Help for the Helpers is Here!

The Thriving Therapist Self-Care BookThe Thriving Therapist: Sustainable Self-Care to Prevent Burnout and Enhance Well-Being is a comprehensive, holistic, and needs-based offering written exclusively for us – the hard-working and dedicated psychotherapist and mental health professional. We put so much time and energy into our clients’ well-being. Don’t we deserve to treat ourselves with the same honor, compassion, and deep respect?

If you’re looking for a compassionate guide to help you lean more and more into your own honest and sustainable self-caring, this book can be just that. It’s chock full of self-reflection exercises, concrete practices, personal musings, colleague anecdotes, a ton of research, communitarian ethos, myth-busting, values clarification, self-care sustainability ideas, and much more.

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What Your Fellow Practitioners Are Saying About the Book

Erica Wise

“Matthew A. Hersh has given a tremendous gift to psychotherapists with his book on sustainable self-care. Born out of his personal experience with a life-threatening illness while he was still in training, this book provides an integrative and nuanced view of the critical importance of self-care to those who care for the mental wellness of others. His engaging style of writing and his self-care reflection breaks encourage the reader to actively participate in—rather than passively read through—this well-researched book. It offers important and meaningful wisdom for psychotherapists throughout their lives.”

~Erica Wise, PhD – Clinical Professor Emerita, Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, and Fellow of the American Psychological Association

“As our society gets ever more stressed and burned out, mental health professionals themselves are busier and more burned out than ever. Dr. Hersh has put together one of the best, most evidence-based yet accessible guides to restoring your health, mental health, and idealism as a mental health professional that I’ve encountered in years.”

~Chris Willard, PsyD –  Psychologist, Author, and Consultant, Boston, MA

Gerald Koocher

“Matthew A. Hersh has pulled together ideas from many wise people and integrated these with his own experiences as a psychologist, therapist, and cancer survivor. The result is a reflective guide to self-care for helping professionals and others who need skills for mindful coping. Readers will find a useful assortment of tools, guides, and wisdom to support themselves even as they strive to help others.”

Gerald P. Koocher, PhD, ABPP – Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, and Former APA President

Will Change Your View of Self-Care, and Yourself

As a mid-career psychologist, I thought I knew everything there was to know about self-care. I’ve had my eyes opened. Dr. Hersh’s extraordinarily comprehensive work begins with a framework for self-care that helped me shift from seeing it as an activity scheduled between other commitments (and for me, at least, an activity that was all too easy to sacrifice when I was “busy”), to a completely different way of being in the world. The Thriving Therapist comprises information from empirically validated studies, Eastern and Western philosophy, BIPOC therapists, pop culture experts, and a range of other sources. Dr. Hersh also offers tools that helped me identify assumptions I didn’t even realize I carried around a vast range of factors–all of which, left unexamined, were diminishing my professional resilience. Most importantly, he provides brief practices that I’ve learned to easily integrate throughout my day. Remarkably, Dr. Hersh manages to present all of this in a breezy voice that left me feeling like I was hanging out with a favorite professor, soaking up wisdom over a casual chat. This book will be my friend and guide for the rest of my career. I truly hope more mental health professionals and graduate programs discover it sooner rather than later.

~J.L.

Essential for Keeping Yourself Afloat

This book has been a balm to me, a provider who works with complex mental health concerns. The work I do is rewarding but also taxing. Matt Hersh’s books goes so far beyond self-care 101. It is a deep yet accessible guide to keeping yourself afloat while doing the work of caring for others. And you will want no other guide than Matt, who’s compassionate voice is felt from the page. If you work in mental health, this is truly an essential book not for your bookshelf but your nightstand.

~MARCI

Practical Wisdom for Helping Professionals

Matt speaks from his experience, offering countless ways to take better care of yourself and ensure you don’t burn out while helping others. If you’re an any helping profession, from a therapist to a nurse to caretaker, this book is for you. It is a truly valuable resource to elevate yourself from surviving to thriving. Matt is one of the best therapists around. He truly practices what he preaches. Highly recommend.

~J.S.

A Gift for Therapists of All Kinds

With this thoughtful, comprehensive review of self-care practices, Matt Hersh gives a real gift back to his community of caregivers. I find myself returning to the book often, selecting a chapter or a practice to reflect on and savor as needed, both for myself and also to enrich my work with clients. Matt draws from a wealth of quality research, personal communications with experts, and his own lived experience to provide this amazing resource for therapist well-being.

~L.A.

A Gift to the World

What a beautifully written and critical book Dr.Hersh shares with the world. He speaks to a universal truth, that in order to practice self-care we must also practice interconnectedness. He illustrates how being deeply connected to others is often our strongest defense against the occupational hazard of burnout. I am deeply grateful that Dr. Hersh took action and contributed to the problematic “0.5% of our psychotherapy training that focuses on taking care of ourselves.” He presents a warm, compassionate, thoughtful, and comprehensive guide to enhancing our wellbeing. If you need to choose one book about self-care, this is the one! He has included everything you need.

~A.B.

Dr. Matt Hersh is a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, certified teacher for the Mindfulness Institute for Emerging Adults, a certified Energy Psychology practitioner, certified YogaBody Breathwork coach, and a certified master Accelerated Resolution Therapy practitioner. He has worked with children, teens, young adults, and adults with a wide range of anxiety disorders, stress-related conditions, executive function challenges, and relational concerns.

In the years since his own medical crisis in 2007, Matt has become increasingly interested in better understanding and helping his fellow practitioners to take more compassionate care of themselves. He has authored several scholarly articles on the intersection among practitioner self-care, ethics, and well-being, and he has presented workshops, talks, and webinars on the topics of self-care, values, mindfulness, anxiety management, and burnout prevention.

Matt’s work has been seen in APA journals, the National Register of Health Service Psychologists, the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, Harvard University, MIT Medical, University of Massachusetts Medical School, the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, Massachusetts Partnerships for Youth, and the Massachusetts Society for a World Free from Sexual Harm by Youth.

Dr. Matt Hersh, founder of The Thriving Therapist

Dr. Matt Hersh is a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, certified teacher for the Mindfulness Institute for Emerging Adults, a certified YogaBody Breathwork coach, and a certified Energy Psychology practitioner. He has worked with children, teens, young adults, and adults with a wide range of anxiety disorders, stress-related conditions, executive function challenges, and relational concerns.

In the years since his own medical crisis in 2007, Matt has become increasingly interested in better understanding and helping his fellow practitioners to take more compassionate care of themselves. He has authored several scholarly articles on the intersection among practitioner self-care, ethics, and well-being, and he has presented workshops, talks, and webinars on the topics of self-care, values, mindfulness, anxiety management, and burnout prevention.

Matt’s work has been seen in APA journals, the National Register of Health Service Psychologists, the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, Harvard University, MIT Medical, University of Massachusetts Medical School, the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, Massachusetts Partnerships for Youth, and the Massachusetts Society for a World Free from Sexual Harm by Youth.

Dr. Matt Hersh, founder of The Thriving Therapist

Start Your Sustainable Self-Care Journey

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The Thriving Therapist Self-Care Book

“What a beautifully written and critical book Dr.Hersh shares with the world…He presents a warm, compassionate, thoughtful, and comprehensive guide to enhancing our wellbeing. If you need to choose one book about self-care, this is the one! He has included everything you need.” – A..B.