Someone once told me that burnout isn’t like a fire alarm going off – it’s more like a carbon monoxide leak: silent and invisible, you don’t realise it’s happening until you are already gasping for air. That’s exactly how it was for me. I kept functioning, kept coping, until I couldn’t.
Burnout crept up after years of personal and professional strain. I lost my sister, a dedicated NHS nurse, to lung cancer during the pandemic. The day before she died, my eldest daughter went into premature labour and delivered a healthy baby girl by C-section. My sister was already very unwell. We waited 10 hours for an ambulance that never came, and by the time we reached hospital she was fading fast. A photo of the new baby arrived, and we cried tears of joy and sadness. She slipped into a coma soon after and died. We had both been supporting my brother, who lives with psychosis, a responsibility we had taken on when our parents passed. My sister’s death left a huge gap, not just in my life but in the wider family support network.
I took some time off, organised her funeral, then went back to seeing clients online and later from home. Looking back I see how many layers of loss I was already carrying. I felt exhausted but couldn’t name why. I’d been struggling with tinnitus since 2019, and after years of being dismissed by healthcare professionals I was finally diagnosed with Ménière’s disease, a condition affecting balance and hearing.
Then in July 2023 my 21-month-old granddaughter was diagnosed with leukaemia. It felt like a scene from Mary Poppins Returns where cousin Topsy declares, ‘It’s the second Wednesday!’ and her whole world turns upside down. Everything familiar was still there but completely disorientating. That’s exactly how my inner world felt. I was standing in my life, but emotionally everything had flipped on its head.
I didn’t follow a single path back to balance – I followed a holistic one. I continued supervision while taking a break from clients, giving myself space to process emotions safely and reflect on my future. I worked with a coach for three months, had short-term counselling and even tried emotional freedom technique tapping. I attended compassion and mindfulness workshops, studied facilitation and supervision, and slowly began developing my own workshop on self-compassion. While therapy played an important part in my recovery, it was the combination of counselling, supervision and coaching, each offering a different kind of space for reflection and growth, that supported my healing.
I spent restorative weekends on the coast with friends and listened to podcasts about burnout and compassion fatigue. Reading Paul Gilbert’s The Compassionate Mind helped me soften my inner critic and treat myself with gentle kindness. At one point I even considered retraining as a death doula (a non-medical support person), searching for ways to bring meaning to what I’d been through.
This combination of support gradually restored my clarity and confidence. Supervision and therapy helped me process the shame I’d felt about ending with clients so abruptly, while coaching gave me practical tools to rebuild structure and direction. Retreats, reading and reflection reminded me that rest wasn’t failure, it was care.
Small, consistent practices made the biggest difference: pausing to notice my emotional state, journalling, mindful walks by the sea, observing the changing seasons. Setting boundaries protected my energy and allowed me to return to client work gently, starting with just one client at first.
By February 2025 I finally felt ready for something new. I travelled to Vietnam and Cambodia for three weeks with a close counselling friend. Immersing myself in Buddhist ideas of acceptance and forgiveness deepened my healing and helped me see that gentleness and surrender can be forms of strength. Then, in August 2025, my granddaughter rang the bell to mark the end of her chemotherapy. That joyful sound, bright and defiant, felt like a new beginning for all of us.
Recovering from burnout wasn’t a straight path, but embracing a compassionate, holistic approach helped me rediscover balance and purpose. Support can come in many forms: supervision, counselling, coaching, retreats or simply moments of kindness towards yourself. Stepping back, caring for yourself and allowing gentleness can transform not only how we work but how we live. For me that’s the courage to be gentle, and it truly changed my life.