Working with healthcare in challenging environments

Programme

This event will aim to help you have a better understanding of difficult situations that may arise when working with clients in an NHS Talking Therapies service or similar environment. We will be exploring better ways of counselling personality disorders and neurodivergence within a mental health service, how we deal with the cost of living pressures on our clients when working on the NHS frontline and how to prevent burnout through self-care.

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Programme

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9.30am - 9.40am	Welcome & Introductions
9.40am - 10.40am	Presentation tbc
10.40am –10.50am	Break
10.50am –11.50am	Counsellor Burnout - a clear-eyed, transdiagnostic approach, presented by Francis Norton
11.50am –12.00pm	Break
12.00pm – 1.00pm	Therapists experience of identifying signs of burnout in themselves, presented by Iris Gudsteinsdottir
1.00pm –1.10pm	Break
1.10pm - 1.30pm	Panel Discussion
1.30pm	Event close

This programme is subject to change.

Presentation tba

9.40am – 10.40am

Counsellor Burnout - a clear-eyed, transdiagnostic approach

10.50am – 11.50am

We will explore the relationship between stress and burnout in the context of counselling practice. We will use powerful and intuitive tools like Dan Siegel’s Window of Tolerance and Marie Åsberg’s Exhaustion Funnel to model burnout as a stress-fuelled process. This transdiagnostic approach integrates biological factors such as physical exhaustion or the social intolerance of neurodivergence, psychological factors such as trauma or people-pleasing, and social factors such as excessive demand and inadequate support.

We will emerge with a clear map for identifying and navigating clinical overwhelm, allowing us to move beyond surface-level "self-care" and toward a deeper, process-informed understanding of self-management and sustainable practice.

Alongside these general mechanisms, the session will highlight some of the most prevalent stress and burnout factors in our profession, and consider how we as counsellors can best interrupt this process in order to prevent or recover from our own burnout.

Francis Nortonis a counsellor and psychotherapist specialising in burnout, stress and emotional regulation. Since 2020, he has worked extensively with individuals experiencing burnout across a range of professional and personal contexts, including those in high-demand and international roles.

His approach integrates trauma-informed practice with transdiagnostic and humanistic perspectives, drawing on frameworks such as the Window of Tolerance, attachment theory, and acceptance-based approaches. He has a particular interest in the overlap between trauma, neurodiversity and burnout, and in developing practical, compassionate ways of supporting regulation and recovery.

Francis facilitates online workshops and support groups, where he focuses on making complex psychological ideas accessible and applicable.

Therapists experience of identifying signs of burnout in themselves

12.00pm - 1.00pm

In this session Iris will be sharing research findings where she explored therapists experience of identifying signs of burnout in themselves. Research, including this one, has shown that this is something that therapists have found difficult to identify. By sharing these findings, Iris hopes to provide more clarity for therapists around what to be on the look out for in terms of signs of burnout in themselves. This includes what signs of burnout could look like, both in the therapy room whilst working, and in their general wellbeing. This will be done through sharing examples of therapists lived experience who have gone through this process, including sharing what factors helped and hindered them in being able to identify they were in burnout.

In addition, Iris will be exploring what prevention and early intervention could look like on a micro and macro scale. Such as how therapists can apply these findings to themselves, and by exploring the role of education, professional culture and awareness in the field.

The aim of this presentation is to share knowledge through therapists lived experience, hoping that this will be a helpful resource contributing to greater awareness and wellbeing for professionals in the field.

Iris Gudsteinsdottir is an integrative counsellor and psychotherapist working in Private Practice. As part of her studies, she completed a research project exploring how therapists identified they were in burnout. She chose to explore this topic after discovering that therapists consistently found it difficult to identify this.

This concerned Iris, as she was entering the profession, and she wanted to better understand the process therapists had been through, so as to learn from their experience and better understand how to prevent burning out herself.

She has learned a great deal from these findings which have helped her build an awareness of any initial concerning signs and she continues to implement self-care strategies and actions that support her professional wellbeing.

She feels that caring for therapists is as important as caring for our clients and hopes that this presentation can support fellow therapists in identifying any signs of burnout in themselves.