Why I Almost Quit Doula Work (and What I Needed to Stay)

I was a newly trained postpartum doula. I was passionate, energized, on fire for this work. And I was also about to quit after only a few months. I was working with a client who was struggling with a feeding issue and it was wearing me out.

Why? Why was my client’s issue so personally tiring for me? I’ll tell you why.

I was spending my family time, my personal time, agonizing over what I could do to “fix” this problem for my client. Researching. Google searching. Mentally cataloging every little thing.

And it was exhausting!

I remember laying in bed, it was after midnight, the light from my phone illuminating my face as I scrolled through some blog post a search had turned up, when my husband’s voice startled me out of my trance.

“Why are you still awake? What are you doing"?”

“I have to find an answer for what’s going on with my client. I can’t sleep until I do!”

“Does your client know you’re doing this? Does she even want you to find this stuff out?”

And then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I didn’t even know the answer to this question. Because the truth was, I was doing this for ME. I was still carrying around my own baggage and my own biases and it was making doula work SO exhausting. And for what?

This wasn’t doula work. Doula work would have been stepping back and sitting down to actively listen to my client. To lean into her and see where she was in the moment. To be that listening ear so that she could unload, process, and truly feel heard as she worked through the issues she was facing in the moment. Taking some imaginery burden from her and making it my personal quest to fix it was not helping my client.

This lack of clear boundaries was burning me out. And my inability to process my own personal baggage and leave all that out of my client’s space, was blurring the line between professional doula and postpartum avenger.

Being a postpartum doula is not about magically fixing everything. It’s not about having the perfect right answer every time. That incredible burden will burn a new doula out faster than you can imagine. And I’m so grateful for that light bulb moment (as well as a training and certifiying organization like ProDoula that teaches new doulas how to avoid all of this in the first place). I wish I had trained with them from the beginning, but that’s a story for a different blog.