Therapists, what was your "I need a minute" moment?

therapists of Reddit what was your I need a minute moment I usually need a breather after working with my victims of intimate assault the pain and tears in my room are always so heavy and raw edit to add as an intern I saw a client for a few weeks was in extreme danger to themselves stopped coming out of the blue literally my first client ever wife came to be seen as a patient a few weeks later and the receptionist hurried back and warned me her husband my client had died they ended up ending themselves and

now she wanted to be scene her description of the event and how her daughters found out was absolutely horrific it was a lot to take in as a new therapist story two more of a funny story but I arrived at a client's house for a session I was doing in home therapy for adolescence at the time with a 13-year-old kid he was a little late getting home from school so he wasn't there yet his mother has me sit down to wait for him and says that while he's not home she wanted to ask me something

I'm assuming it's about her son since that's why I'm there she proceeds to ask me why I think her boyfriend won't perform oral on her and if I have any suggestions to Chang that really didn't see that one coming this does not sound within op's wheelhouse at the very least I guess she didn't understand that therapists have Specialties definitely an outof thee blue thing my suggestion would just be I don't know ask your boyfriend about it talk to them about it communication is good story three not a therapist but volunteered on a hotline for people

who were a danger to themselves for a number of years took a call from a young woman who was hysterical on the phone was difficult to make out what she was saying amongst her sobs but I could make out she was outside I asked her where she was and she replied that she was on the top floor of a multi-story car park and was contemplating jumping off I talked with her and tried to calm her down meanwhile I was shaking like a leaf but to no avail she jumped and the line went dead it was

in the local paper not long after and it stayed with me for years story four I worked in child/ adolescent crisis before my current job I could tell a lot of stories but the one that really sticks with me is this if you're not familiar with crisis units in the hospital they have CCTV so security guards can watch mult patients simultaneously to monitor behavior for safety I'm working a crisis case of a 12-year-old male after a few years at the same Hospital the child had been aggressive toward staff broke a crisis worker's nose so he'd

been put in fourpoint restraints don't even get me started on that human rights violation one of the guards comes to me and says I think you need to see this he pulls up a screen recording and there's a video of a mom putting her hand down the child's pants gesticulating her hand inside his pants then pulling her hand back out after a few uh strokes and then a few minutes later the same thing I call CPS they come down and watch the videos I call his long-term mental health therapist and say I'm sorry to tell

you this but we saw mom touching Child on video the therapist screams that they knew it they said they knew she was doing something we call Dad down who hasn't been in the kid's life much he says he got chased Away by Mom for a lot of reasons but one of them was that he got creeped out by things mom would say and do for instance mom allegedly told him she was attracted to girlish looking boys with long hair which just about summed up the the child mom is asked about the incident and says she

wasn't touching the child inappropriately says that the child has a tick and needs his balls moved sometimes to stop the tick he couldn't get the tick himself because of being in restraints so she just did it for him twice CPS found that an acceptable excuse and ruled the case unfounded I don't know what was worse watching the videos or hearing that CPS watched the same videos as me and said yeah that's okay I think I need a minute after this one cuz this isn't just tragic or anything this is downright infuriating this kid is probably

all messed up because of stuff like this and CPS won't intervene because the mother's explanation was apparently sufficient yeah this one sucks Story five about a year ago my partner started having these weird paranoia and mood swings she thought the neighbors hated her or that our house was being tapped if we were driving she had to roll up all the windows and put the music on full blast so people couldn't hear us talking on the highway at highway speeds she would cycle rapidly between hypermania and a deafening depression almost always fixated on her mom men

being trash or my immediate family if it wasn't that then anything that came to mind she would just latch on to something and rant and rage for hours we had to go to coup's therapy because eventually she confessed some truths to me that were just too terrible for me to accept we also got our own personal therapists and she sought a psychiatrist who diagnosed her with skits effective bipolar 1 my partner has consented and encouraged me to talk about her story by the way but things were pretty bad for months she would just scream and

criticize and judge and so on it was too much for me to handle on my own so we drove cross country to seek out support from her immediate family and friends we moved to Florida from Miami and she had really no support or Community down here they were all still in the midwest where we went to University started our careers met each other Etc well we made it to her mom's house and then she just rage ranted to her about everything nothing was off limits it went on for at least an hour to add to

