Therapy for Helping Professionals
I offer therapy for helping professionals in Bendigo and online who are experiencing burnout, emotional exhaustion, workplace stress, trauma, grief, or questions of identity and meaning in their work. For many people, these experiences are shaped by the emotional demands of caring roles, including vicarious trauma. For mental health professionals seeking their own therapy, counselling can be part of getting to know themselves better.
If you are considering therapy with me, the first step is usually a brief phone conversation to see whether working together feels like a good fit.
My approach to therapy
Therapy is not something that is “done to” you—therapy happens within a mutual relationship.
Hello, I am Frederikke Jensen, a master’s qualified counsellor based in Bendigo, Victoria. I enjoy working with people in the helping professions, including counsellors, nurses, social workers, allied health professionals, educators, and carers.
You can find out more about my background and approach on my About page.
I invite people to go deeper—beyond symptom reduction or diagnosis alone—towards lasting emotional and psychological wellbeing.
Meaningful change happens when we move beyond surface-level techniques and begin to explore emotions, thoughts, bodily sensations, and understand what emerges within the therapeutic relationship.
I work from the understanding that we are shaped in relationships, and that change can also happen through relationships. This relational understanding is foundational to both narrative therapy and psychodynamic therapy, which inform the way I work.
I have written further about therapy for helping professionals, including burnout, workplace trauma, EAP counselling limitations, emotional resilience, and why many therapists and mental health professionals engage in their own long-term therapy on this page.
As a therapist who works psychodynamically and relationally, I have also been in intensive therapy myself which which continues to sustain me in my work.
How do we begin therapy?
The goal might be to figure out the goal—sometimes we make space for “not knowing”. It is also okay to take time to think about whether therapy with me is for you. We start with a brief phone call before we begin meeting regularly. Next, I allow the first four sessions as a space for us to understand what you want from therapy and whether we feel like a good fit to work together.
How do you schedule therapy sessions?
I usually work with people on a weekly basis. You can read more on this page where I explain how meeting regularly helps us build trust, maintain momentum, and provide consistent support through difficult periods.
Sessions usually take place on the same day and time each week as part of our mutual commitment to the therapeutic work. Sessions start and finish on time.
Do you work short-term or longer-term with people?
Therapy can be short-term or longer-term depending on the depth of your struggles, your goals, and where you find yourself in life right now.
Some people come for support through a particular difficult time in their lives, while others are seeking to work deeper, longer term. Even during shorter-term work, I usually require weekly sessions as a minimum, as less frequent meetings can make it difficult to establish and maintain meaningful therapeutic momentum.
I am interested in understanding what brought you to therapy now, and what feels most pressing for you to talk about, and this will remain an ongoing conversation throughout therapy.
If you are grappling with how to choose a therapist for yourself, you might want to read why I think the title of your therapist may matter less than what you might think.
What is your fee?
I will tell you my fee when we first speak in the initial phone call. My focus in the first phone call is to learn about you and find out what you are looking for, and if this matches what I can provide.
Questions helping professionals often ask about therapy
Do helping professionals benefit from their own therapy?
I believe all helping professionals can benefit from their own therapy. Therapy can support emotional resilience, deepen our capacity to attune to clients, patients, or students, and help us recognise where our own histories, stressors, or emotional burdens may be shaping our work in ways we are not fully aware of.
I also believe that helping work should not become a zero-sum game. If your work has left you depleted, emotionally exhausted, or with less of yourself available for your own relationships and well being, there may be something important worth exploring more deeply in therapy.
Why does your service focus on weekly therapy?
Momentum of important work can be lost between sessions. It can also be harder to stay connected to painful material when you are left holding it alone for weeks at a time.
You can read more about weekly therapy on this page.
How do you work with trauma?
I have explained in more depth about how I work with trauma and my approach when I see helping professionals who have experienced trauma.
What about privacy? I worry about meeting someone I know if I come in person.
My in-person practice room in Bendigo, Kangaroo Flat, is located in a quiet setting. If you have any concerns, let us discuss them.
Attending therapy in person in a regional city like Bendigo, where you have friends, acquaintances, clients or patients, can feel exposing, depending on how you feel about being in therapy. Some mental health professionals are open about this; some are not. I wrote an article on this to reduce stigma about helping professionals in therapy.
How can I attend weekly therapy if I do shift work?
Although I cannot guarantee I can offer too many options, as I offer people a regular weekly spot, I will try to accommodate as best I can, and I do have some early morning and after-hours appointments available. Most importantly, we need to work out if we are a good enough fit to work together.