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Episode Description
At orientation, Lindsey’s grad program told her that skipping a single reading meant failing her future clients. At graduation, they laughed and said, “We know you couldn’t have possibly read everything.”
That gap tells you a lot about how therapists learn to burn out.
In this episode, Ashley Charbonneau and Morgen Villegas sit down with Lindsey Boes, LMFT, an AAMFT-approved supervisor in Colorado. She works with therapists, healers, and caregivers in burnout recovery. Lindsey hit her own wall eight years into private practice. At the time she was teaching, supervising, reviewing notes, and seeing a full caseload. She rebuilt from there. She raised her rates by $40 and didn’t lose a single client. Now she takes a month off every year.
Together, they talk about:
Why so many therapists start as the emotional caretaker in their family of origin
How shame gets used in grad school and supervision, and what it teaches new clinicians
Burnout as a systemic problem shaped by capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy culture
How Lindsey blends narrative therapy and IFS to help clients drop the stories that keep them overfunctioning
Modeling real boundaries for supervisees, sabbaticals included
If you’re sure you just need to work harder, this one’s for you. You’re not failing. You’re human, and you have permission to do less.
GUEST BIO:
Lindsey Boes is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and AAMFT Approved Supervisor in Colorado. She has over a decade of experience helping therapists, healers, and caregivers recover from burnout and build better boundaries. Her work is rooted in feminist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist values. She sees burnout as a systemic problem, not a personal one. Lindsey runs her private practice, Guided Journey Therapy. She also founded Guided Journey Studio, which offers tools for people who give a lot and are learning they deserve care too. Find burnout recovery and boundary resources at guidedjourneystudio.com.
Transcript
Morgen V.: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to The Art of Being a Therapist: The Space Between Training and Real Life. I'm Morgen, and I'm here with my co-host, Ashley, and our guest, Lindsey. Our mission is to create a space where therapists can think critically, reflect openly, and examine the gray areas of the profession without shame, while also staying accountable to the lived experiences of clients.
We believe good therapists lean into the nuance of this work, remain open to feedback, question their training, and are willing to examine their role and responsibility in relationship to the people that they serve.
Ashley C.: Through honest conversations with both therapists and clients, we examine what makes therapy helpful and what it means to take responsibility in
Meet Lindsey and Her Lens
Ashley C.: this work.
Today, we are here with Lindsey, who is a licensed marriage and family therapist and an AAMFT-approved supervisor based in Colorado. She has over a decade of clinical experience and specializes in burnout recovery, boundary work, and the particular exhaustion that comes from spending your life caring for others.
Whoo, so needed. She approaches her work through feminist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist lenses in the understanding that burnout is systemic, not personal, and that the systems asking the most of helpers are rarely designed with their wellbeing in mind. Lindsey works with therapists, healers, and caregivers through her private practice, Guided Journey Therapy, and she founded Guided Journey Studio to bring psychoeducational tools to people who give a lot and learning they deserve care, too
Morgen V.: Oh my gosh.
Welcome, Lindsay. Just as a fact side note, Lindsay and I met each other through a IFS specific group called Speak for the Parts, and so she and I really connected around our political views, our desire to maintain an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and feminist lens through the work that we do. And so I'm just so excited that you're here, Lindsay, and would love to hear a little bit about what your career has looked like.
Lindsey B.: Like the, the nods going together at the same time really, that made my heart happy, so thank you for that.
Origins of Overfunctioning
Lindsey B.: My career started, I think, really similarly to a lot of us, where we-- I was the emotional provider, emotional regulator for a lot of people in my family growing up. And so we-- a lot of us are expected to provide emotional parameters for the adults in our lives without reimbursement, without awareness, without any sort of acknowledgement of that work being done, which is how so many of us get into this field.
So you can maybe hear immediately how I, I see this with such systemic influence in burnout that we experience as clinicians, is that we've been taught to do this without reimbursement or acknowledgement or our own boundaries since childhood frequently. And so it's just feels normal by the time we're out of grad school and licensed.
