My practicum site was a hospice. The office always smelled of an uneasy compromise—cloying vanilla potpourri meant to make the space feel cozy and warm. For most people, the scent worked. But to me, it never quite masked the sharp, sterile disinfectant that lingered just underneath. I lived in that gap between the two smells: the one I was supposed to believe in and the one I actually felt.
I was the kind of clinician who found safety in the details. My outreach logs were organized with military precision; my EHR notes were a source of quiet pride. In a field where you are constantly surrounded by the unpredictable nature of grief, I clung to the things I could control: my accuracy, my timeliness, and my presence with my clients.
I remember starting my shift, reaching for the heavy, black office phone—the kind with too many buttons and a flickering display—and logging into my extension. The voicemail was exactly twelve words long.
“Your client committed suicide. We’ll talk about it next week in supervision.”
Click. Dial tone.
He didn’t leave a name. He didn’t tell me which family was now in the wreckage, he didn’t ask how I was, and he didn’t offer a bridge. My supervisor simply dropped a trauma into a digital mailbox and left me to carry it for the next four days.
Looking back, I see layers of possibility for that silence. Perhaps he was simply overwhelmed himself—paralyzed by a sudden awareness of his own professional liability or the perceived need for self-protection. Perhaps he was merely repeating the hands-off supervision he had once received. Perhaps he mistook my quiet competence for invulnerability and assumed I didn’t need the support. Or perhaps, in the clinical coldness of the institution, he had simply lost the habit of checking in on the human beings behind the work. Whatever the reason, it was a profound miscalculation. At that moment, the system failed us both.
I cleared my schedule. For the next several hours, I went on an EHR ghost hunt, clicking through active files just to hear the voices of the people I knew. When I confirmed everyone was safe, I moved to my referrals. I was searching for a name to attach to the news.
Eventually, I found the file. It was a name I had called once but never actually met. I looked back at my note: “A woman with pressured speech answered the phone. She stated, ‘Now is not a good time, my sister just died.’ She hung up before this writer could provide a name, role, or contact information. Will follow up in 10 days for a second attempt.”
I felt a strange, heavy mix of emotions. There was a sense of relief knowing that I hadn’t missed a red flag with a client I had a relationship with. But that was immediately followed by the feeling that I should have known more, or done more, even though I hadn’t even been given the chance to introduce myself. I felt responsible for the case, yet entirely lost and unsupported in how to handle the news.
When the silence of the long weekend finally broke in our supervision meeting, I didn’t wait for him to lead. I shared the visceral impact of that voicemail and named what support should have looked like in that moment. He didn’t like the feedback. In response, he gave me a negative evaluation.
I reached out to my School Practicum Advisor, a woman I trusted to help clear the air. I believed that once the objective reality of the situation was on the table, the focus would naturally shift toward accountability and care. But that meeting was a second disappointment. My advisor looked at the supervisor and started with an apology. Not to me, but to him. “I am so sorry,” she said. “It must have been so hard for you to hear that criticism.” I watched her work to preserve the institutional relationship between the school and the hospice site.
I realized then that I wasn’t a clinician-in-training to them; I was a variable in a contract that needed to be smoothed over. Power was being protected, and I was entirely unprotected. I learned then that if I wanted a professional environment that valued the human being as much as the work, I would have to learn how to build it myself.
In the wake of that meeting, I started to question my longevity in this field. I wondered if the passion I felt for the work was actually a liability, and if the reality of the profession was simply a series of self-protective, risk-averse transactions. I saw a system that was more concerned with mitigating exposure than it was with client or clinician care.
I was fortunate, though. While my mornings were spent in the uneasy, masked quiet of the hospice, my evenings were spent working at a short-term inpatient facility that hosted an APA-approved internship. It was a place that was loud, buzzing, and unapologetically raw, and it was in that environment that I found a different kind of architecture.
I appealed to the supervising psychologist there, Dr. Bivens-Levin. She didn’t just listen; she did the heavy lifting of restoring my confidence. She spent hours rebuilding my belief that I deserved to be held while I held others. She was the first person to show me that repair isn’t just about fixing a mistake—it’s about reinforcing the foundation of the person doing the work.
While that advisor and I eventually moved toward a more collaborative place (she even served on my dissertation committee years later), the lesson of that institutional failure stayed with me. It was my first real look at how easily systems choose polite preservation over authentic support.
I carry that look with me into every room I enter now. I have been the trainee navigating a system that felt like it was closing in. I have been the leader tasked with protecting organizational partnerships—feeling the pressure to keep the machine running while knowing that the people inside it were fraying. I’ve learned that you can preserve a professional relationship without sacrificing the humanity of the people within it.
The work we do is too important to do in isolation. None of us should ever have to check our voicemail and wonder if we’re standing alone.