When passion becomes a nightmare: The power of togetherness in overcoming burnout

08:14 PM, 10^th of March 2012. I am just getting ready to lock the clinic and go home after my last session for today. My phone buzzes. It’s a message from a colleague. “Got a minute?” I call back. His voice is tired. “I don’t know who else to talk to. I just feel… done. Like I’ve got nothing left to give.”

We met the next day. He’s someone I’ve always seen as solid. One of those people you lean on when the caseload gets heavy. But as we talk, I notice the edge in his voice, the flatness behind his usual humour.  “I can’t switch off,” he says. “Even when I’m home, my head’s still here. I’m exhausted, and I hate that I’ve started to care less about the people I work with. I used to stay after hours to chat. Now I just want to get out as fast as I can. I still want to help but I simply don’t feel I can do it anymore. I love this job. Or… I used to.”

Everything he’s saying sounds familiar. Too familiar. Because lately, I’ve been feeling the same. The late nights, the constant crises, the sense that no matter what we do, it’s never enough. I’ve told myself it’s just a busy patch. But hearing him speak, I know it’s more than that.

I know what this feels like. Burnout. We don’t like the word, but that’s what it is. And it’s not just us. I can feel it. If two of us are this far gone, might there be anyone else in the team?

So, we started asking around, quietly at first. And guess what? We weren’t alone. Far from it.

That’s when the question came: What if we did something about it? Together.

We decided to create a space for us. A group, just for us, would meet every other week for exactly one year. A place to talk about the weight of this work. To share what’s hard. To listen without fixing.

Two weeks later, we sat in the boardroom of our clinic for our first session. Just a handful of us at the start. By the third session, more colleagues joined. By the fifth, the conversations had shifted something big. For the first time in months, I felt lighter walking out the door. Not because the work got easier, but because I wasn’t carrying it alone anymore.

We didn’t want another meeting that felt like work. So together, we shaped something different - a peer support model loosely based on the Balint approach. The Balint method, created in the late 1950s by Michael Balint, was one of the first structured ways for professionals to reflect on their work and support each other. It was originally designed for doctors, but the heart of it spoke to what we needed: a safe, consistent space to make sense of the pressures we carry, and how those pressures shape the way we show up for our clients and for each other.

The idea was simple: we’d meet regularly, bring real situations from our work, and explore them together. Not to fix each other. Not to hand out ready-made solutions. But to listen deeply, to understand, and to find patterns we couldn’t see on our own.

There was no “expert in the room.” No hierarchy. Just peers, sharing the load and reflecting out loud. Over time, those conversations started to shift things. We began to notice the ways stress was creeping into our decisions. We started to feel less alone. And, little by little, we started finding our own answers, together.

We also wanted a way to understand where we were starting from, and whether this group could actually make a difference. So, at the end of our first session, we each took a few minutes to complete two short questionnaires. One was the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which looks at the core signs of burnout: exhaustion, feeling disconnected from your work, and whether you still feel effective at what you do. The other was something called the Areas of Worklife Survey. That one digs into six parts of our jobs that can push us toward burnout: workload, fairness, control, values, reward, and sense of community. It didn’t take long, but the results were eye-opening. Seeing the patterns laid out like that gave us a clear picture of what we were dealing with, and it sparked conversations we might never have had otherwise.

During the first session we took time to get to know each other, to understand what are the main issues that we can address in our time together and what would be the best way to do that. We used mind-mapping and brain-storming to explore what might cause burnout, basically to find out what hurts, and where, and how, to find commons goals that the group wanted to achieve and identify paths and links to bridge the gaps between the issues and the goals. All the contributions were written down and arranged on a white board and used as a menu from which to choose themes of discussion in the following sessions. We wanted to create an experience in which we fully involved the group members rather than impose a prescribed set of interventions.

In the weeks that followed, we found a rhythm that worked for us. Every session began the same way: one of us would share a real situation from their work, something that had stayed with them, something they couldn’t quite shake. They spoke from memory, not from notes, because this wasn’t about the clinical details. It was about how it felt. What it brought up. Why it lingered.

The rest of us listened. Really listened. We asked just enough questions to understand what happened, not to give advice or jump in with fixes. Once the picture felt clear, the person who had shared would take a step back, sometimes leaning back in their chair, sometimes just sitting quietly, while the group began to talk it through.

Those conversations weren’t about solutions. They were about exploring the story from every angle, from how it made each and every one of us feel. What it brought up for us. We’d say things like, “If I were in your shoes, I think I’d feel…” or “If I were the client, maybe I’d sense…” Speaking in first person kept us grounded. It wasn’t theory. It was human.

