The Courage to be Gentle: Reclaiming My Soul of Counselling Through Post-Burnout Growth

A few years ago, burnout crept up on me quietly, through years of loss and strain that I kept absorbing without ever pausing to name what was happening. By the time I recognised it, I was already deep inside it. I found my way back not through a single fix, but through a genuinely holistic path: supervision, coaching, short-term counselling, rest, reflection, and slowly rebuilding my sense of self. I wrote about that journey for BACP's Therapy Today.

What I want to share here is what came after: the framework I built from everything that journey taught me. I call it Post-Burnout Growth, and it is made up of Five Shifts.

This article was first published in Therapy Today, the journal of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. You can read the original piece here.

Yet, we live in a modern clinical culture obsessed with boxes. When people reach the point of profound depletion or chronic burnout, the immediate instinct of the medical model is to hand over a symptom checklist, find a defect, and prescribe a diagnostic label to "fix" them.

But burnout is not a biological glitch or a structural defect. It is a highly intelligent nervous system staging a radical protest. It is the body saying: No more. True recovery is not about patching someone up so they can return to the environment that broke them. It is about a complete evolution.

Through blending my own lived experience with rock-solid psychological theory, I developed a framework underpinned by Petrūska Clarkson's model of the therapeutic relationship, built on true relational safety, not clinical distance. To move past burnout, we must navigate The 5 Shifts to quieten the inner critic, step off the ladder of comparison, and reclaim our quiet dignity.

Shift 1: The Soothe Shift (Gilbert & Linehan)

When we are hurting, our instinct is often to turn outward by seeking validation, distraction, or frantic solutions. But when life hits with overwhelming force, we have to learn to turn inward. Drawing from Paul Gilbert's Compassionate Mind and Marsha Linehan's Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), the Soothe Shift is about radical self-acceptance. It is the practice of learning how to self-soothe when the nervous system is in a state of absolute collapse or terror. It is the shift from fighting our pain to gently settling our physiology.

Shift 2: The Horizontal Shift (Adler & Clarkson)

Burnout is heavily fanned by a harsh inner critic that traps us on a "step-ladder" of hierarchy. We spend our lives comparing ourselves to others, climbing to feel superior or collapsing into inferiority and self-doubt. Drawing from Alfred Adler's concepts (as highlighted in The Courage to Be Disliked) and Clarkson's therapeutic relationship, the Horizontal Shift is the act of stepping off the ladder entirely. It is about quietening the critic and standing on completely level ground with humanity, recognising no superiority and no inferiority. Just equal human dignity.

Shift 3: The Somatic Shift (Skovholt, Dana, van der Kolk, & Maté)

There is a lot of debate today about what it means when we say "the body keeps the score." Let us be clear: this is not about metaphor or pop-psychology trends. It is about hard biochemistry. When we live in a state of chronic hyper-vigilance or prolonged professional burnout, our bodies are continuously flooded with cortisol and adrenaline. Over time, this chemical deluge damages the gut, inflames the nervous system, and can actively fan the flames of autoimmune conditions and chronic illness.

The Somatic Shift moves us away from trying to think our way out of exhaustion, and toward safely learning to inhabit our physiology again. It means tracking our biological triggers, yes, but it also means intentionally looking for what Deb Dana calls "glimmers", small, split-second moments of safety and comfort that cue our nervous system that the threat has passed. I call them micro-joys. Those tiny moments are what tell the body it is finally safe to heal.

Shift 4: The Expansion Shift (Tonkin)

We have all been told the cultural lie that "time heals all wounds." But time alone heals nothing. If a deep emotional wound is left ignored, it does not disappear. Instead, it festers in the dark, draining our energy because nobody has helped us clean it, dress it, and tenderly tend to it the way an injury demands.

Drawing from Lois Tonkin's model of grief, the Expansion Shift recognises that healing does not mean waiting for our pain to magically shrink. Instead, we do the brave, gentle work of dressing that wound until it safely becomes a scar, and then we expand our lives around it. This shift is deeply rooted in the understanding that grief is very much love. When we lose someone, our grief does not fade because our love for them does not fade. By expanding our lives, we honour those who have died. We build a bigger, richer life that is vast enough to safely carry both the heavy weight of our loss and the enduring beauty of our love for them.

Shift 5: The Integrity Shift (Smethurst & Waite)

I first knew of Terry Waite in 1987. I was twenty-two, and that August I was getting married, an exciting time for me. Terry Waite was often spoken about that year, but none of us truly understood what he was enduring. We knew his name, we knew he had been taken, but the reality of what that meant was beyond us. It is only now, at sixty-one, with my own lived experience of loss and survival behind me, that I can even begin to imagine what those years must have held for him.

Years later, as a therapist, I attended a talk given by Philippa Smethurst. It was there that she introduced the concept of post-traumatic growth, the idea that people don't simply recover from trauma, but can grow beyond who they were before it, because of how they carry and metabolise what happened to them. She spoke about Terry Waite with real warmth. And it was only then that I began to properly understand what I had only half-registered as a young woman in 1987. Waite survived, not because his circumstances improved, but because his sense of who he was stayed intact even when everything external was stripped away. His integrity became the one thing his captors could never take.

That is the Integrity Shift. It is what Smethurst's work points to, and what Waite's life embodies: that when we align our internal truth with our external life, we become harder to break. Not because we stop feeling pain, but because we know, underneath it, who we are.

This is why I think of the burnout scar as a compass rather than a wound to be hidden. It is like stepping into water. You can never step into the same water twice. It might look the same on the surface, but the water has already moved on, and so have you. There is no going back to who you were before burnout, only forward, into who you are becoming because of it. That is what I mean by post-burnout growth. You do not recover back to your old self. You grow around the scar, into someone new.

Every One of Us Has a Reason to Be Here

When we stop pathologizing human suffering and start understanding it, the shame evaporates. We realise that our lifelong survival strategies, and even our lowest moments of dark overwhelm, are actually markers of how hard we have fought to stay alive.

Counselling was never meant to be about acting as a clinical technician who files people into rigid diagnostic boxes. It was meant to be a space of profound, level-ground safety that helps human beings understand themselves.

It takes immense, fierce courage to be gentle in a world that demands we harden. But by stepping off the step-ladder, soothing our nervous systems, and allowing our lives to expand, we can finally recognise the truth: you do not need a label to validate your existence. You are here, you survived, and every single one of us has a reason to be here. We might not know what that reason is yet.

This is also why I no longer want to keep this framework to myself, or to the therapy room alone. Working one-to-one will always matter, but it only ever reaches one person at a time, and burnout is not a one-person problem. It is happening quietly, invisibly, to therapists, carers, and countless others who are still functioning, still coping, until they can't. That is why I run 'The Courage to Be Gentle' as a workshop, and why I am building this into something that can reach further than one room at a time.

If any part of these Five Shifts has spoken to you, sign up to my mailing list to hear when the next workshop opens. And if you'd rather talk this through one-to-one, you're welcome to book a session with me for counselling or supervision.

If you'd like to read Terry Waite's story in full, in his own words, his memoir Taken on Trust tells it.