Verified by 
Key points
- "Counseling yourself out of a job" is a helpful mindset for bringing social justice into your work.
- Our work with individuals, couples, families, and groups has a larger impact beyond our offices.
- Each person who is mentally healthy may be better able to manage conflict and their emotions out in the world.
Before I was a school counselor, even before I was a teacher, I was an organizer. I worked on both electoral and issue campaigns, facilitated trainings and conferences, planned marches and protests. One phrase often came up in strategy conversations: “Organize yourself out of a job.” For electoral projects, this was a clear goal—if your candidate wins, your job is done and you move on to the next one. For issue-based work, although less clear, the endgame is still imaginable—if your organization’s mission is to end child poverty, instead of seeing the completion of that mission as an opportunity to pivot or diversify, it would mean your organization is no longer needed.
In the mental health field, I call this "counseling yourself out of a job.” At first, considering this possibility feels unusual and strange. But the work we do with individuals, couples, families, and other professionals has a ripple effect into the world. With each person who gains communication, conflict-resolution, and self-management skills, that individual is better able to manage conflict and their emotions out in the world—they, in turn, influence their social circles, their families and children. We know this to be true, but it can be easy to disconnect from this larger social impact when we are hyper-focused on building our careers by tackling these problems at the individual level.
I can envision a world—although not in my lifetime, and probably not even in my son’s—where everyone is mentally healthy. This doesn’t mean that we all think the same, or that we have eliminated all mental illness or pain, but that we all have the skills necessary to support each other through challenging times. Perhaps we still need specialists to address acute needs, but the demand for therapy would be minimal. Instead, we would supply our own communities with the care, empathy, and support that used to require a trained professional to provide.
Can you picture it? A family breaking the cycle of addiction, impacting generations to come. A young trans woman finding affirmation and coming into her own, able to pass on that confidence and wisdom. Teachers and students joining together after an incident of police brutality in their community, having difficult conversations, processing their emotions, and changing hearts and minds along the way.
While I certainly don’t believe that therapy is the world’s only hope for addressing the inequities and oppressions we are facing, having the attitude of hoping to be out of a job someday helps me to focus on building a movement, not simply on building my career. This forward thrust to my work helps me to keep social justice and anti-racism at the forefront of my mind, and gives me the motivation to push forward even on the most challenging days, because I am no longer isolated in my office seeing case after case of self-harm or child abuse—rather, I am connected to a goal for the greater good, and the healing of our world at large.