the emotional density her sister was there with us all her sister checked out after about 30 minutes and disappeared to the next room over I barely even noticed she left but when she came back after about 10 minutes she had a fullon emotional breakdown about how she doesn't know what to do and that things were bad for her a double whammy at this point I was just so worn down and demoralized from it all that I couldn't even respond or try to diffuse or anything I just sat and stared blankly at the fake flowers on

the table she would occasionally fizzle out but that refractory period was short those few moments were almost euphoric I so daily I'm personally just gutted by the confessions I can't even begin to describe the sorrow I feel for her and what she's going through I don't know what will come of us or this but there really isn't much recourse for me right now her entire family is literally incapable of providing any meaningful emotional support I feel stuck and almost crazy my reality feels distorted like I'm in an alternate timeline or Universe sometimes I feel like

I'm hanging on by a thread but I promise I'm Diamond handing that thread forever I know that I'm processing trauma and shock among other things I can still discern the true reality from the Distortion that's been creeping but I'm convinced that without my therapist I would have lost it months ago folks like you therapists as well as the work you do are so crucial to the health and well-being of us all I'm grateful every day for the service that you and your colleagues provide I don't know where I would be without it and I can't

even fathom that possibility for my partner you are a Warrior fighting near imperceptible battles and I witness your courage thank you for sharing your responses and creating spaces to share about these things story six not a therapist but social worker who works with traumatized children we got this underaged girl who was raised by a mother suffering of munch Housen by proxy syndrome which essentially means the mother pretends that her child is sick to get attention and pity this goes as far as poisoning her own child or even mutilating them to have a reason to seek

doctors the mother in question was incredibly abusive even when her daughter got taken away from her for some reason officials never took child custody from her which made it easy to have influence on her daughter's life she specifically used it to tell her daughter that she loved her and she will always be there for her but every time stuff actually hit the fan and she needed to be there she wasn't one day her daughter got pregnant but the child died within a few days so an abortion needed to be done ASAP to prevent pregnancy poisoning

all she needed to do was Grant permission by email but although I called her several times and she assured me she would send it it just never came her daughter was forced to have her dead unborn child in her womb for 3 days for the sole reason that her mother just didn't do anything we finally reached out to CPS and got permission through them but her daughter was deeply traumatized by this and just never recovered from it seeing her like this was my first I need a minute moment story seven not a therapist but I

used to be a school social worker we had two students who were mured by their dad the next day a student told me that she knew they were being abused but didn't tell a single person so she broke down in my office and blamed herself for them getting murdered all because she didn't tell anyone they told her they were getting abused the next day the student tried to end themselves the next week the schools shut down because of Co I attempted to follow up with her remote and checked in but a month into the schools

being closed I lost contact I still think of her every day and hope she's doing all right I would say my therapist moment was when a 10-year-old child described to me in Vivid detail about how his mom's boyfriend locked him in a dog kennel and brutally stabbed his mom to death right in front of him then took her body to the woods and threatened to end him if he told someone I still see this client and I work on helping him work through the grief and emotion processing as well as is building coping skills he's

still super young but I worry that he's going to get some unhealthy coping skills to cope with this trauma op these stories don't read like I need a minute it reads like I need a few months this is a lot of stuff and from kids it's even worse and oh ah I have nothing but respect for therapists and social workers of all kinds the good ones at least I've heard of some pretty bad social workers not many but the ones that I have heard of were pretty bad that aside though the work these people do

do is incredible and also super necessary despite it being kind of invisible sometimes Story 8 first internship on my path to counselor and I was working in a funeral home under the grief counselor there grief and Trauma is my focus we were taught to be strong and supportive to those grieving of course and if we needed to cry go in the back or to the bathroom I escorted an elderly lady to view her husband before the service I helped sit her in the chair in front of the casket and was standing behind her when she