So I also had a lot of academic pressure growing up, but my family was very much PhDs, masters, lots of university influence. So we would talk about who got tenure at family dinner and who has a book coming out. It was very work, academic-focused conversations with extended family. And so grad school pressure felt, again, really normal for me.
And this is just what life is like, is always pushing to show that you've done something and that you're doing something really great and that you matter in what you're doing. That's just achieving in something. Always try to get the next goalpost and not really being satisfied with the goalpost that we've already accomplished.
Grad School Martyrdom
Lindsey B.: So then I went to grad school, which was a process that was for all of us, right? It was such a place. For me, it was also there were a lot of problematic- messages that I received about really martyrdom that I-- we didn't call it martyrdom. It was doing what your privilege requires you to do. But it was actually martyrdom, if you know what I mean by it was couched or packaged as this is what you should be doing.
And so then after grad school, went right into private practice and started replicating a lot of the same pressures from these systems on myself with-- 'cause I didn't realize that wasn't okay. I didn't realize that wasn't normal.
Hitting Burnout and Rebuilding
Lindsey B.: And so then after about 10-- no, about eight years in private practice, I hit a burnout mark and was just not okay.
And I realized I was teaching at a university doing undergrad and grad school teaching. I was providing behind-the-glass supervision for practicum students. I had my own post-grad supervisees, reviewing notes, and my own private practice. It was just too much, and really had to take big steps back from not only the way I was running my business, but also how am I making sense of what this field is?
And am I okay with the way I'm making sense of it now? Which was a giant no. So I started the process of Going into recovery from burnout, and I use the word recovery really intentionally there, it's a recovery process, and ended up raising my rates like $40 across the board. Didn't lose a single client, by the way.
People are terrified to raise their rates. Did it ethically, I should add. We can talk more about that as well, of how to raise rates and all that. But then went through business coaching and really reshaped how I made sense, my relationship with my business, my relationship with the field. And so now I'm still in recovery from burnout.
I think that's going to be a lifelong thing, like managing the symptoms rather than healing it completely. And I've become incredibly passionate about helping other healers and caregivers who have internalized the sense of, "I'm just not working hard enough" to see that's not it. If that's the question or if that's the pressure you're putting on yourself, I'm not a betting person, but if I were, I would bet money that's not actually what's happening.
It's more of a system issue. So that's how I got through to really specializing on healers and caregivers experiencing burnout. And then part of that was I wanted to get out of the one-to-one therapy hour, of only making money in the one hour that I was doing a therapy session and not for any of the other time that was going into the work.
So I started my new business of Guided Journey Studio, which I've created on my own over years, I've been working on this for years, of creating products that I wish I would've had to help me along my own journey of recovering from burnout. So Now I'm getting to explore a new way of helping people that's outside of the specific mental health system, where we're so often like cartilage between two bones that we're just expected to give and take all of the tension between the system and our clients.
And so I'm intentionally stepping out of that by going into a different way of helping people.
Ashley C.: Wow. You just said so much that resonates with me. Academic pressure. Morgen doesn't know this, but I was a fourth generation legacy at University of Southern California, and I chose not to go there for undergrad.
And it-- a rejection from my family, the legacy that I wasn't upholding. And obviously, that comes from a lot of power and privilege that-- which my family doesn't really stand for the most part. And then my advisor in college told me I was a disappointment because I was only getting my master's and not going for a PhD.
You and I are chuckling right now because looking back, it's so ridiculous, but it took to heal from that. And as you said, those big moments, along with these other moments, like dinner table conversations that we don't necessarily think impact us long term, but do, like all of that contributes to how we help others and how we give up ourselves to help others.
And it's not until we are, I'll speak for myself, very deep in burnout and was like, "Oh, shit, how do I back out of this?" And it's hard to lower your caseload. It's hard to say, "I can't do this anymore." It's hard to communicate that professionally. And a lot of it for me was like all or nothing thinking.
Either I am doing this work or I'm not. And taking a step back, I had to challenge myself to not do the nothing, right? I-- how do I do the moderation? I don't know. And then at the end there, you spoke about- We have inherent worth. Our worth is not hinged on whether or not we are helping other people, but we internalize that and believe that from a lot of different sources, as you said.
