Teacher attrition has become a pervasive international issue with research documenting teachers leaving the profession as an effect of several factors including poor working conditions and flawed policy contexts. Such research has been helpful in drawing attention to how the harsh realities of classrooms and schools can disillusion teachers, creating stress, burnout, and potentially a desire to leave the profession. It has also led to an emphasis on well-being and mental health in teacher education programmes and the adoption of practices such as self-care planning, animal therapy, and resilience workshops. Such initiatives adopt the ideas, practices, and language of psychological therapy and as such can be characterised as "therapeutic" practices. Critiquing therapeutic practices in teacher education, the author argues that an excessive focus on the teacher's inner reality distracts from the ethico-political dimension of educational work -- care for the world (of education) that brings us together as educators -- with consequences for the profession and for democracy. Drawing on Honig's (2017) concept of "public things," the author offers conceptual resources with which teacher educators might consider how self-care is entangled with care for the world, inviting a (re)imagining of teacher education as a site of repair and renewal of that world.