Walking with the helpers: Announcing Pace Groups for mental health providers
UPDATED August 2021: Thank you to all the helpers who participated in our Pace groups for mental health professionals. We have retired this specialized offering. Many therapists continue to enjoy our Pace Groups. If you’re interested in meeting regularly with people who understand and are committed to real conversations, check us out!
In a year of immense stress and turmoil, therapists are stretched and depleted.
To support mental health professionals, Pace is offering 50 clinician-only Pace Groups at cost. To learn more, read on.
This year we therapists walked with our clients, friends, and family through innumerable challenges. We navigated all of it: a pandemic, civil unrest, an economic crisis, a racial justice movement, and waves of widespread traumatic symptoms. We did this in support of our clients and at the same time in our own lives. Never in my life have I held and endured so much suffering in tandem across so many months.
Pace brings people together to work on their mental and emotional health, wherever they are. Pace connects you with other real people through technology to talk with one another, work on yourself, and feel less alone together. Pace is for everyone, but your group is for people going through the same thing. Pace Groups are part peer support, part process group, guided by expert facilitators. In a world of so much content, they are a quiet space, a room of humans in a similar journey.
As a thank you to all the therapists, as a “we love you and are cheering for you”, and as a show of solidarity in this difficult world, Pace is offering Pace Groups for mental health clinicians. These groups are open to anyone offering therapy, including but not limited to social workers, counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists.
We designed Pace clinician groups with the goal of breaking down every barrier to participation. We revised the Pace Group timing, duration, and length of each session to optimize your ability to engage in a moment for you.
We meet weekdays in the late morning, a typically slow time for clinical work. Although traditional Pace groups are 90 minutes long, we’ve shortened clinician Pace groups to 60 minutes to fit conveniently into the hour to hour schedule of meeting patients. And because clinicians have lots of practice at emotionally connecting quickly, we’re offering abbreviated group seasons of 6 weeks so clinicians can quickly test out whether Pace Groups work for them. Finally, we lowered the price to $30 per a meeting so five members are only paying the cost of the facilitator’s time ($150/60 minute session). Pace is happy to cover the engineering, marketing, and all other company costs involved; honestly we thought about offering all these groups for free but we heard again and again that clinicians wanted to pay for their colleague’s time. And therapists know better than most how behaviorally motivating it can be to commit money and time to values-aligned goals. All these adjustments are in the service of opening the door to your own support. We don’t want time, commitment, or cost to get in the way of the pause you so deeply deserve.
Why are we offering low cost therapist groups?
Because therapists are exhausted, depleted, and showing up each day fueled by a mission to help. Because this struggle is deeply personal and urgent. I am no stranger to this experience, the twisted conundrum of a heart wide open in the midst of physical and emotional burnout. I spent much of my twenties barreling into therapy rooms with a full heart and white knuckled endurance. I loved my clients and had no idea how to care for myself so I could keep doing what I loved. My template for relating to suffering was ‘hold it or fix it’ and in those seasons of being a therapist it felt as though the suffering was endlessly poured into me.
I tried my best. I did the things I knew. I exercised the hell out of my body, I slept 9 hours a night, I had a strong social support network and started meditation. I thought I was the freaking valedictorian of self-care. Little did I know.
Not a mugshot, just me burnt-out
Those years were marked by classic burn out signs. My evening alcohol intake climbed. Violent nightmares scared me awake. I scanned for jumpers while biking over the Golden Gate Bridge. When I was mugged down the street from the hospital, it felt inevitable. I thought “Of course, there’s violence everywhere. I’m lucky I wasn’t shot or raped.” I reported to work straight from the cop car, slinking home only after my boss put her hand on my arm, saying quietly, “I don’t know how else to say this. You must care for yourself first. The work will wait for you.”
Embrace your superpowers (and the vulnerability)
“Embrace your superpowers” is a Pace company value. Over my years of coming back to the work I love, and doing it in a sustaining way, I have learned that to embrace, to “shoulder” or literally hold in two arms, includes both a recognition of the strength and it’s counter weakness. Our commitment to excellence creates a harmful cocktail of judgment when we fall below our high personal standards. Our selflessness means that we are at risk of not prioritizing our own personal well being. Our grit and stoicism push us to skip over our own suffering.
Our super powers can also be our greatest vulnerabilities. Therapists’ exceptional strengths and values are inexorably linked to parallel shadow risks.
Just like years ago, I feel the same pulls toward overwork and undercare again now. I feel it in myself and my dear colleagues and friends. There is so much to hold. We can save ourselves. Together. Our amazing strengths can be harnessed to build a community of compassion and care, where we carry this load together. Pace wants to help.
We can’t make it all better - but we want to offer a quiet space to emotionally connect with people who get what you’re going through and are going through it too. I hope to see you soon. We must care for ourselves. The work will wait. I’m cheering for you - and for us all.