Burnout, Boundaries, and Being Human: A Practice of Care from the Inside Out

We used to think we had to be more whole than we were in order to do this work.

When we started as therapists, we imagined future versions of ourselves who were better rested, more healed, and less shaken by the world as it is. These idealized selves were calm under pressure, confident in our boundaries, and endlessly capable of being with others’ pain. We’d never get activated in session. We’d say hard things with grace and leave every clinical hour with energy to spare. There was a fantasy, often quietly held, that we’d eventually grow into someone unflappable.

We don’t remember exactly when that myth began to unravel. Maybe it was during a tough session, or maybe in the middle of another late-night text about how heavy things felt. What’s true is that those ideal selves never arrived. Instead, we got tired. And in that fatigue, we got honest.

This essay is about honesty. It’s about what it means to be clinicians who feel deeply, not only about our clients but also about each other, about the work, and about the contradictions we live inside. It’s about the invisible weight of caregiving; the kind that doesn’t look dramatic on the surface but shows up in the small ways we bend ourselves trying to show up for others. It’s about how we are choosing, slowly and intentionally, to do this differently: to build a practice rooted not in perfection, but in permission to rest, to falter, and to repair.

The Invisible Weight of Care

There are these moments (mid-text, mid-dishes, mid-note-taking) where one of us will inevitably pause and say, “How did we ever think we could do this alone?” And by “this,” we don’t just mean the day-to-day labour of therapy or business ownership. We mean the whole layered truth of it: holding the pain of others while metabolizing our own, building systems of care while trying to survive systems that weren’t built to care for us, and choosing to stay relational in work that constantly pressures us toward disconnection and self-sacrifice.

Burnout, in our experience, rarely looks like collapse. It doesn’t arrive as one dramatic breaking point. Like a slow erosion, it seeps in. It shows up in blurry boundaries, the impulse to over-accommodate, the emails sent at midnight, the subtle dread before an intake call, the unshakable feeling that you’re the one who needs to be held. It makes it harder to listen, more challenging to stay present, and harder to feel like you’re doing enough.

This work asks a lot. It asks us to show up with empathy, to attune to subtle shifts, to navigate trauma, trust, and transformation all in the space of 50 minutes. And if you are also queer, racialized, disabled, poor, or holding any marginalized identity, these asks get even bigger. We are both care providers and care seekers, often navigating our wounds while tending to others. We are still learning how to move at what Adrienne Maree Brown calls “the pace of trust.” For us, that means trying to bring the values we hold (anti-capitalism, relational integrity, trauma awareness) into the marrow of our calendars, our emails, our boundaries, and our bodies.

The Power That Lingers

We’ve worked hard to build a workplace that doesn’t reproduce harm. We’ve centred transparency, shared decision-making, and care. And still, power lives here. It lives in expectations, projections, and in the subtle pressures to be invulnerable or perfect. Even when we name ourselves as collaborators, not bosses, we feel the weight of how others see us.

There have been moments when our care was mistaken for control, our structure for rigidity. And there have been moments when we’ve made mistakes, and something we said or didn’t say caused harm. These moments bring up shame, defensiveness, and the urge to retreat. But we are learning to stay. To meet the rupture not with collapse, but with curiosity and care.

We are not immune to the messiness of relationships just because we facilitate them. We’re in it, too. And we’re trying, over and over again, to relate from a place of accountability, not authority. To remember that power is real, even when we don’t want it. And to name it with as much transparency and humility as we can.

Doing Right Inside Broken Systems

The truth is, we are trying to build something liberatory within systems that are fundamentally not. We run practices in a world shaped by capitalism, white supremacy, and ableism. We want our work to be accessible. We want our teams to be paid well. We want our clients to feel held without being overburdened. And also we have bills, software, student loans, and therapy to afford ourselves.

There is no easy way to hold all of that. Some days, we cry over spreadsheets, raise our rates with a pit in our stomachs, and wonder if we’re doing too much, or not enough. These tensions aren’t signs of failure. They are signs that we are awake to the world we live in and that we are trying to navigate it with integrity.

We’ve come to understand that proper care cannot be offered from depletion. When we are running on empty, when we are saying yes from guilt or urgency, when we are overriding our own needs to serve others, something distorts. The work becomes thin, reactive, hollow. So we try, whenever we can, to come back to abundance; not in the financial sense, but in the sense of inner spaciousness. Enough rest, enough connection, enough permission to be whole.

