My Gap Year From Working as a Psychologist

Marianna Jaross

“I’m giving up my registration,” was not a sentence I had expected to say last year. This career was and is a huge part of my life and identity.

Not-for-profit work. Private practice. Project work. Trying to carve out a role within psychology that expanded beyond one-to-one work and into the conversations I thought that we needed to be having within healthcare.

I had thought that seeing 5-6 clients a day over a few days a week would be my life. And it just wasn’t. There was a lot of shame around this, and whether I would be a ‘real’ psychologist again.

There was also a part of me that was worried whether my ideal of helping people was going to stand within the system as it was. I had lived through different training programs and the push for diagnosis (including the clout of clinical endorsement in psychology), a deepening of our understanding of trauma, and systems that were stretched to support the people we were meant to be serving; as well as the clinicians and therapists supporting them.

I saw the impact of program funding, pathologisation, and violence against women. I worked in a program funded following The Royal Commission into Family Violence; which ended after a few years, with no equivalent service to refer to once it ended, even though the need was there. I watched disjointed systems and disciplines talk about similar arenas, yet not collaborate. I watched us talking about trauma-informed care and mind-body connection, and training programs do little about introducing this to the next stream of therapists. I watched good clinicians leave, burn out, and question their contribution in systems that did not adequately support them. I watched people feel trapped in careers that they had spent their whole life trying to build.

Personally, I was also frustrated and lost as to how I was going to contribute.“You don’t need to change the world” was something I was told more than once.

Maybe you are reading this and thinking this is all skewed quite negatively: “You’re being quite glass-half empty” would perhaps be a reasonable assessment. I think some of what we hold in healthcare is something we don’t talk about enough, and that goes beyond ‘seek supervision’ and ‘self-care’ (and is potentially a whole other article).

Having had worked as a therapist for a lot of my adult life, my sense was that we needed more of was what we deemed as ‘alternative’ approaches to therapy. Art. Music. Food. Community. Connection. These were important elements of healing, and the fact that these were seen as ‘alternatives’ to mainstream medicine felt so strange to me: “Social prescribing!” “Go for a walk!” “Connect with others!” Of course, in and of themselves these could not be the solution to all challenges. But when responses to pain, abuse and challenging life circumstances were packaged as an individual problem, it made me question the foundation from which we were providing support; and spaces that were conducive healing, growth, and thriving weren’t being promoted or supported in a deeper way.

So, I had not clear answers and went on my gap nine months from being a psychologist.

I have sat in many conversations with other therapists, counsellors, social workers, and psychologists where we discuss our alternative life: “Maybe I’ll open a shop” (usually we don’t know what the shop would sell, perhaps tea?). “Maybe I’ll become a florist.” “Maybe I’ll become a barista.” For me personally, I did not open a shop or become a florist. I did, however, apply for funding for my books and writing. I applied for grants. I questioned my identity and how I was going to fit into this field long-term.

This is what I reflected on:

1.)   There is a range of work a psychologist can do. We have an image of a ‘typical’ psychologist. But we don’t have to give ourselves grace for what our bandwidth is for client work, whether we actually want to be supporting clients one-to-one, and understanding that there are many ways to be a psychologist. And there doesn’t have to be shame around this. We are all individuals; and assuming the same trajectory will suit all of us is not supportive.

2.)   Portfolio careers. This goes hand-in-hand with the above. More and more doctors and clinicians are looking to expand out of direct client care. Perhaps they want better work-life balance. Perhaps they want to be decision-makers and shape the system. Perhaps they don’t want to do this work in the same way anymore. Maybe they want to teach, share knowledge, write, create, and contribute in new and interesting ways. We need to talk about this and facilitate ways to grow into new arenas. Impact doesn’t have to end with the clinic room.

3.)   Training programs need to catch up to contemporary issues within psychology and healthcare. How do we navigate a system that is predicated on pathologising when we are becoming increasingly trauma-informed? What do we need, keep, and support; and what do we question? How do we work together with other disciplines to support client care? How do we navigate these tensions without holding it all ourselves, and still do meaningful work?

4.)   Bringing humanity back to healthcare. There can be quite a rigid expectation of what healthcare and healthcare workers are supposed to look and be like: Together. All the answers. And to some degree, we are trained professionals who have a job to do. But when we do this to the point of eradicating ourselves so that our whole identity is absorbed in our title, we lose something within ourselves. So, my sense is that we need to carve out areas and arenas of our life that are for us: Movement. Creativity. Art. Friends. Family. A fun hobby. Are these the be-all solution? No, but they are a start. They are individual supports to cope, but they do not address the bigger picture systems that I believe need to shift in the long-term.

These are my thoughts for now. More to come.

© Marianna Jaross 2026