Stacey Steele Psychology

05/16/2026

Last weekend was a valuable two days of fellowship, reflection, and planning for the board and staff of the Psychologists' Association of Alberta!

Last week, the PAA team connected, collaborated, and celebrated at the latest Board and Staff Retreat.

The focus was a lookahead for the organization: what the next five years will look like for PAA.

It was also an opportunity to give thanks to our exiting board members, Dr. Sandra Dixon and Tamara Austin, and a welcome to our new board members Dr. Ruby Sharma, Dr. Denise Mannell, and Dr. Julie Curley.

Thank you to everyone for their contribution and making this retreat a huge success.

05/15/2026

Non-profit trained me to do everything with nothing and document it in triplicate.

Private practice let me stop doing that.

Somewhere between the funding reports and the Friday I finally stopped scheduling clients, I figured out what a sustainable practice actually looks like and it had a lot more to do with design than discipline and self care.

Whether you're in public systems, agency work, or private practice, the pressures may look different but the impact of burnout is the same.

And the thing that actually helps is peer connection &
If you're ready to stop designing your life around your recovery time the ReLit Practice Program waitlist is open.

ReLit Practice ™ is burnout recovery for therapists and other helpers because you deserve the same quality of care you give your clients. Grounded in research, lived experience, and the reality of the systems you're working in.

Link in bio. 🌿

05/11/2026

Sunday Scaries, Monday morning dread....whatever way you call it anticipatory anxiety correlates with burnout in the helping professions.

Vulnerabilities to this can include being a novice therapist, larger caseloads with high acuity, experiences of moral injury, and when the actual workload does not match what was expected and not enough resources to meet demands.

You know what this is, but knowing hasn't made it stop.

Awareness is not protection against burnout.
But peer connection is.

The Reset Circle™ is a free, online, monthly gathering for therapists and other hleping professionals navigating burnout and the weight of practice in demanding systems. Each 60 minute circle includes a brief masterclass on topics that matter in and out of the session, a guided grounding practice, and an opportunity to reflect and share (always optional!). But mostly, this is a space you can actually exhale in with people who get it.

The next one is May 12th at 7pm EST where the topic is "Bringing our whole self into the therapy room".

Save your seat and register at the link in bio!

Registration also gets you access to the replay and subscription to the ReLit Practice™ newsletter.

Send this to the colleague who needs it!

Hope to see you there💖

05/01/2026

Therapists, ever feel overwhelmed by the volume of therapy influencer & get caught in the comparison trap?

Me too.

Check out my latest blog; "I'm Not Doing Enough: A Therapist's Honest Take on Therapy Influencer Culture"
Where I show behind the curtain of what it's like to be a therapist on social media, examine the research on therapy influencers (it may not be what you think!), and offer a next step for getting out of your head online!

04/20/2026

I opened my socials today and was reminded again of the huge canyon of reality between therapy on socials and therapy in real life.

This post is not about Therapy Jeff in particular, you can find the post and make your own call, it is about how to practice discernment because therapy content is particularly vulnerable to misrepresentation and some can cause real harm.

Your favourite tik tok therapist? You may love their content, and a lot resonates with your experience, but....

that confident authority may still be in grad school, the private practice expert teaching you how to run a group practice could have never owned a business, that edgy intellectual could have lost their license for harming a client, and the wise and warm mentor giving advice on PTSD recovery may have a weekend course in fairy energy healing (which low key sounds lovely, just not for medical advice).

Look for what defines them as an authority, who recognizes them as an expert, and fact check the hot take that didn't feel right. Use discernment and ask questions, you deserve well being online as much as anywhere else.

04/15/2026

We need nuance in the conversation about boundaries in the helping professions because it isn't just personal, we need to examine structure.

I shared a post last week about boundaries vs practice architecture and today I invite you to go deeper.
Even better, share with a colleague and go through them together!

Are your boundaries working harder than they need to?
Are you "shoulding" yourself for not saying no when the system didn't give you good enough choices?
And, where are these patterns being recreated?

If you're interested in exploring your practice design and rhythms more, hit the link in bio to grab the free "Reset Checklist" when you subscribe to the newsletter or register for the Reset Circle.

The checklist is a tool to guage where you need recalibratiing and where you are on track.

04/15/2026

Followers from Medicine Hat, can you do your thing and share this fundraiser for this wonderful family?

Standing With Angie, Liam & Camden Through Brain Tumor Surgery, … Kara Anton needs your support for Standing with Angie Through Brain Tumor Surgery & Recovery

04/12/2026

My family has this amazing skill that no matter how hard I try, I can't seem to get the knack.

It's sleeping in on a Sunday.

So here I am...bed head, hot cup of Kopiko ☕, favourite pen in hand (can you tell I used to be a smoker? 😅), enjoying the warmth at my kitchen table while looking outside at the misty cool morning pretending it's Wuthering Heights and not suburban Canada.

This is my favourite time to get 'er done. It's where I find the most inspiration.

And honestly? It's also what actual self care looks like for me.
Because burnout prevention doesn't mean following an arbitrary Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5 schedule where you clock out and immediately shift into "wellness mode."

I've had SO many conversations with high-performing clinicians who just want to get this "self-care" thing right. They feel anxious when something unexpected takes priority. Guilt when they can't finish all the things. Shame when they scroll past someone else's curated version of balance.

Instead of operating from what they actually need, their Unrelenting Standards and Self-Sacrifice schemas are running the show.

🔥 Here's what self-care actually is:
Honouring your body's rhythms. Your preferences. Giving yourself a push when you need to power through, and allowing some "F it" moments to abandon the plan and take a side quest.

☀️ "Work-life balance" isn't being tethered to someone else's version of work.
It's working late and sleeping in. Work sprints on Sunday mornings. Booking clients on a Saturday and taking a Wednesday off.

YOU are the only one who can define and design your work, your self-care, and your recovery.

👇
Save this if you needed permission to stop performing balance and start practicing it.

04/08/2026

What the Self-Sacrifice schema does is make you believe that your needs are genuinely less important than everyone else's. Not intellectually, you know better intellectually. But somatically. In the way your stomach drops when you think about saying no or your chest tightening at the thought of letting someone down.

So when someone tells a clinician with this schema to "set better boundaries," here's what actually happens internally:

"I should be able to do this. Other people can do this. What's wrong with me that I can't?"

The boundary advice becomes another source of shame. Another should. Another way to fail.

04/08/2026

Schema Therapy, developed by Jeffrey Young, identifies schemas as "broad, pervasive themes regarding oneself and one's relationship with others, developed during childhood and elaborated throughout one's lifetime, and dysfunctional to a significant degree." 

Of them, there are a few that continue to show up in the research as being prevalent in the helpging professions and the Self Sacrifice schema is one.

Those with a self-sacrifce schema  may have disproportionate focus on meeting the needs of others at the expense of their own needs to prevent someone else from feeling pain and discomfort, out of fear that the relationship won’t be maintained without self-sacrificing, a desire not to appear as “needy”, and to avoid guilt from feeling selfish.  

If you carry these schema, learning to identify your needs, have them met, and setting relational boundaries are important. But boundary advice about workplace structures may actually activate this schema and create a double bind.

For clinicians with this schema,  boundary-setting is more about safety than skills and the qualities that make you effective in this work are the same ones that can make you vulnerable.

I share more about this in this week's blog and podcast. Go to the link in bio to learn more.

04/04/2026

It's cold out there, bring your jacket.

Therapist to therapist, I see how hard you are working and even though sometimes it feels like you can't possibly make a difference, you are.

"Look for the helpers"

I write more about this in this week's blog, go to the link in bio and read more.


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