Because we were peers, there was no single leader in the room. We all held the responsibility to keep the space safe, respectful, and focused. Our job was to protect the frame, not to control it. No one gave quick answers. No one told anyone what they should do. We stayed with the feelings, the relationships, the meaning behind the work.

At the end, the person who had shared would come back into the conversation. Often, they didn’t need to say much. You could see it on their face, the shift that comes when someone else carries your story for a while. When you realize you’re not the only one feeling what you feel.

Soon enough, these sessions opened doors we hadn’t even known were closed. We started noticing how the weight of the work was shaping our decisions. We began talking openly about exhaustion, awareness of our own resources and limits, assertivity and learning to say no, about the fear of losing our sense of purpose, about the tiny boundaries we’d let slip. And slowly, we began building our own ways forward.

Over the months we met, our conversations didn’t just stay at the surface. They opened doors to practical tools and experiments. Things that helped us hold the weight of this work a little differently. Sometimes, after a tough story, someone would say, “I keep feeling like I’m failing because others get more recognition than I do.” That led us into exercises that helped challenge those beliefs and rebuild a sense of fairness. Other times, it was about learning to pause, to breathe, to let the nervous system settle before diving into the next crisis.

We tried mindfulness in its simplest form: ten quiet minutes at the start of every session. Eyes closed, feet grounded, just letting the noise fall away. It sounds small, but after a week of constant demands, those ten minutes felt like a reset button.

There were moments when words weren’t enough, so we borrowed from drama and role play. Stepping into each other’s shoes to understand what our reactions were really saying. We used conversations drawn from existential work to reconnect with why we started this journey in the first place, and whether the way we were working was still aligned with the values we cared about most.

Nothing was pre-packaged. These ideas emerged because someone’s struggle called for them. Each tool was a response to what the group needed at that moment. And as the weeks went on, we realized we weren’t just talking, we were building something.

When the year came to an end, we spent our last session doing what we’d been learning to do all along, pausing, looking back, and asking the questions we so often forget to ask in this line of work: what has this meant for you? How have you changed? What do you want to carry forward?

Everyone was still there. The same people who walked in all those months ago, tired and frayed around the edges, sat together now with a different kind of energy. Lighter. Stronger. When we talked about what had shifted, the answers weren’t about big, dramatic transformations. They were about the quiet things that make everything else possible: gaining a sense of hope, feeling balanced again, feeling confident again, having the energy to show up not just for work but for life. Setting boundaries without guilt. Finding ways through the daily stress instead of feeling trapped by it.

Burnout scores, when we used the same two tools we used at the beginning of our journey, had dropped sharply, people were less exhausted, less disconnected, more present.

And the best part?

Months later, when we checked in again, the changes had held. The exhaustion hadn’t vanished from the world, but it wasn’t swallowing us whole anymore. And that, for me, was the real measure of success, not the numbers, though they told their own story, but the faces of people who could finally breathe again

And it wasn’t just about individuals. People spoke about the ripple effects at work, the conversations that hadn’t been happening before, the sense of being part of something again instead of feeling alone at your desk. More collaboration. More courage to ask for help and to offer it. Some even said, I’m enjoying my job again. That mattered. Because for a long time, many of us weren’t sure we ever would.

Looking back, what made the biggest difference wasn’t any single exercise or technique. It was the space we created together, a space where you didn’t have to wear the mask of being “the strong one,” where you didn’t have to rush to the next session without knowing how you can do the right thing for your clients, where someone would actually hear what you were carrying and say, “I know that feels, I am here for you.”

And here’s the truth: you don’t need a perfect plan to start this. You don’t need permission. You just need a room, a circle of people who care, and the courage to say, “What if we did this together?”

Because if there’s one thing I learned, it’s this: burnout thrives in silence. Recovery begins in connection.

As I walked out of that last session, I remember thinking how close we’d come to breaking, and how much lighter we all felt because we chose to lean in, together. No magic fix. No corporate wellness program. Just people willing to listen and share the weight.

And that’s really why I write these stories for you. Because I know how easy it is to believe that burnout is just part of the job. That nothing can change. But it can. It starts with small, human choices, like creating spaces where we can be honest, reflect, and support each other in ways that truly matter.

If this resonated with you, stay close. Every week in this newsletter, I share ideas, stories, and tools that help us do this work without losing ourselves in the process. Because recovery, ours and theirs, deserves better.

So, keep reading. Keep the conversation going. And maybe, just maybe, let this be the nudge to start your own circle. Who knows what might change for you?