And I think that is also tied to the idea of conditional love. I think for a lot of folks, that's what it taps at, is if my worth hinges on something, then other people's love for me also hinges on something.
Doing Less Without Shame
Ashley C.: And I think I'm... I wanna hear more about how you help people recover from burnout, but also what themes are you seeing in causes of burnout, and what themes are you seeing in ability to heal?
Lindsey B.: I hear so frequently with these, like, really, like, high achieving helpers and healers who just compartmentalize their own shit to the level they don't realize they're doing it, and it's this idea when I say, "You have per-" It's not my permission to give you. I'm just letting you know you have permission to do less, and immediately people think I'm telling them, "Do nothing.
Do a garbage human day forever." And the idea of doing less than everything you can possibly do in a day, if you're so used to pushing for 100% every single day, and someone comes along and says, "Hey, you can do 75. You can do 25. You're still a valuable human being." It... The all or nothing to I have to do everything or I'm terrible, I'm awful, I'm taking things from the people I love, and being able to say, "Whoa.
Huh." You see the huge gap in between those things, right? So it's a lot of the same, I don't like the language CBT uses for thought traps or whatever, but I tend to be from a narrative perspective, so I try to see it as like burnout encourages to see an all or nothing. Burnout encourages to catastrophize.
Burnout encourages to, encourages us to see the future, and it's awful if you do these things. And more often than not, that's just lies that we're taught by the system and by our training and by past supervisors and things we've just picked up.
Ashley C.: I, when I was in burnout, my therapist reflected back to me, "You're an A-plus employee.
Can you be a C employee?" Yeah. And literally my body had this reaction of I can't be average, but I wanna be average. What you said resonates with me, and I would say resonates with a lot of my supervisees, a lot of the clients that I have who are therapists as well, and it's hard work. It's the work of a lifetime to understand- Mm-hmm
our worth, and then to be able to exude that and uphold that to the out-
Lindsey B.: Yeah. I appreciate also that you mentioned attachment and how the way that we function in our families of origin will affect our attachment. But I'm gonna say 99% of the time it starts with family of origin, and the story that, that we as helpers and healers create about our own worth as children, and then I like to say we're just children with a few decades added to our bodies, but we're just still children inside, and really children are the ones who call the shots a lot of the times unless we're being super intentional in doing that work.
That's who shows up. I'm working with really well-established, highly regarded healers and caregivers who are doing such amazing work and just doubt that they're doing anything. That's such a common thread.
Burnout as Systemic Oppression
Morgen V.: I'm curious if we wanna even just zoom out a little bit more. You mentioned in grad school witnessing some of that performative privilege recognition, right?
And so I wanna name this messaging that people are showing up with in the room with you, right? I'm not enough, I can't fix enough, I can't do enough, I can't go from 100 to 75%. Tell us about how, how patriarchy informs- Yeah ... the care that you're providing there, 'cause shit, this is some powerful stuff that just goes way beyond what we're holding in our body and in our mind, right?
Lindsey B.: Absolutely. It's... I love that question. Fantastic question. What just came up for me is that we all feel it so vividly in our own systems, in our own bodies, but feel so alone in it, but we aren't. It's actually way more common than people talk about because we've been shamed out of talking about it. And so I have two different directions my mind went, Morgen, when you asked that question.
The first is the idea of- The tenets of white supremacy, when we talk about all or nothing thinking, the written word being the most important thing, everything is on me, it has to be on me, protecting comfort of certain people over the safety of others. I was experiencing a lot of those feelings within my own individual private practice.
I felt like I'm the only one who can do this. It's this client isn't getting better, it's because I'm failing. I have to do better. But it, that doesn't allow space for relational understanding of people and the, the sacredness, the loveliness that comes into our therapy sessions doesn't really get recognized in any way, except between us and the client.
