Teachers who want a divorce: TTE can help!
In which I lay out the approach I take to teacher misery and burnout
Back when I was an active psychotherapist, I developed a kind of sub-specialty: divorce. Turns out I was really good at helping my clients divorce their partners.
What did I do?
I supported my clients in examining the roles they played in their marriages that perpetuated their misery.
We looked for relational patterns from their families of origin that my clients were re-enacting with their current partners.
I helped my clients make sense of the data they were gathering about themselves, their partners, and the fit they co-created between them.
We came up with experiments my clients were willing to try with their partners, experiments like describing their experience, sharing the impact those experiences had on them, asking for what they wanted or needed, asking their partners what it was like to be them, trying new fits.
When partners were open to these efforts, marriages got stronger. When partners resisted these efforts because they apparently preferred the status quo even if it made their loved one miserable, divorce ensued. Sad for the marriage. Happy for my clients.
Weirdly, when I work with teachers who are unhappy with their partners — namely, schools — divorce rarely occurs. Rather, even teachers who are crispy from burnout or determined to quit today find a way not just to stick with teaching but to thrive. Why might that be?
I suspect it’s because, for many teachers, their jobs involve throwing themselves on the rocks of all the people they’re supposed to serve. Going the extra mile for their students, whom they love and entered the profession to help, perhaps even to save. Saying yes to every assignment offered to them by admin. Taking parents’ anxiety about their kids personally and bending over backwards to accommodate to them. Isolating themselves from their colleagues because who has the freakin’ time to talk?
Then, when teachers get burned out, they blame the rocks.
Yes, sure. People can really suck. And systems can suck, maybe even more. These rocks can leave teachers cut and bloody.
But who threw themselves on the rocks in the first place?
The work I do with teachers is the same work I did with my psychotherapy clients. We examine the roles they play, the (dysfunctional) relational patterns they enact not just with students, colleagues, admin, and parents but with the system itself. Because teachers, like my clients, are human and bring those patterns with them wherever they go.
We gather data that suggests what’s going wrong and what changes need to be made. And we come up with experiments the teachers can try that will either shift the relationships that are making them miserable or yield more interesting data about those relationships. Which we can fold into another, more refined experiment.
Gaining this perspective, which the teachers I work with who are immersed in the shit cannot provide for themselves, relieves them. They understand their experiences in totally new ways. They feel seen, heard, and cared for. They feel empowered to transform their daily experiences because their successful experiments show them they are empowered. Teachers who are in Teacher Support Groups, the best form of educator support I know, feel embraced and accepted by colleagues they would never have talked to before. And they seek these colleagues out once they’ve begun working with them.
You ready to quit? I totally understand. I’m super sorry that so many amazing teachers are leaving the profession. But whatever you do, don’t join a TSG. Because you might just figure out a sustainable and even joyful way to stay.