Working with burnout

Work related burnout is showing up in therapy rooms with increasing frequency, and yet most practitioners feel underprepared to address it with the structured, evidence-informed confidence their clients need. This is a hands-on workshop that gives you exactly that. You will leave with a clear framework for understanding, assessing and treating burnout in individual therapy, along with a set of practical tools you can bring directly into your work with clients.  This workshop is for therapists and psychologists who want to move beyond generic stress interventions and into targeted, confident burnout treatment. 

Background to the workshop

Burnout’s inclusion in the ICD-11 gave it formal recognition, but specifically as a phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress, not a diagnosable condition in its own right. This aspect of the definition is important to recognise – burnout is a systemic issue, but it hasn’t stopped people experiencing burnout from showing up in individual therapy rooms in growing numbers. The available clinical literature, however, is still weighted heavily towards organisational-level interventions: policy change, workload redesign, management training. Practitioners working one-to-one with a burnt-out client are left with comparatively little to draw on, despite often being the ones actually treating it. This is important because burnout goes beyond stress and tiredness, it is a multi-dimensional condition encompassing emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and a diminished sense of professional efficacy and its effects on a person’s wellbeing, relationships, and working life can be profound. Many therapists and psychologists report real uncertainty about how to define burnout clearly, how to assess for it, and how to structure their approach once it is identified. Without a coherent clinical framework, it is easy to default to generic interventions that do not adequately address what clients are actually experiencing. 

What you will gain from this workshop

This workshop offers practical answers to the clinical challenges burnout presents. By the end of the day, you will have: 

• A thorough grounding in the three core domains of burnout (physical and emotional exhaustion, mental distancing from the work and reduced sense of professional efficacy) and how they present differently across individuals, giving you the clarity to identify and name what you are seeing in the room 

• Familiarity with evidence-based assessment tools for burnout that you can incorporate into your intake process and ongoing clinical work 

• A flexible formulation framework, developed by Dr Claire Plumbly, that brings structure and coherence to your treatment planning without constraining your therapeutic style 

• Practical intervention ideas across the key recovery domains, touching on boundary setting, restoring a sense of control and supporting return to work (with one of these covered in more depth).   

• The clinical judgement to match your approach to presentation complexity and stage of recovery, so a straightforward case and a more entrenched one are treated differently rather than run through the same generic plan. 

About this workshop

This workshop is led by Dr Claire Plumbly, a UK clinical psychologist and EMDR consultant specialising in burnout, trauma, anxiety and PTSD, and the author of Burnout: how to manage your nervous system before it manages you, published in the US as The Trauma of Burnout. Claire’s approach integrates EMDR, compassion-focused therapy (CFT), polyvagal theory and trauma-informed practice, and it is this combination of specialist expertise and hands-on clinical experience that shapes how the workshop is taught.  

Rather than primarily didactic, the session is structured to be practical throughout: short presentations introduce key concepts and frameworks, which then feed directly into experiential exercises and small group discussion, so that ideas are tested and applied rather than simply absorbed. Video demonstrations offer concrete illustrations of clinical approaches in action, and case-based scenarios give participants the opportunity to work through real-world clinical situations in a structured way. Dr Plumbly’s formulation tool, developed from her specialist work with burnt-out clients, is introduced and practised during the workshop, so participants leave with hands-on familiarity rather than simply a handout to read later.  

Who will benefit from this workshop? 

This workshop is suited to therapists, psychologists and counsellors who are already working within an evidence-based framework, whether ACT, CBT, CFT, mindfulness-based approaches, or a combination, and who want to extend their skills to work more effectively with burnout. It will be useful both to those who frequently encounter burnout in their caseload and to those who want to feel better equipped when it arises. Participants should have a working knowledge of at least one evidence-based therapeutic modality; this is not an introductory course, and the material assumes a degree of existing clinical experience.