But the tenets of white supremacy show up in the workplace. So something else I don't think I'll ever forget this as much as I would like to. In grad school, I remember, like a lot of us, being given required readings on, in like ethics class on burnout and how this is going to happen, and it's a part of this profession, and don't practice in isolation So that was like the reading, but then the lived experience, I remember vividly being in dyadic supervision and the, the person I was in supervision with, the other student, was also my roommate, and I saw her coming home crying four out of five days a week from her internship, burned out.
And her internship was a acute care psychiatric hospital for... And she was in the adolescent and children. And then I was working at a residential treatment facility, and so I had, I wanna say 14 clients in a full year, and I saw them every day. I got to see them get better. She had 300-some clients and never got to see them improve.
I got to see some of her clients improve, 'cause they'd come to residential in a small town, so I got to see kids that she worked with improve, but she didn't, and that was a big part of burnout for her. And so we went to supervision, and she mentioned it to our supervisor, and he said, "Burnout is a tactic of oppression that is used to keep quality therapy from the people who need it the most.
Is that the kind of therapist you wanna be?" So shame was absolutely used as a tactic, which would never have been verbally acknowledged or held accountable. That would not have happened. And so I remember walking out of supervision that day believing in my bones, I'm going to feel burnout, but when I do, it's my fault, because I'm letting oppression keep me from being the best therapist that I could be, and I'm harming my clients now because of it.
So we were burned out in grad school. The implication that there are some therapists that are just really bad, and they're sneaky. They're out there, and they're sneaky bad therapists. Do you wanna be one of those, one of them? Just was a devastating experience that I, I wish when you do like EMDR and IFS, you wish you could bring a part of you back into another time.
I so wish that I could bring current Lindsay back to that time and stand in that hallway and be like, "Hold up. Everything he just said is bullshit." We are flawed human beings, all of us, and sometimes that comes out in supervision, and that doesn't mean that you are failing your clients by being a human being yourself.
We have h- natural human limits. The mental health system does not see our natural limits as anything other than an inconvenience. This is not a you problem. Find a community. Give yourself some grace and take a sabbatical, which I do every year now. I take a month off every year, and it's coming up. I'm super excited.
Because my nervous system needs it. I don't know if everybody's nervous system needs a month off. Mine does. So that's what I'm doing.
Morgen V.: So I love that you said that. I just got tearful. I'm gonna try not to start sobbing. I tend to do that on each episode. Like, how much actual meaningful work could we maybe have done if we did have true support, if we did have an anchoring community that could have gotten us through some of those difficulties and helped us to speak up to some of the toxicity?
Lindsey B.: When we go into a field that's about passion and ca- caring for others, medical staff, teachers, veterinarians, there's a lot of pressure. Clergy. In any sort of field where the goal is to take care of others, and you typically go into that field because you care about people. You don't do this job. You do this for people.
From a systems perspective, like legitimate question, how are we supposed to, to do our job if our systems aren't being cared for because we're struggling to pay rent or mortgage or get healthcare? Retirement, excuse me, what is that? I don't understand how, like literally from a systems perspective, make that make sense.
It doesn't make sense. And having this righteous anger grow from inside of me that People who don't care about taking care of other people don't have this pressure put on them and can just go live their lives.
Morgen V.: I'm really appreciating, Lindsey, how you're naming kind of the, the ways that this has impacted you professionally and personally, and then how you hold a space for your clients.
And I think we kind of touched- Mm-hmm ... on, like, how you help people recover, and I'm... It's like your personal, professional obviously inform how you hold that space for folks. Are you able to just walk us through a little bit more about what that looks like, just in terms of, yes, we're naming these broken systems and that kind of thing?
You also have your studio where you have the tools that you've developed, I think is what you mentioned. Yes. And then, yeah, tell us a little bit more about that, too.
Therapy Tools and Supervision Boundaries
Lindsey B.: So I don't bridge the two for the obvious reasons, if we have to keep our clinical practices and licensed hats away from anything that we're offering, like a coaching service as well.
So for that reason, I don't blend them and share a lot between the two. But for the, in the therapy room, the way I work with this is, again, going back to the family of origin, and I use a blend of narrative. Narrative is, I like to call it the bowl that my ice cream sits in. And then I also have a scoop of narrative and a scoop of IFS, a s- a scoop of structural and systemic, little sprinkles of Bowen and contextual.
