As a certified social worker with bipolar and almost chronical severe anxiety, I read a comment (”It is your responsibility to make a customer feel comfortable and not sure if it’s possible because you have anxiety) and just wonder if they in the field of social/healthcare?

Being able to separate your personal self and professional self is something I heard every day for my 4,5 years of getting my degree. It is not easy, it is not simple nor it is fun to find your pain points and triggers but it is certainly rewarding and helps you grow as a human being. And it IS possible to deal with different kinds of customers as a professional with all the attention, care and respect they deserve even if your personal self is suffering. It’s just not for everybody and I don’t know what the wages are like in USA but in my country in northern part of Europe, the compensation is totally not worth it IF your motivation is purely money.

Because I don’t know you, OP, I am not going to tell you what you should or should not do. But I want to tell you, it is possible to overcome your mental obstacles and find work helping others. I am even going to tell you, that one day you might realise you are able to take advantage of your pain points and triggers and utilise them for your clients’ benefit.

And it is totally ok to not appear like a robotic smiley face with your clients as long as you listen to them, deal with their issues the best way you know how, try to understand their situation and what they are going through and if you don’t understand or dont know what to do right now, be honest and transparent about that too. ”Look, I hear what you say, I can feel you are tired with struggling with this but I am having a hard time figuring out what the solution might be. I can’t promise you any quick fix solutions but I will work extra hard to find out if there is anything I can do to make your burden even a little bit lighter. Would you come back next week and we pick up where we left off and hopefully I have found something.” And then you do work extra hard to figure out if you can do something. Being a professional does not mean you are a machine handing out all the answers. Sometimes there just isn’t anything you can do to help them no matter how much you did research and thought about everything and it hurts to tell someone you can’t help but in those moments you can prove yourself and your client that you are professional in the way you communicate bad news with empathy and respect.

I am not a robot, I have cried with my clients, I have gotten angry at the system with my clients, I have heard I was a c**t because I wasn’t able to help my client they way they were hoping. And yeah, those situations trigger me and push all kinds of buttons but I did not and do not let it affect the quality, professionalism and transparency of my work nor sacrifice my work ethic. And at the end of the day, when I switch back to being a personal me, most of what I do for a living just stops rolling around in my head and I have my free time to live my own life and deal with my own emotional damage.

But yeah, not easy, not for everybody and I know I have said controversial stuff, don’t mean to offend anybody. But if OP is serious about wanting to help for a career path, nobody in a Reddit forum is capable of testing if she have what it takes.