therapy for therapists and healthcare professionals
Therapy for Therapists and Healthcare Professionals in FL
Clinician Burnout · Compassion Fatigue
Everyone else has someone to call. They call you.
maybe you can relate
Who I Work With
Seaside is for the clinician who has spent years being the person everyone turns to, and doesn't have that person herself. You would recognize compassion fatigue in a colleague right away. In yourself, it just feels like being tired.
Maybe you can relate. There's the drive home where you're reflecting on a session that ended two hours ago. You're managing your own stress while you help everyone else manage theirs.
Maybe you can relate. You have a full schedule with no room in the day just for you. You know exactly what boundaries you'd recommend to a client. Holding them yourself is another thing.
From the outside, you look like the one who has it handled. Your colleagues and your clients believe it. The distance between how composed you look and how much you're actually carrying wears on you, and it's harder to admit when staying composed is part of the job description.
what burnout looks like
Signs of Therapist Burnout and Compassion Fatigue
It looks like a full schedule, current documentation, and a clinician who feels emotionally drained by the end of the week.
Burnout and compassion fatigue overlap. Most clinicians carry both. Here's what they tend to look like from the inside.
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Physical exhaustion is often the first thing you notice.
Trouble sleeping, tension in your jaw and shoulders, headaches, stomach problems, and getting sick more often than you used to.
Dread is more physical than it sounds. A heaviness that builds as the day goes on. A tightening before a session you used to look forward to. Then a client cancels and what you feel first is relief. Everyone welcomes an unexpected hour now and then. It's worth paying attention when you feel that relief each time.
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You're tired in a way that sleep doesn't resolve.
You take the week off. You still check messages about the high-risk client. You come back rested, but within a few days it's as though you never left.
This is the most common sign of burnout among clinicians. Time away helps when the problem is the schedule. It doesn't do much when the problem follows you home.
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Clients start to feel less like people and more like a schedule. You notice yourself watching the clock. This is the sign clinicians find hardest to say out loud. It's what happens when you spend years close to other people's pain without enough room to recover.
You pull back from friends, decline the dinner, leave the group text unanswered — because you've been listening all day and you have nothing left for it.
If you protect your work by giving up everything around it, eventually you have less to bring to the work too.
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Notes pile up. You write them at night, days after the session, or you leave out things you'd normally include. You put off the insurance paperwork and the treatment plans until the last possible hour.
What happens in the room matters more. You skip a hard conversation you'd normally have. You end with a client sooner than you should. You find reasons not to take the complex case. This is usually the point where clinicians start to worry about themselves, and that worry is worth listening to. Being tired enough that it reaches your work is a different problem than a full inbox.
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Imposter syndrome isn't caused by burnout. Most clinicians who have it have had it a long time, often since training. When you're exhausted, it gets louder — the idea that you've been getting by on luck sounds more believable when you're too tired to question it.
You over-prepare. You review the chart one more time, rehearse the family meeting before the family meeting, document well past what the case requires. Some of that is good practice. Some of it is the same pattern you'd notice in a client: if you can plan for everything, maybe no one will find out.
Along with it comes the sentence I hear most from clinicians: I of all people should know better. You're exhausted, and then you criticize yourself for being exhausted at all, as though the training was supposed to make you exempt. It doesn't. Doing this kind of work is itself the strongest known risk factor for burnout, so it comes with the job rather than with any failing on your part.
THE HATS YOU WEAR
The Invisible Load That Clinicians Carry
You hold a lot of roles. Someone's wife, someone's mother, someone's daughter. The one who runs the household. And then the professional one, the clinician everyone assumes is fine.
For most of the women I see in this field, the caregiving role never fully comes off. You spend the day attending to other people, then walk in the door and begin again, this time for your children, your partner, your parents. It's the same work, redirected.
Underneath all of it is the invisible load: the mental calendar only you are keeping. The progress notes still open. The permission slip due Friday. The fact that nothing has been taken out for dinner. It's real work. It just doesn't show up anywhere anyone can see it.
It's also part of why your nervous system never fully powers down, even when you finally relax at the end of the day.
work with someone who knows your whole story
Therapy for Therapists
The hard part isn't deciding you want your own therapist. It's finding the right one.