stood up and laid on the casket balling her eyes out declaring how much she loved him missed him and begging him not to leave her and to come back that totally destroyed me I immediately started crying behind her she stood up and I sucked it up to help her walk back into the Hall to start greeting guests I thought I had done a good job collecting myself but my mentor took one look at me and said softly go to the back room which I did I completely lost it for a few minutes cleaned up and

went back to help with the service I definitely needed that minute when you are working with people directly at the peak of their grief or at least fairly close to it yeah that's going to hit you pretty hard op sounds like you have a decent system though to go to the back room and just take a second and then come back or a few seconds and then come back later it's a tough job story nine I'm no longer in mental health but I was a mental health professional in a big city jail for years I

had a few moments where I needed to take an extended bathroom break to compose myself breaks were not allowed outside of lunch I had one person admit to touching his very small children and tell me he thought it was what they wanted had another confessed to a brutal murder every Greystone detail with a straight face another who would routinely dig up his mother's grave to put her in different clothes and one who murdered his abuser that job was nuts and made me realize you never really know anyone or why they do anything I was so

burnt out I left the field altogether it sucks because I feel like it's my calling but I'm too old to go back to school for a masters now story 10 I had a patient who was psychotic and believed their ex spouse had been touching their child this person went into graphic detail of examining the child's rectum for signs of abuse despite my attempts to get them to stop I had to go to the door to my office and tell them they had to leave or I was going to call security for the record I never

asked them about this despite being aware of it from their crisis evaluation I'm an activity therapist and my assessment with patients is all about their lifestyle and activity I was asking them about chores housework Etc and this was apparently something they did multiple times a day as part of a basic routine which is why it came up DCF removed the child from their care the patient event ually cleared from their psychosis which was substance induced by mixing Aderall and alcohol and recanted on their belief their spouse was touching their child but denied the examinations ever

happened story 11 my wife's friends are a couple of therapists he works at the prison a she works an emergency handling cases such as somebody trying to unal life their family during an episode and she helps to negotiate with the person and diffuse the situation I once made the mistake to ask how their day at work was and it was like all the things in this thread but in one week suddenly my job doesn't sound so bad bad anymore story 12 I worked with a veteran and he was talking about his experience he told me

about how one time they got orders to attack a bus because there might be a high value Target on it so he said they absolutely blew the crap out of the bus with bullet holes he said the bus looked like Scrap Metal by the time they were done and everyone in the bus was very obviously mutilated and dead women children and Men turns out there was no high value Target they just murdered these people he said that there was one man that was hanging out of the bus with his pants ripped off off and he

had a huge dong his response after looking over the bus with his Squad was what a waste of a huge dong and that he and his squadmates or whatever the term is all laughed about it and moved along he said that when he hangs out with them now years later they look back on that story as one of the funniest times in their career the thing that got me was that he truly did think it was a funny experience he did not care about the people they murdered I wasn't sure what to say or how

to respond the lack of empathy revealed a lot to me and just the horrors of war and brainwash that goes into making a soldier and turning them into a machine and the squad mentality that they have no one to be accountable to except each other no remorse yeah I can't think of any other term other than brainwashing for this admittedly there are people out there with that lack of empathy but not a lot of them I don't think and I also don't think they somehow all end up in the Army as such these people were

most likely normal empathetic caring people at some point and it had to be ironed out of them and that's pretty I don't know I think it's pretty awful story 13 I'm a therapist in training in my last year of grad school for counseling and seeing clients but my job before school was working on crisis lines including the Veterans Crisis Line one evening I took a call from an older fellow who wanted to verbally process trauma which is usually a nogo because talking about trauma without any way to regulate the nervous system reinforces the neural Pathways

associated with the trauma and makes things worse but this man could not be persuaded to discuss current life stressors he got himself into a flashback of time spent as a prisoner of war in v Vietnam and described to me in graphic detail the horrors he endured like what it was like to eat cockroaches to avoid starving to death and the torture he suffered also went through his moral injuries of murdering soldiers and a child accidentally he then went on to say that some time ago his wife and adult child died in an accident together and

he believed it was his punishment for what he did in the war this went on for an hour I offered as much support as I could and I tried to work with him to do any kind of self soothing but he just kept on switching between processing shame and guilt and processing trauma I couldn't get his name so I couldn't get him connected to the contact for Urgent Mental Health appointments and he wasn't actively looking to harm himself so there was nothing more I could do the Despair and resignation in his voice was Haunting definitely

