Occupational burnout and the pressure of time—how can therapy help?
If you work in the helping sector, you know all of this; time and resources are scarce in the helping sector in Australia. You feel it, see it and experience it daily. You might be a helping professional who queries, how can I keep going due to the lack of time to do the work properly. How can I keep going with the impact that work has on my personal life? How can I keep going, seeing how the dignity and well-being of clients or patients I support are violated?
The time pressure is real, and you might wonder how therapy can help with occupational burnout that is caused by systemic failures and an increasing economic pressure that has seen resources in the most vital of our public systems depleted.
How counselling and therapy can help find purpose and meaning
Therapy can be a holding and revitalising space for people who are still working and trying to keep burnout at bay. It may not be instant and dramatic, and when I say re-vitalising, I don’t think necessarily that by coming to sessions with a counsellor, you go back to work all joyful and full of energy straight away. My job is to provide you with some immediate relief by being heard and to offer a place where all of your emotions, thoughts and feelings are welcomed—including anger and deep despair.
Next, there are hard realities that therapy won’t help change (such as the scarcity of time and resources in your workplace), but what may change through our work in therapy are the parts of you that you have some influence on in how you connect with colleagues, clients, patients and people in your personal life and the choices you make.
For example, you may come alive to a point where you can make decisions about work and life that, down the track, change your path to something more meaningful.
You could also develop a way of asking for something different at work, which would see you gaining more influence, so that work becomes better for you and your colleagues and the people you support.
You might still find a different path, but you gain some space and perhaps a voice in speaking up on the way.
Non-pathologising therapy for burnout
As a narrative therapist, my stance is to help people build their own sense of agency. I don’t subscribe to advice-giving in the form of work-life balance hygiene lists. Nor will I give you worksheets or challenge your feelings about the devastating impact of work, as this most likely needs to be grieved, “sat with” and listened to. Systemic violence, abuse and neglect of clients (because resources are limited) are real in workplaces of scarcity, and it is hard for your soul to watch.
If you come to me saying, ‘I think I have burnout’, then I would explore what is underneath the label for you and what sense you make of it. I might also help you mourn and grieve the disappointment of what work has turned into and what dreams you may have lost.
My approach as a therapist who works with people to find and deal with the root cause of their problems, is not about diagnosis or quick fixes. There is research, labelling, and now attempting to create diagnostic criteria for burnout such as this research by Black Dog saying Burnout diagnosis one step closer to predicting what personalities are at most risk.
I am not so interested in diagnosis, but in what sense you make of the label of burnout and your relationship to it, and what influence it has on you, and your relationships, be it family, friends or your sense of self and identity. This can enable richer descriptions and meaning-making, which in turn gives you something to hold on to—a “throughline” if you will, to get you through a rough patch in your life.
Therapy can help us see patterns and story-lines we follow
Perhaps you and I will discover a pattern that has allowed the pressure of time at work to recruit you and submerge you by asking curious questions, such as:
How do you think time pressure came to be part of your life; is there a story to this?
Are there times when the pressure of time is not in control?
Who else do you know who has also been recruited by time pressure?
In essence, work pressures often are not just about the pressure at work, but an inner pressure to keep going in very difficult circumstances, helping others, putting your own needs aside—and perhaps finding it difficult to find the voice to ask for something different.
It may be true, as mentioned in the research from Black Dog that certain personality styles are more at risk of burnout. It seems to me, though, that this is a thin story, and perhaps a pathologising story, not seeing the strength helpers also have.
What if that personality style that is seen as a “risk” is also what makes you a good helper in the first place, sensitive to other people’s suffering?
What if we, in the work of therapy, can help you slow down a little, help you find agency so that you can move about in the world still as a helper, now with a bit more strength in your backpack
Therapy can help you experience in real time, in the present moment, a slowing down
It is also in the repeated invitations to slow down in a therapy session, such as ‘can we pause and look at that’, which over time builds your own awareness and ability to slow down and feel and reflect rather than be at the mercy of demands.
Essentially, putting words to thoughts and feelings and a felt sense of slowing down can be what gives you some sense of agency, which you can take with you out in the world and back to work, enabling you to create some possibilities for yourself and others.
