What I Wish I’d Known About Wellbeing at the Beginning of My Counselling Career
When I started out as a counsellor, my head was occupied with thoughts of ‘am I doing this right?’, trying to remember relevant theory and my speech for contracting with new clients. Once I set up private practice, my thoughts were with directory listings, social media, and ethical and legal requirements. My wellbeing wasn’t a top priority, and I don’t think I fully realised that it should have been.
Having conducted a survey on the subject of counsellor wellbeing in the Counsellors Therapy Pot Facebook group, it seems that the number of counsellors who feel they received adequate guidance about their own wellbeing during training are in the minority. Some training organisations do this very well, some do it adequately, and many, probably due to resource constraints, don’t focus on it enough.
There are many voices in our profession who champion the wellbeing of counsellors and therapists, but there are still ingrained messages and beliefs, both in the profession and in wider society, that counsellors and other helping professionals ‘can handle it’, are somehow superhuman, or that ‘it’s the nature of the job, the burden is ours to carry’. There are a number of reasons for this:
Gendered expectations in the profession
The moralising idea that because the work is meaningful, practitioners should not complain about hardship
The shame that practitioners themselves feel about needing or wanting help: a shame that quietly shapes the culture of the profession
Wellbeing hasn’t exactly been ignored, but it has often been treated as something practitioners are expected to manage privately. We all have a role in caring for ourselves, of course, but that doesn’t mean we should have to figure it all out alone. I believe that in the beginning we need guidance, and later, very likely, we still need support above and beyond what supervision alone can offer.
I wish I’d known about the baked-in messages around wellbeing, both from within the counselling profession and from those looking in from the outside. I think I might have been quicker to question, or to share some of the experiences I had. Even just knowing that I wasn’t alone, that it was okay to talk about the difficult parts of this role, would have made it easier.
What follows are some of the beliefs I wish I’d held from the beginning. This isn’t about hindsight or regrets. It’s about naming things I’d love us all to hold, so that others don’t have to learn the hard way. Perhaps, together, we can start to build a kinder and more helpful roadmap.
I believe that, with care, we do not need to carry the weight of client trauma
I carried more than my fair share of the weight of client stories for several years. Without divulging any details, I’ll share one example of this. Not long after I started in private practice, a client brought in objects from their childhood to talk about. One of those items had a story attached to it that brought up distressing images in my head for months afterwards.
I thought this was normal. No one told me it wasn’t.
I thought it was just part and parcel of what I’d signed up to. Now I understand that this is vicarious trauma. There were many things that could have helped:
Accessing my own counselling
Having rituals for after sessions and at the end of the day
Talking about such things more openly in supervision and with peers
Somatic practices
And perhaps most simply: just knowing that it didn’t have to be this way
I believe that we need time to completely switch off
In the early days of my career, I spent a lot of my spare time worrying about clients. I had one particular client who regularly talked about ending their life. I remember worrying about them over weekends and, as a result, not feeling properly rested.
We know, cognitively, that worry doesn’t help: that it has a negative impact on our health and our work. But in my experience, it can be genuinely difficult to take that on board, especially in the beginning. I realise now that I somehow felt it was my responsibility to keep that person safe even outside our sessions. Thinking about it now, those were old patterns from my own history showing up in the work. I’d had lots of my own therapy but I do believe that when you become a counsellor there are very subtle and unexpected ways that old patterns can be triggered.
Provided we have carried out due diligence, we need to release the belief that we are the make or break for our clients, because, let’s face it, we are rarely the sole factor. And a counsellor who cannot rest is a counsellor who cannot, in the long run, properly show up.
I believe that we can expect to be fairly paid for what we do
You might wonder why I’ve included this in an article about wellbeing. I’ve included it because financial wellbeing is inseparable from our emotional and mental wellbeing, and it doesn’t get talked about enough.
There is an ingrained belief, in our profession and perhaps in society more broadly, that because we do meaningful work, we are not entitled to talk about financial hardship. Let me say this plainly: doing meaningful work doesn’t mean we don’t have to eat, or have a roof over our heads, or that we don’t deserve a holiday once in a while. So many of us studied hard, made sacrifices, and continue to carry significant costs in private practice. We have earned the right to make a meaningful living, as well as to do meaningful work.
Living and breathing this belief matters. When we do, we are:
Less likely to reduce our rate the moment someone asks us to
Less likely to bend on our cancellation policies
More likely to carry, and spread, the message that our work has real value
We don’t need to hustle to be heard
I’ll be honest: this is something I’m still growing into myself. It’s tough out there. Many of us in private practice are struggling to find clients, and those in employed roles may feel stretched or uncertain. None of us came into this work to become marketing gurus or salespeople.
I genuinely believe it is possible to run a sustainable practice without sacrificing our values or burning out. I also believe that it is our authenticity that holds the answer. What makes us unique, the things we care about most deeply, can give us an edge when we do put ourselves out there. We don’t have to become someone else to make a difference, or to make a living.
Boundaries aren’t just about the client: they’re about us too
In training, what we learn about boundaries is largely, and quite rightly, geared towards the benefit and safety of the client. But when we go into private practice, it can be easy to relax our own boundaries, or not think about them at all, in the eagerness to build something. In the long run, this doesn’t serve anyone. It leads to burnout, resentment, and a practice that doesn’t fit the person running it.
Holding boundaries for ourselves might look like:
Having a structure to our week that we protect
Having a clear cancellation policy and sticking to it
Setting time limits when we do offer concessionary rate
Only taking on work that aligns with our values
And it’s worth remembering: when we model strong, healthy boundaries, that has value for our clients too. But more than anything, it’s how we build a practice we can actually sustain.
I could name more beliefs I’d like to have held from the beginning but these are the ones that seem the most important. I’m not holding all of these perfectly myself, and that’s part of the point. What strikes me now is that they aren’t just things I wish I’d known. They’re things I think we need to start saying out loud, together.
It can be tempting, especially in the current climate, to lessen our worth, lower our boundaries, to grin and bear it. But that isn’t the answer. It isn’t sustainable. We deserve better. And as a community, we can support each other to move forward: authentically, meaningfully, and with our values intact.