Cat’s social prescribing story : Safeguarding your emotional wellbeing

Cat is a Health and Wellbeing Coach working in rural Northeast England. She shares her experience of the impact on her emotional wellbeing of supporting clients with dementia and their families, and some strategies and tips that can help.

Cat’s routine job involves travelling quite extensively in rural areas, often to clients who live quite isolated. Cat feels that because of limited support and resources, these clients often rely extensively on her emotionally and practically:

“We develop relationships that border very closely somewhere between professional and a friend”.

While this bond nurtures good rapport and working relationships, the downside is that Cat often feels that her clients become over reliant on her support:

“People are emotionally hanging on to us because we are seen as that one lifeline out there, often to help them through this thing that they don’t understand”.

Cat’s clients sometimes open up about feeling very lonely and unsupported and confess that they have nobody to care for them except Cat. This easily generates strong emotional responses in Cat:

“One of my patients told me they are absolutely grateful for our service because they felt like nobody was interested in them until now.
And that actually made me so sad!”

Because of her hectic schedule, Cat observes that sometimes she has not got the time and space to process these complex situations and strong feelings:

“You just go through the hustle and bustle and don’t have time yourself to actually reflect on, you know what’s actually going on. Especially when you are time-constrained, cause that’s another issue and you’ve got this schedule, you’ve got all these appointments booked in. You might not have the time to actually create opportunities for reflection”.

Therefore, Cat thinks that it is crucial for a social prescriber to make time for personal reflection and emotion processing. She thinks it is important for social prescribers to find out what support infrastructure they can resort to in times of need:

“I think it’s helpful to know the support that’s out there for when you get difficult cases that can be quite upsetting. So, becoming aware of what the emotional support that you can get is key”.

Cat has found that peer support and supervision are particularly helpful to get that emotional and practical support from someone from the same profession:

“Each week we have a peer support group, and we also have drop-in sessions and that’s for us to present cases to reflect on practice and to find support on those type of cases that might be difficult. So, I think it is quite a good time for reflection. We also do have our supervision once a month”.

Cat also believes that expanding her professional network beyond her own team is important:

“I’m always really grateful when there’s regional conferences, where we can all actually get all in the same room and be able to network and make those connections because like I say, it’s so down to that personal relationship”.

Through support from peers, Cat learns every day how to best create a healthy emotional distance from her clients, whilst keeping herself committed and able to support them effectively.