hung up after that call and went straight to the bathroom and sobbed I needed many minutes easily the worst most brutal call I ever took story 14 therapist here I specialize in working with First Responders and medical professionals nurses Physicians Etc the child death cases are always hard for me I'm an expert at keeping a good Poker Face during those sessions but damn if there aren't days I've gone home and just held my kids and cried with gratitude that it wasn't them First Responders experience so much trauma story 15 not a therapist I worked at

a VIP lounge in your conference center that hosted a few events every year for cops Child Services detectives Etc one conference was specifically for how to handle crimes where children are the victims or targets the cops would come in and have no t act I was just a teen at that time with my own trauma making $8 an hour no tips and these grown men would drink and demand I listen to the worst of their cases like it was entertainment or typical office gossip one told a horrible graphic story of two children who were abducted

and abused the oldest kid went to see a therapist afterwards the therapist didn't show up for her next client's appointment they found her in the parking lot it was probably just the last straw in a stack of many but the way the cop told the story she heard the girl talk about what happened to her and her sister left the office and and ended herself in her car and honestly I get it it's been almost 12 years and I still have nightmares about those girls people who work in fields like this usually not therapists cuz

they're a little more emotionally intelligent but like cops and soldiers I suppose yeah they tend to have no concept of you know the civilian mindset the one that doesn't experience these horrible things regularly and quite frankly doesn't wish to experience them at all whether in front of them or in a story op I'm really sorry you had to hear that those cops in my opinion are a lot worse than tactilus they're just unempathetic inconsiderate it's it's just bad and working there means you were essentially forced to listen to them which is just great because if

you don't you could lose your job for not being I don't know good service this situation just sucks so yeah I'm sorry op luckily everyone who clicked on this video and made it this far probably signed up for this that being said I still want everyone to I don't know take some moments and check in with themselves make sure it's all good it's a really heavy threat after all and as always after threads like these I encourage you to take some time for yourself do what you need to do as I like to say story

18 I'm not a therapist but a teacher used to teach in middle school but now I transferred to high school I want to share this because I think my story is relevant I was fresh out of college barely even an adult myself but I was assigned as a Home Room teacher to this class of mostly 13 to 14-year-old kids I had a student who would always excuse themselves to go to the bathroom and self harm so we fellow teachers set up this monitor scheme where if we're on break we just supervise the hallway and check

if there's anyone in the bathroom who stayed there for a suspiciously long time the school did have a guidance counselor but it's The Home Room teacher's job to be the frontliner so to speak so I would be the one counseling the kid and trying to get them to calm down process their emotions Etc I did not have any ounce of training for it I just had to pull inward for the mental strength and compassion to be able to help the kid every time after an incident I would break down because I felt like everything was

unfair to me because I didn't ask to be a therapist then and to the kid because because they had to be counseled by a newbie teacher who just wanted to teach some Physics I think I wasn't the same ever since I became very jaded of my profession I'm still a teacher and I still love working with kids and teens but I had to learn to harden my heart and realize I can't help everyone because it's not my position to do so I hated that thought and I still hate my powerlessness the kid in my story

eventually contacted me a few years later they told me if I hadn't been there to listen they might have just ended their life there and then it made me feel like I did something right but I wouldn't wish to go through that ever again mental health professionals have very specific training for very good reason this is absurdly above op's pay grade here both in the literal sense and the more metaphorical sense of it's just not what they signed up for that level of emotional burden is tough for anyone to hold especially without being ready for

it and being trained for it not to mention the fact that if you don't have training for it you could say the wrong things or you know it's just could be not good in general so I'm sorry op that you go through that because it's just not what you signed up for story 19 when I was in the 10th grade A friend of mine took her own life I came to school the next day thinking I was okay and I must have been because none of my teachers said anything to me except when I got

to French I was just sitting there and my French teacher asked me to step outside with him when I did he said he could tell something was weighing on me and said if I ever needed to talk I could talk to him or he would help me find someone I ended up telling him about what happened and he didn't say too much Beyond oh no and I'm so sorry he mainly just listened but it helped me so much to be able to say it and to know that there was an adult in my life who