So that's how I like to think the way I make sense of therapy. I just need to state to make it explicit, obviously scoops of feminism, queer affirmative, anti-racism. I can't separate narrative from those things, so I sometimes need to make it verbally explicit as well. And so I really like to talk through with people a mixture of parts and stories.
Like, I see it as from an IFS model, we have different parts of us that hold different narratives from the world and from different interactions with different people. And so a lot of it is identifying what actually makes sense for you. Sometimes I'll call it a personal justice orientation, not what the s- what the social justice movement tells us we should be doing, because so many tactics of white supremacy get used in the social justice movement without us really noticing it.
So what are your values that I trust are lovely? You wouldn't be where you are right now if you were selfish. And so what are your values, and how can you apply them to your life in a way that actually makes sense and is systemic, meaning it's sustainable, and allows you to be more authentic in the way that you show up?
And that can be more authentic with the people in your personal life. That could be more authentic with the people in your personal or in your professional life. And it could be just more authentic with you and your parts, and your internal world just feels more authentic. And usually it's values of authenticity, being a person who actually puts good into the world, someone who stands up for other people, someone who values being smart and thoughtful and intentional.
And when we really do the deconstructing work of all of the lies that we have absorbed and shift that into, "I am not okay with these stories influencing me in such a harmful way." I- it's a shift from, "I've accepted this monkey on my back," to, "I am not okay with this because I deserve better, and the people I work with deserve better.
And my value is not hinged on the service, the value that I provide for others, and yet it won't be sacrificed either, like from me taking care of me And so it's really turning inward and honoring yourself the way you might honor a client or a patient. It's really a hard look in the mirror. I can feel that, and I'm curious if that...
Morgen V.: It seems like that would likely inform the way that you provide supervision.
Lindsey B.: I'm really honest with my supervisees. I only have one supervisee, but a couple, 'cause I was burned out when I had six, so two. I am looking for another supervisee if anyone in Colorado's interested. When I was working with a lot of supervisees a couple years ago, I actually had some pretty big family trauma stuff happen in my life, and it was really hard.
It completely turned my life upside down, and I was in supervision of supervision and talked with that supervisor about, "I can't pretend this isn't happening for me, and I don't want to. I don't want to pretend that this is fine because I don't want my supervisees feeling like they have to pretend that everything is fine.
So I'm gonna tell them what I'm facing right now and make sure they know it's not their job to take care of me. I am taking care of me. I am doing the things that I need to do." So part of it is actually doing it. You actually have to do the things to take care of yourself, and then model that and be honest with your supervisees about that.
And then gave them the opportunity to ask questions. So I tell them, "I will take a sabbatical. I take a month off in September. If that's problematic, then I'm not your supervisor, and I do this to show you that you don't have to be on 365." I know, shocking. Shocking.
Morgen V.: Ashley and I were just talking about how one of the greatest teachers, that it's okay to be honest with clients, it's okay to be honest with supervisees, and it's actually...
That is tied into our own, again, our own liberation, right? It's if we continue to not show up authentically or if we continue to essentially lie, then we are not providing a care or a service that is worth what it could be, right? Yeah. If we show up in the way that you just said, it's like, holy shit. Then you let people just have some insight, and then it, and then they got to care just a little bit for you.
Anyway, love it.
Lindsey B.: Humanity. It's shocking, right?
Ashley C.: And you actually named my biggest weakness or area of growth as a ... And that's don't do what I do. Yeah. And I'm getting more and more aligned with modeling and practicing what I want supervisees to really exhibit or exude when it comes to boundaries around time, taking time off, not working on vacation.
That's a very hard one for me. Mm. Saying no, that historically was very difficult for, whether it was projects or clients or supervisees. And it's hard to tell a supervisee, "Yes, this is who I am, and this is why I don't want you to be like me." Yeah. And that conversation is usually, I think, helpful. But again, the honesty around this is not it.
7/365 is not it.