The Grief of Belonging

What shapes our work, maybe more than anything else, is grief. Not just personal grief, but political and relational grief. Exile, chosen or not. Displacement from the community. The heartbreak of trying to belong in spaces that can’t hold the fullness of who we are. One of us moved to Canada for safety. The other stayed, navigating ableism and transphobia daily. We’ve both experienced harm in spaces that claimed to be about healing. We’ve both been pushed to the edges of activist communities for refusing to perform certainty, for holding too much nuance, for saying what felt unspeakable.

There’s a unique kind of sorrow in being exiled by your people. And yet, it’s from that place that we began to build something new. Something that doesn’t demand purity. Something that can hold contradiction and repair.

What We’re Building

What we’re creating now is small, but it feels real. It started with a friendship at a yoga ashram over two decades ago – a place full of contradictions – where we first learned to name what didn’t work while still treasuring what did. That early honesty shaped everything. Over the years, we held each other through heartbreak, identity shifts, and professional disillusionment. And now, we’re co-creating a practice that centers care in every direction; not just from clinician to client, but from person to person.

Relational supervision is one example. Every week, we pause to ask each other: What’s heavy? What’s working? What needs to shift? These are not performance evaluations. They are spaces to be human. To say, “I’m tired,” and have that be enough. To say, “I messed up,” and not be shamed. To say, “I’m scared,” and not be alone.

We believe this way of working can grow, not by scaling up, but by deepening. Through choosing slowness over speed, connection over control, and repair over perfection.

What’s Working (Sometimes)

There are signs that we’re onto something, even if we’re still fumbling. People stay – not forever, but long enough to matter. And when they leave, it’s often with care. We’ve had goodbyes that felt like love: handwritten notes, honest conversations, shared tears. That feels like a quiet kind of success.

Clients notice it too. They can feel the way we care for each other, the way our work is grounded in something mutual. One recently said, “I can tell that you and Clayre are tight. I wish I had that at work.” That comment landed like a reminder: the quality of our relationships sets the tone for everything else.

And we laugh. Often. We share absurd memes and random joys and ridiculous private jokes. We celebrate each other. We know that in a field where burnout is so common, joy isn’t frivolous – it’s a form of resistance. It’s part of the glue that holds everything together.

What We’re Still Learning: We are still learning how to receive feedback without letting it undo us. It’s hard not to take it personally, especially when it touches something tender. But we are practicing. Pausing. Asking ourselves, “What is this person trusting me with?” Trying to metabolize the discomfort and respond with care, not defensiveness.

We are learning how to hold firm and relational boundaries—saying no without closing the door and saying yes without self-abandoning. Naming clearly: “This is what we can offer. This is what we can’t. And we’re still here.”

We are learning to let go of the fantasy that we can get it right all the time. That shows up in how we stress over emails, replay conversations, and prepare for meetings like tests. But we’re realizing that good stewardship doesn’t mean perfection. It means presence. It means repair.

We are learning to rest without guilt. Sometimes that means one of us has to remind the other: “You don’t have to earn this.” We are unlearning the grind culture that told us our worth is realized in our output. Sometimes rest still feels like rebellion. Sometimes it feels like grief.

And most of all, we are learning to keep softening, even after harm. We’ve both been betrayed in places that claimed to be about care. It would be easy to shut down. But we’re choosing to keep our hearts intact. To keep risking intimacy. To keep believing that connection is possible. We are choosing this not because it’s easy, but because it’s necessary.

A Final Word

We didn’t write this because we have answers. We wrote it to tell the truth. About who we are, how we work, and how we’re trying to live into our values, not just in theory, but in practice. We believe that being human in the work of care is not a liability. It’s the whole point. We believe the revolution begins within: in how we relate to ourselves, to each other, and to the work.

And if you’re here with us (learning, unlearning, trying again), we want you to know: we see you. We welcome you. We’re in it with you.

If these reflections resonate with you—if you’re longing for a place to be met as you are, to rest inside the work instead of outrun it—Laura offers relational, experiential supervision and consultation for therapists, caregivers, and helping professionals. Her approach invites honesty, spaciousness, and care that moves in both directions. You can learn more and book a consultation with Laura here.