Being a therapist in Ann Arbor is to meet and support highly-intelligent, accomplished, capable professionals and academics who are struggling to make sense of and overcome the disenfranchisement and burnout they feel despite their success.
What do you do when you’ve accomplished goal after goal in your life and found yourself still feeling unfulfilled? Ann Arbor is celebrated year after year as a highly educated city in which to live, work, and raise a family. With the presence of a major public university, three hospitals, the advanced automotive industry, and a plethora of tech start-ups there are many employment opportunities that promise well-compensated, mission-driven, and meaningful work. In a community like this, you have all the indicators that people who live here should feel successful and well.
But with so many people in Ann Arbor experiencing success and wellness, individuals who aren’t feeling fulfilled by their success can feel all the more isolated.
What do you do when you’ve accomplished goal after goal in your life and found yourself still feeling unfulfilled?
Therapy for Professionals in Ann Arbor
As a therapist in Ann Arbor, my clients are high-achieving, driven, and intelligent. They use their brilliant minds and extensive training to solve complex problems, yet they still report feeling empty or out of sync. It is perplexing to commit a significant amount of effort in your work, accomplish your goals, and then not feel an equivalent amount of satisfaction.
Professionals are striving to meet the demands of their role, satisfy the ever expanding expectations of their leadership team, and mitigate the growing sense of resentment they might feel for their employer. They may be becoming all too aware of the discrepancy between the publicly stated values of their organization and their personal experience of working within that same organization. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to believe in the stated mission and values of an institution when your supervisor is not modeling those same values in their leadership. This can create a felt sense of disenfranchisement for aspiring workers.
Professionals want meaning and purpose and to experience an embodiment of their values. The discrepancy between what they intellectually know and want to accomplish versus how they actually emotionally feel about their role in the world and their relationships is significant. It is the existential pang of achieving one’s long-term dreams to find out that the future they envisioned has much of the same difficulty and frustration that they had hoped to escape by climbing the career ladder.
Why Does Professional Success Feel Hollow?
Why is the discrepancy between the promise of professional success and what actually comes to pass so vast? Within the competitive culture of professional and academic success is the promise that once you achieve your goals, you will be rewarded with equivalent financial success or public acclaim. What is often omitted from the promise is the amount of personal sacrifice professionals are asked to make in pursuit of this goal. Professionals often feel pulled to sacrifice their personal time, health, and quality engagement with their loved ones.
When you’ve made significant personal sacrifices to achieve a goal mandated by your employer, it makes sense that your sense of accomplishment is diminished. Professionals are often asked to bypass their human needs and quality of life in support of institutional goals, even when those institutional goals claim to be in service of humanity. Temporary compromises sold for the sake “just getting across the finish line” become unspoken organizational expectations that perpetually push the finish line over the horizon.
Jesse Kauffman
Therapist for Professionals in Ann Arbor, Mighigan
I help professionals work through their disappointment and burnout to find meaning and alignment in their life.
Words from leadership begin to feel more and more brittle when they continue to mismatch organizational action. It’s not uncommon for leaders to mandate cultural competency training and verbally support diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives only to then have that same leader tolerate or perpetuate micro-aggressions toward their already marginalized subordinates.
It is natural to feel disenfranchised when you see others accumulate notoriety and wealth, and then use their advanced degrees and reputation to manipulate systems to accommodate their personal agenda. Leaders and colleagues using their title, connections, or status to intimidate others; missing the opportunity to better understand themselves through introspection, humility, and personal accountability.
When to Consider Therapy
It is heavy to hear story after story from clients I admire and respect who wonder if the dreams they have achieved are more hollow than they were promised. But the premise of our relationship is that they are seeking therapy to better their situation, to work through the disappointment of the dream achieved, and find something more – more nourishing, fulfilling, compassionate, and wholesome. There is hope in their commitment to work toward a better future despite what they’ve been experiencing.
If you can resonate with what my clients are navigating, know that you are not alone, that there are others who are grappling with this collective disenfranchisement to forge a new way forward. People are carving out the time and space they need to listen to their bodies and their hearts, gathering the necessary data to move forward with meaning. With practice people are speaking an embodied truth to imbalances in power in their own small spheres of influence and continuing to show up for their loved ones in meaningful ways.
Therapy can help you reconnect with your own values so that you can find your own embodied truth and live more empowered. If you’ve never tried therapy before, websites like Therapy Den, Zencare, or Psychology Today have listings of hundreds of therapists to start your search. If you are looking for a therapist in Ann Arbor and would like to work with me, you can contact me here.