The Body Keeps Showing Up

There is a particular kind of hard that doesn't announce itself.

It doesn't arrive as a crisis. It doesn't interrupt your schedule in a way that anyone else notices. It just quietly asks more of you than it used to — and you keep showing up anyway. Because that's what you do.

Most of us have been there. Some of us are there right now — navigating something in our own bodies or lives while simultaneously holding space for others to do the same. Not talking about it much. Managing it between sessions. Putting it down long enough to be present and picking it back up on the way to the car.

This post is for that version of you.

The myth of the fully arrived therapist.

We are trained, explicitly or implicitly, to be ahead of our clients. Clear. Grounded. Resolved.

And most of us absorbed that message so completely that we apply it to our bodies too. We should be the ones who have figured out self-care. Who model regulated nervous systems. Who aren't rattled by uncertainty or loss or the particular grief of a body that isn't doing what you need it to do.

Except we are rattled sometimes. We have hard seasons in our own bodies and lives. Days when we sit down with a client and do the thing anyway—and nobody in that room knows what it cost to get there.

That is not a character flaw. That is a human doing human work from inside a human body.

But it is worth looking at honestly.

What happens when we compartmentalize.

Compartmentalizing is a skill. A necessary one. The ability to set aside what's happening in our own lives long enough to be genuinely present for someone else is part of what makes us effective.

And it has a cost.

When the thing we're compartmentalizing is our own body—our own health, our own uncertainty, our own quiet grief about what we're navigating—that cost can be significant. Because bodies don't stay compartmentalized forever. They find ways to speak.

Sometimes it shows up as shortened tolerance. A session that would normally feel manageable suddenly feels like too much. Sometimes it shows up as over-identification with a client who is navigating something similar—or under-identification, a pulling away because it's too close. Sometimes it shows up as that particular flatness that comes from giving a lot while running low.

None of that makes you a bad clinician. It makes you a clinician who is also a person. Which is all of us, all the time, whether we name it or not.

The harder question.

Here it is.

Are you tending to yourself with even a fraction of the curiosity and compassion you bring to your clients?

Not performing self-care. Not checking the boxes. Actually turning toward whatever is hard in your body or your life right now with something that resembles the presence you offer in session.

Because here's what I know: the clinicians who are most dangerous, not in a dramatic way, but in the subtle, accumulated way that affects the work, are not the ones who are in process. They are the ones who are in process and pretending they aren't. The ones who have decided that having needs means they aren't fit for this work.

You are fit for this work. And you are allowed to still be in it yourself.

Not done yet.

That phrase has been sitting with me.

Not done yet isn't a failure. It isn't a reason to step back from the work or to distrust yourself as a clinician. It is just the honest truth of what it means to be a human doing this work across a whole career—which is long, and which will ask different things of you at different times.

You don't have to be resolved to be present. You don't have to have it figured out to be effective. You don't have to be finished to show up.

You just have to be honest, with yourself first, and then with whatever support systems you have, about what's actually true.

An invitation.

If this is landing somewhere specific for you — if there's something in your own body or life that you've been quietly carrying while continuing to show up for everyone else — I want you to know that you're not alone in that.

And I want to offer something concrete.

On July 15th I'm hosting a free live webinar called Not Done Yet: On Being a Therapist While Still in the Work. It's a 90-minute conversation for clinicians who are navigating their own process — whatever that looks like — while still holding space for others. We'll talk about what it means to be in process responsibly, how our own unresolved pieces show up in the room, and how to relate to all of it with curiosity instead of shame.

It's not about becoming a perfect therapist. It's about becoming a more integrated one.

If that sounds like the room you need right now — I hope you'll join me.

Register here.

Dr. Jamie English is a licensed clinical social worker, supervisor, and educator. The DJ English blog explores the inner life of the clinician — the parts of this work we don't always talk about out loud.