Setting Emotional Boundaries from Work to Life
Anthony R. Quintiliani, Ph.D., LADC
Sometimes setting emotional boundaries from the psychotherapy room to your life outside of work can be a difficult thing to do. Shifting from 
“experience near empathy” (Kohut), “unconditional positive regard” (Rogers), “hovering attention” (Freud), “the holding environment” in “intersubjective space” (Winnicott), and compassionate awareness to emotional distancing, separation, and dispassion is no easy task. In more in-depth clinical interactions, the process of projective identification between therapist and client may drain your emotional resources; sometimes being “as if” you were the experiencer of your client’s pain and suffering can take a serious toll on your own emotional resources. At time the therapist’s own emotional life lacks the quality of connection experienced in the therapy session. Success in setting emotional boundaries is a very important self-care skill. It may determine your success, failure, joy, or misery in the clinical work you do. It will definitely prevent most case of “burn out.”
Therapists may wish to complete a brief self-care assessment at the end of each emotionally demanding day. Some things to check are as follows:
- Are you taking care of your own physical, psychological, spiritual, and emotional needs?
- Are you using mindfulness, self-compassion, clinical supervision, or journaling to get to know how you are doing?
- Are you valuing yourself enough regarding self-rewards, positive self-talk, cognitive and behavioral restructuring?
- Are you giving yourself time to experience some form of creativity?
- What about your spiritual self?
- Do you spend quality time in nature, among the awe of it all?
- Are you involved in the type of quality relationship you desire?
- Be sure to act on your own behalf if you find problems in the above areas.
Another very powerful process is to develop improving self-compassion for yourself, often blurring the inner boundaries of your own emotional life experience and the clinical work you do. Therapists are, in the end, only people with a set of specific 
helping skills. We suffer just like other people do. Hopefully, our training and experience have given us a bit of a positive edge here. Here are some things you may wish to consider to improve your own level of self-compassion.
- Using mindful awareness, observe the level and intensity of your self-criticism.
- Let go of personal resistance to being real, being your true self.
- Get out of your head! Get out of the past!
- Do loving kindness meditation often.
- Recognize your own difficult emotions (shame, anger, revenge, trying to control others, etc.), and simply be with them as a sacred part of who you are and be real about it. Use emotion regulation to improve things.
- Practice much more self-appreciation.
- Do not dwell on the pain and suffering of your past. All that stuff probably made you a stronger person.
- Welcome and LOVE all of you, with special attention to the sacred quality of your own life suffering.
- When you experience or re-experience anxiety, depression, addictive behaviors, or trauma – hold an open, soft heart for it. Then make changes to improve your life experience.
- Always get help when you need it, and do your best not to dwell on what you have little control over.
- Be certain too make changes to improve self-compassion regarding any problem areas above.
Fo more information refer to Norcross, J. C. and VandenBos, G. R. (2018). Leaving it at the Office: A Guide to Psychotherapist Self-Care. New York: Guilford. Neff, K. and Germer, C. (2018). The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook: A Proven Way to Accept Yourself, Build Inner Strength, and Thrive. New York: Guilford.
Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC
From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont and the Home of The Monkton Sangha
Author of Mindful Happiness
New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon!
meditations below are presented to expand the use of interoceptive processes in therapy practice. They are presented in very brief form, so slow down the work when using these in your therapy practice. Rather than repeating the introductory process, I will note it here. Be sure to use it in each meditation.
clients. Once a counselor has practiced these skills on a regular basis, it may be time to share such practices with clients. Live-practice therapy sessions are always more effective than simply “talk-therapy” about skills. Talk is cognitive, thereby impacting our executive brain more so than our body and limbic brain. Live mind-body practice impacts both the executive and limbic brain areas, and the body. In the same way that cognitive and psychodynamic interventions alone often fail to impact limbic system reactivity, these mind-body practices impact both mind and body – if we are lucky they may also impact the soul. A side-effect of regularly practiced skills may be increased personal happiness in life. These skills, if practiced regularly, will improve emotion self-regulation for most people. Here are the skills. This is simply an introduction, so you may have to research and learn “how to do” these skills via additional help. Be aware that if you suffer from severe physical illnesses, you may want to check with your healthcare provider before starting these practices. The same may be true if you suffer from severe psychological conditions.
interactions. When practiced regularly, it may reduce suffering from excessive stress, shame, guilt, and traumatic life experiences. One key benefit is that wise mind’s effects on emotion regulation may reduce the need to self-medicate, a core cause for all addictions. Rather than simply depending on sensory pleasures for short-term escape from pain and/or a fleeting experiences of joy/happiness, wise mind may improve radical acceptance, sensory soothing, and responding inter-personally with wisdom (kindness, respect, compassion). A valued possible outcome is increased authentic, longer-term happiness.
anxiety, the effects of trauma, addictions, and eating disorders. Various well-constructed meta-analyses have demonstrated that mindfulness practice (mainly regular meditation) produced positive effects on depression, anxiety, chronic pain and emotion regulation. It is important to note that all these conditions may become precursors for addictions, including smartphone addiction. By 2007 it was estimated that nearly ten percent of Americans (30,000,000 people) practiced meditation; add to this other mindfulness practices like yoga, qi gong, and tai chi and that number may double. By 2015 mindfulness-based practices were well-integrated into various skilled therapies: mindfulness-based stress reduction (improves depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and emotion regulation), dialectical behavior therapy (improves emotion regulation, self-soothing, and impulsivity), mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (50% eduction in relapse for repeated serious depressive episodes), mindfulness-based relapse prevention (for addictions), and acceptance and commitment therapy. The key variable was clear: if clients practiced regularly, they improved their clinical conditions, but if clients did not practice, they did not improve their clinical conditions. Therefore, two things are very important: doing regular practice in psychotherapy sessions, and the clinician being a regular mindfulness practitioner.
experienced directly. When people pay close attention to positive stories they tell themselves and/or positive emotional memories, serotonin levels may increase. Thus mindfulness practices enhance the experience of happiness. However, if people get stuck into paying attention to negative stories and negative emotional memories, the level of serotonin is reduced. Yes, being chronically stuck in the suffering of your past always makes emotional experience worse.