Hi, I'm Gail — a Licensed Mental Health Counselor with nearly three decades in medical and mental health settings including hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and private practice.
Outside of the therapy room, I'm a wife, a stepmom to two beautiful daughters, a grandmother, and a cat mom to three. I'm happiest behind a camera, on a pickleball court, or working on one of the endless projects at the coastal-themed home my husband and I share.
I'm just a step ahead of you on this shoreline — and I'd be glad to walk alongside you.
the seaside approach
How Therapy for Therapists Works
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Your emotional and physical well-being are connected.
I pay attention to the patterns that shape how you feel day to day — how you're sleeping, how stress is showing up in your body, how perimenopause might be part of the picture — and help you understand how they're feeding into your mood and your sense of yourself.
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So much of what keeps you stuck isn't the situation itself — it's the way your mind keeps replaying it.
We look at the all-or-nothing thinking, the negative self-talk, the guilt, and put it back in proportion — so it stops running the show.
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You've gotten yourself this far.
The insight and resourcefulness that have carried everyone around you — that's what we build on. We start from what's already working in you.
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Sometimes you don't need to unpack everything — you just need to figure out the next step.
The decision you keep circling. The conversation you're dreading. We start there.
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The Integrative Approach is the thread that ties it together.
I draw from all of the above — CBT, mind-body work, solution-focused and strength-based approaches — and shape it around your life instead of the other way around.
GETTING STARTED
What to Expect
Meet. We start with a conversation, either a first session or a free Shoreline Conversation. It's a chance to see if we're the right fit.
Reflect. In our first sessions, we'll spend time exploring what brought you here, what you're hoping to change or better understand, and what you've been carrying. Together, we'll begin mapping out what support can look like for you.
Begin. By the end of the first session, you'll have a clearer sense of how we'll work together, a place to begin processing what's been weighing on you, and practical next steps to help you move forward.
Therapy at Seaside is collaborative and tailored to your goals, at a pace that fits your everyday. This time is dedicated to you.
Frequently asked questions about therapy for therapists AND HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONALS
FAQs
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Most of us do.
Surveys consistently find that mental health professionals seek their own therapy at far higher rates than the general population, and many started during training.
So the question usually isn't whether it's appropriate — you already know it is, and you've probably recommended it to a colleague this month.
Most of the clinicians I see still find their work meaningful. They're here to make sure it doesn't cost them everything around it.
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This is the reason most clinicians give for putting therapy off.
Between supervision relationships, consultation groups, referral partners, and shared trainings, the list of people genuinely available to you gets short and fast.
Working with someone outside your immediate area helps.
I see clients across Florida. Sessions are private and held through secure, HIPAA-compliant telehealth platform, with the same confidentiality protections you already explain to your own clients.
If you're weighing a possible dual relationship, tell me who's in your circle and I'll tell you whether I'm a good fit or whether a referral would serve you better.
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Yes. They overlap, and most clinicians have some of both.
Burnout comes from the conditions around the work — the caseload, the documentation, the institution, the lack of support. It tends to show up as exhaustion, cynicism, and the sense that you're not doing the job as well as you used to.
Compassion fatigue comes from the exposure itself, the cumulative cost of being close to other people's suffering week after week. Telling them apart matters, because they don't respond to the same changes. One usually calls for something structural. The other calls for somewhere to put what you've absorbed.
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Yes. It's most of what we end up working on.
In this profession the line between work and home tends to blur first, because you're rewarded for being available and it's rarely obvious what that's costing you.
We look at where your time and energy are actually going, what genuinely requires you, and what you can hand off. Then we work on the harder part, which is holding the boundary once someone is disappointed by it.
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Yes. Nurses, physicians, physical and speech therapists, social workers, and coaches carry a version of the same load: high responsibility, high expectations, and other people's hardest days taken in at close range.
The details differ by field. The exhaustion is remarkably consistent. Much of my career was spent in hospitals, rehabilitation, and skilled nursing, so the pressures of clinical work in a medical setting are familiar to me.
the seaside list
From the Shores of Seaside
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find joy in the in-between
Let’s Dive In.
So much of life happens in the in-between.
I would be honored to help you find a little more balance there — and maybe even some joy. Even on the days it's hard to see.
