used to encourage focused attention by focusing on one thing and allowing yourself to see, hear, and appreciate it, be it physical, emotional, or something else (e.g. a plant, a feeling, a thought)). Any activity that helps you feel mentally comfortable and instills a sense of calm and readiness can be used for this activity.
An important consideration is to decide where and when to participate in this process on a daily basis. For example, are you going to do it before you leave the house? In the car or on the bus when traveling to work? As soon as you arrive at your office? From my experience with similar techniques in theater, once the actions have been determined, it is helpful to always perform them in the same or as closely spaced manner as possible in order to preserve the integrity of the actions and processes.
With practice, you will likely be able to engage with your self-care and mindfulness processes anywhere, although changing the environment or process may initially make it difficult to establish and maintain the mindfulness you are hoping for. If you find yourself in a position where you need to travel regularly for your meetings, it can be helpful to take a specific action before each meeting. It may also be useful to practice this action several times in calming environments before performing the activity in a more fluid and possibly stimulating environment.
Literally Typing: After you have completed your grounding activity, you will literally be typing. This means that you are physically tapping your hands on a surface or object. Your physical entry means that you are mentally, emotionally, and spiritually ready to 1) devote yourself to the activities that follow in a laborious and conscientious manner, 2) be fully present in your interactions, and 3) be aware of the impact of your efforts and can have presence on customers and others.
Your physical tip in action means your day has begun and you will be consciously aware of everything that happens from that moment on. What is important is that tapping marks the time when it is about others (and not your own self), while the previous actions were intended solely for the person performing them (i.e. you). This can allow you to deal with and deal with more sophisticated emotions and experiences by recognizing that this time is all about devoting yourself entirely to someone else, just as the previous actions were devoted to self-sufficiency. And essentially, you are taking care of yourself while taking care of others because you have purposely prepared for your ministry.
Tapping in the truest sense of the word: After your sessions, work, or treatments are over (or between sessions if the content was particularly difficult), it's time to literally retype, just like you did. This is a physical action where you physically tap the same surface or object that you tapped. It is important to use the same object every time, whenever possible, to symbolize the end of the specific dedication for your work.
This eavesdropping provides a physical action to put an end to what happened during your work day and allows you to get back to doing the idle work that you have. In addition, this action signals that the feelings and emotions that may have arisen during your work should be kept in this particular time. They are not necessarily intended to exist beyond the scope of this session or this day.
Enjoy Your Post-Tap-Out Activities: At this point, it's time to get into the activities of your personal life and non-work time. This means doing whatever you would normally do after work – exercising, playing with your kids, shopping for groceries, looking after your home, hanging out with friends, etc. – without interruption from what happens during your work hours is.
Also, some people find it incredibly helpful to engage in some type of self-care at the end of the day, similar to what they do at the beginning of the day. This could include watching a specific show, enjoying an ice cream, or doing another crossword puzzle – anything that can help you decompress and relax. This activity can be done anytime, but it may be more useful if you do it soon after you tap, so it can act as a nice, calming cap for your work day.
Technical considerations
This technique was adopted from a theatrical practice used in scenes where violence or intimacy was approached that could have effects similar to reliving trauma or increasing the actors' emotional discomfort. It is important to recognize when something is beyond the scope of commitment to work. It is up to the advisors to determine, to the best of their knowledge, when an event may require further measures to protect their wellbeing. It can be difficult to “leave some issues at work” and when that happens it may be wise to seek assistance. If a counselor is having a troubling reaction to a client's trauma, it may be useful to discuss this in the clinician's own therapy sessions or to deal with trusted colleagues or supervisors so as not to shoulder the burden alone.
Using this technique can take a long time depending on the self-care measures chosen by the counselor. Given this reality, it can be useful to quickly and easily find an action or to incorporate parts of the technology into everyday life so that the user is not burdened. However, it is imperative to take the time to prepare for the day to avoid burnout and increase wellbeing.
Although this technique is not intended to be a panacea for stress reduction, it can prove useful in creating tighter boundaries between personal and work life, which is a common stressor among counselors. The goal is not to fix every stressor clinicians may experience, but rather to enable clinicians to have a solid and deliberate process of getting in and out of their daily work in a demanding area.
In the event that a consultant has to switch between environments during the working day, it can be helpful to get on and off before and after each customer and to use the travel time for a little more mindfulness. In particular because of the multitude of options, such as For example, in traffic or accidents that may occur while traveling between places, practicing mindfulness while traveling can help to separate the stress of travel from your work. In addition, this technique can help rescuers reduce personal stressors that are often carried over to working with clients, enabling a fruitful and deliberate work experience.
Suffice it to say that there are many situations that may not benefit from the ability to get on and off. The use of this technique is ultimately at the discretion of each person. It is just supposed to give them more autonomy in how they want to spend their time in a helping profession.
First steps
Ask yourself the following questions to start tapping in the dedication technique:
How about you deliberately accessing and leaving your workday? Do you have any concerns? What can you do to address these concerns?
What self-care routines would you like to use to start your day? Which are you already doing?
Mindfulness is an essential part of preparing for unlocking. What mindfulness practices have you identified that you can fall back on? If you are not participating in mindfulness, do you have other religious or spiritual practices that you may be using (e.g., prayers, religious texts, songs)?
Where will you get on at the beginning of your job and get off at the end?
What does it mean for you to practice your work consciously?
What practices would you like to establish when your work life enters your private life after leaving?
What resources do you have to deal with particularly difficult clinical working days? Write them down and use your list when you need them.
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Nicholas Salazar is a sophomore at Marquette University in the Counseling Education and Counseling Psychology Department. He works part-time and is an intern with Rogers Behavioral Health in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. Contact him at [email protected].
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