Lindsey B.: It's not it. Being the first to arrive at your office, your whole office building, and the last to leave from the whole office, not just your therapy office, the entire office building. Don't do what I used to do, then don't do what I do. It feels really great to be able to say, "Oh, yeah, I used to do that shit.
Not anymore." Here and there, I'll still work till 9:00 PM sometimes, here and there, but it's not a this is my life work. And one of the big shifts that was really, like I felt like I had committed a crime when I thought it the first time, was, I learned this from my business coach, Megan Meganson, years ago.
Your business is for you. Your clients will benefit. Like the idea that my business wasn't for the general public felt like a crime. I think I actually made myself smaller in, like, a fear response, like they're gonna come get me. The, the bad therapist police are gonna come get me, and it's true, and I say that to supervisees and just watch them squirm.
Yeah, let's sit with that. What does that mean to you? What's coming up? What stories from grad school? What stories from your childhood? Especially if your parents were small business owners, like that can get into it, too. Let's just sit in it, and I'm gonna try not to smile as you're doing it.
Morgen V.: Lindsay, I'm just so appreciative of how much you show up in integrity and share of yourself with clients, with supervisees, and then just in general with our therapist community.
I'm curious if there's more that wants to be shared just
Closing Lessons and Community Care
Morgen V.: as we're starting to wrap.
Lindsey B.: Really the idea of your personal life does not stop after grad school. It doesn't stop when you get licensed. It doesn't stop when you get your own private practice.
It doesn't even stop between client sessions.
It doesn't stop...
No. I actually, I got a, another thing that Morgen knows about. I finished up one of our group meetings where we were, like, in parts and I really was like, it was just such a lovely meeting that we had where I really felt in touch with self-led energy and was able to provide compassion to some parts that I hadn't provided compassion to before.
We hung up and I got a phone call, and it was a family emergency, so I had to cancel my clients for the week. I had to book a flight back home that night, and had my own new wave of personal trauma happen, and then just had to go right back into work the next week. That's not normal. That's not normal, and normal as in healthy when we...
Different definitions of normal. It's not healthy normal. So no, we need space to be human beings in this profession, and I sometimes get mad at the stereotype of redheads of being, like, really angry all the time, and then I look at myself and I'm like, "Oh, I'm-" That's not wrong.
Ashley C.: Also a redhead- Mm-hmm ... and sometimes I have the same thought.
"Oh, I'm so passionate about- Mm-hmm ...
everything."
Lindsey B.: So if there are people listening who feel alone in their experience of burnout, and that they just need to work harder, I promise you, you are not, and it's not a you problem. We need it in relationship, and in community, and in safety with each other, and permission to do less.
I think the last thing I'll say here is when I started grad school, we were told that you need to be doing everything. You need to be reading every page that we assign you. You need to be doing all of the exercises, writing all of the... really putting your whole self into your reflection papers and everything that you're writing.
And then at the end, when we had our graduation party, they said, "We know you couldn't have possibly read everything we assigned you." Yeah. I was, oh, I was so mad. So mad. But the thing is, in orientation, when they said, "You need to read, you need to read everything," they said, "If you don't read, you're not only not getting out of this program what you could, but you are failing your future clients by not reading."
And then gave us... Thank you for that, Morgen. Big middle finger for that. The counseling students, who were right next door to us in a completely different program, completely different faculty, curriculum, everything, they were taught, "You cannot do 100%." So their orientation was very different than ours. You can't do 100%, so every day try to do 90% of what you can do that day.
It's not gonna be the same every day, so try to do 90% of what you can do each day, and then use each other to do reading groups. So you can't read all of it, so break it up. Only do your specific part, and then you can share it and learn and teach each other. Give yourself some compassion. I feel like that's just a perfect lesson right there, is it's not about doing 100%.
Doing less than 100% is not doing zero, and be in community with people.
Morgen V.: Thank you so much. That's such a great way to end our time for today. I thank you for that. Mm-hmm. Thank you so much for listening to our episode spotlighting Lindsay. Please share this episode with someone who might enjoy it, and be sure to like, follow, or subscribe to the podcast.
Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.
