Holding It All Is Not the Job: Why Leaders, Practitioners, and Helpers Need Support
Support and Space for People Doing the Work
If you're engaging in mission-driven or trauma-informed work and feeling the weight of it all, you’re not alone. This post is meant to validate the fact that leaders, therapists, activists, and justice-rooted practitioners need reflective support, without having to explain everything.
The Weight of Caring
When you’re the one others turn to for answers, it can be easy to forget that you, too, deserve care. Whether you're a leader, therapist, advocate, or DEI practitioner, your work is rooted in a desire to make things better. Being on a mission to make things better for your clients, your team, and your community comes with weight, especially if you're also carrying lived experience.
The hard truth I’ve come to learn is that the people doing the most meaningful work are often the most under-supported.
We hold vicarious and primary trauma, navigate systemic barriers, and try to be both deeply human and relentlessly professional. If you identify as Black, Indigenous, or Person of Color, you likely have the added pressure to code-switch. Over time, this all can take a toll.
Needing Support Isn’t a Weakness. It’s a Way Forward.
Coaching, consultation, and clinical supervision aren’t just about skills or strategy. They’re about sustainability, reflection, and repair.
These spaces allow you to ask:
How do I lead and still honor my humanity?
What does it mean to “show up” and honor my values without burning out?
How do I navigate systems that weren’t built for me, while still holding integrity and care?
Especially for Black, Indigenous, People of Color and other Historically Marginalized Practitioners
If you are navigating racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, or other systemic oppression while doing front-line or leadership work, you are already doing two jobs: the work itself, and the work of surviving the system.
You deserve a reflective space that:
Understands intersectionality and systemic harm
Centers cultural wisdom, not cultural bypassing
Values your lived experience as expertise
Quickly, Trauma-Informed Practice and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and belonging work became performative and surface-level. So much so that a simple shift in the narrative around this work has led many organizations to entirely abandon it. For those who remain steadfast and committed to the work, the space must be built to go deeper —offering real, grounded support for those who live and lead at the intersections. It must seek to sustain this depth by operationalizing through policies, practices, and budgets.
What Kind of Support Can Exist Outside of the Workplace?
True support doesn’t just come from policies or HR departments. It comes from spaces designed to hold your complexity with care, curiosity, and context.
Reflective support outside of your workplace might look like:
Clinical supervision (for therapists, pre- and post-licensure)
Leadership and team consultation
Justice-centered consulting for those leading DEI, advocacy, or mission-driven work
Somatic and restorative practice for those wanting to reconnect with their bodies while staying rooted in equity
These offerings allow us to explore the questions that often go unspoken:
How do I keep showing up without losing myself?
What does it mean to be well and still in service?
How do I lead without replicating the very systems I want to change?
Final Reflection
You don’t have to be in crisis to seek support. You don’t have to earn rest. You don’t have to explain your existence to be understood. You don’t have to shrink to belong. Consulting and reflective support should be cultural and healing work. Support is not a reward for burnout, it is a requirement for continuing the work.
When done well, reflective support is about more than checking boxes. It’s about:
Honoring emotional labor
Navigating identity and systemic harm
Realigning with your values and your vision
Interrupting isolation and overperformance as normalized leadership models
What Kind of Support Does Rooted Soul Offer?
Clinical supervision (pre- and post-licensure)
Consulting and coaching for individual leaders, practitioners, and caregivers
Consulting and facilitation for justice-centered and mission-aligned teams
Restorative Practice & Support for those seeking embodied support
Whether addressing case consultation, mission and vision alignment, burnout, or systems repair, the goal is the same: to help you stay rooted in your work without sacrificing your values and well-being.
Ready to explore support?
Learn more about consulting, supervision, and somatic support:
👉 rootedsoulpractice.com/services
