Still Practicing

Still practicing has several meanings. It suggests that the balance of heartaches and joys must not deter us from pursuing a clinical practice. At the same time, it implies that for the clinician, "practice" never "makes perfect." We continue to refine our clinical instruments over our entire working lives.

Key Features

• Emotional Balance: Explores the concept of emotional balance in clinical practice.
• Resilience: Investigates how clinicians maintain resilience amidst personal challenges.
• Career Phases: Addresses the journey from training to late career, focusing on sustaining interest in work.
• Impact Awareness: Encourages mindful career choices regarding long-term emotional effects.
• Balance Inquiry: Poses critical questions about balancing pain and joy in the clinical field.

Additional Information

Framed by her previous work on the concept of emotional balance, Sandra Buechler investigates how vicissitudes in a clinical career can have a profound and lasting impact on the clinician's emotional balance, and considers how the clinician's resilience is maintained in the face of the personal fallout of a lifetime of clinical practice. At each juncture, from training to early phases of clinical experience, through mid and late career, she asks, what can help us maintain a vital interest in our work? How do we not burn out?

Aimed at the nexus of the personal and theoretical, Still Practicing concentrates on the sadness, feelings of shame, and satisfactions inherent in practice, and encourages newcomers and veterans alike to make career choices mindful of their potential long-term impact on their feelings about being therapists. It poses a question vital to the life of the clinician: How can we strike a balance between the work's inevitable pain and its potential joy?