was paying attention and cared it was even more impactful because it wasn't a therapist who was paid to care just my teacher who is only paid to teach French and who was going the extra mile and thus must have really cared so to the last op I'm not surprised your student contacted you to thank you for being there it's 40 years since my story happened and if I could find my French teacher now I would do the same so Mr Wenda if you're reading this thanks a lot for car ing story 20 I once worked

in a crisis intervention service a 38-year-old mother of two called me up saying that she was planning to hang herself this was nothing new for the client this happened around once per month usually when she was refused contact with her two young kids due to her absolute dbag of an X usually I would call 999 and the police would arrive at her home and take her neck out of the Noose she would always kick the stool away when the police were within 20 seconds of rescuing her I kept her on the line and kept her

calm as I contacted the cops they were there within 5 minutes she heard them come up her stairs so jumped from the stool however she forgot to unlock the security lock on her heavy fire door the two cops first on scene were two small females and thus were unable to break the door down I heard her choke and gargle on speaker phone I could hear her breathing it took around 20 minutes for the cops to break through I heard her make her last sound after 5 minutes this still haunts me story 21 I've heard just

about everything and it's normal to be emotionally impacted in some way after a heavy session we are humans and it's important for me to have grounding rituals and whatnot after a heavy day but really the I need to breathe a minute before my next client is usually after a client with unmedicated SL previously untreated BPD or similar presentations that are cptsd I enjoy working with these clients as I find that it's easy to understand where their pain is coming from and they often have a lot of love and compassion but poor boundaries and emotional regulation

amongst other things I could never have more than one or two on my case load though because the emotional abbility can be really exhausting to tend to and the intensity of these emotions can be quite extreme like an emotional tornado where you never know what's next and then sometimes you're on the receiving end of those emotions as their fear of Abandonment can lead to volatility within the therapeutic relationship so it makes sense to just need a minute to gather yourself after those sessions and is nothing I would want a client to internalize still any good

therapist who works with clients such as these can recognize where this libility and volatility comes from and hopefully we'll be able to work through it and maintain stability Security in the therapeutic relationship and calm boundaries are important modeling and can provide the most corrective experiences story 22 I'm not a therapist but this stirred some memories for me weirdly throughout the death of my infant daughter in the hospital I was quite composed considering the usual emotions were there with all of us but it was a few days after I traveled on the ferry to sign her

birth and death certificate they gave me a box of all the documents and a few items like her Hospital wristband and on the fairy back I just sat there on the chair with the Box on my my lap everyone Departed the craft and I just sat there a fairy worker came over to tell me it was okay to leave and I snapped out of it I must have visibly had emotion on my face and red eyes she asked if I needed a minute with a genuine sincerity I just nodded and sat there for a minute

she walked away I took some deep breaths and departed I gently nodded to the lady with a smile and she smiled back I guess I really needed that minute grief can hit at different times in different ways for different people but I believe it is always important to take some time to sit with it no matter who you are or how you feel about it I feel like there will always come that time when the grief just hits you where you realize something where it starts to feel real in a way and in that taking

the minute is really important for yourself and for your healing op I'm sorry for your loss story 23 not a therapist but my first night on air as a talk show host I got a call from a frantic woman she told me she had just found her brother hanging in the garage and did not know what to do I organized police and ambulance to her address and kept her on the phone until they got there it was sad had people ask me later if IID arranged her call to get her ratings we would never pull

something like that it left me a bit shaky for a while after as there have been multiple people in my life who have taken their own lives yeah Opie you're not a therapist but needing a minute after that is incredibly reasonable definitely not a call you expect in an environment like that and also on your first night on air you really went through a trial by fire there didn't you anyway that is all the stories we have for today this thread was pretty heavy and as such if you need to I'm not saying you have

to but if you need to if you think it would help I encourage you to take a minute for yourselves and you can think about whatever or think about nothing just whatever you feel would help you the most in this moment but for now though thank you so much for watching I hope you have a wonderful day or night wherever you are and I will see you in the next one