Why School Counselors Are SO TIRED (It’s Not Burnout)

If you’re exhausted in a way that rest doesn’t fix, this episode is for you.

School counselors are often told they’re burned out, so they’re handed self-care tips, boundary advice, and mindset shifts that never quite work. There’s a reason for that.

In this episode, I unpack the research that shows what school counselors are actually dealing with- and why calling it burnout misses the point. When you name the real problem, the way you relate to your exhaustion, your work, and your expectations changes completely.

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Join the next-level conversation in my Substack.

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Want support with real-world strategies that actually work on your campus? We’re doing that every day in the School for School Counselors Mastermind. Come join us! 

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All names, stories, and case studies in this episode are fictionalized composites drawn from real-world circumstances. Any resemblance to actual students, families, or school personnel is coincidental. Details have been altered to protect privacy.

This work is part of the School for School Counselors body of work developed by Steph Johnson, LPC, CSC, which centers role authority over role drift, consultative practice over fix-it culture, adult-designed systems and environments as primary drivers of student behavior, clinical judgment over compliance, and school counselor identity as leadership within complex systems.

Chapters

• 0:13 Soul Tired, Not Just Busy
• 2:47 Rethinking Burnout’s Definition
• 4:24 Moral Distress And Injury Explained
• 5:12 High Demand, Low Control Trap
• 9:16 Blocked From Using Your Skills
• 12:56 Vicarious Trauma Accumulates Quietly
• 18:10 Systems Returned To Function, Not Health

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:07

Last week somebody walked in my office and asked me how I was doing. And without even thinking about it, I said, My soul is tired. I didn't say, I'm tired or I'm busy. It was like an instant reaction. My soul is tired. Because I'd been reliving a really disturbing case involving some former students while I was preparing to go to court. I was handling a big safety concern on campus. And then I was fielding some really random, weird parent concerns, along with all the ordinary stuff that you and I have to confront all the time. But here's the thing: I know I'm not the only one that feels like that. Because there's this exhaustion that school counselors talk about that goes way deeper than the workload. It's not the kind of tired that you get over after the weekend or the kind of tired that even a whole summer break can touch. Sometimes it is something completely different. And for years in school counseling, we've been calling this burnout. We've been having conversations around setting boundaries, practicing more self-care, getting massages, journaling, using the right apps, right? But what if we've been treating the wrong problem the whole time? What if the reason that none of those things ever feels like it works is because what you're experiencing isn't burnout at all? Today I want to show you what research actually says is going on and why that understanding is going to change everything for you. Hey school counselor, welcome back. Why are you so tired all the time? And I don't just mean physically exhausted. I mean that bone deep, nothing helps kind of tired that doesn't go away after a weekend or even a whole break. You've probably been told it's burnout and that you need better self-care or stronger boundaries. But what if we've been calling this the wrong thing the entire time? And that's why none of the solutions that anyone gives you ever works. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity in your work and maybe a little bit of rebellion, you're in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast. So in the education world, it seems like we throw out the word burnout constantly. But the term burnout, as it was originally defined by Christina Maslock, isn't just being tired. Maslock described burnout as this combination of feeling emotionally exhausted, feeling a depersonalization in your work, and then feeling this sense of reduced personal accomplishment. And those things are happening in response to these chronic stressors that are in the workplace. But here's the part that everybody always skips over when we look at burnout research. And I've been guilty of this myself. Burnout research starts with the assumption that the role itself is sound. Meaning we begin the journey by assuming that the work role of the individual is healthy, and that the stress is just coming from some sort of overload within that role. But the assumption doesn't hold up for school counselors. What actually fits us better, and what I'm seeing more and more talk around in healthcare and other helping professions are the ideas of moral distress and moral injury. These ideas were first articulated by a psychiatrist, Jonathan Shea, who worked with combat veterans. Here's what moral injury looks like. It's when you know what effective ethical care looks like, but the system prevents you from providing it and you're still held responsible for the outcome. Does that sound familiar? Because we talked about that in the episode right before this one, where we were talking about these standards of being held to an expectation, but having absolutely no authority on campus. So this is not burnout. This is chronic ethical conflict. And because it's not burnout, it produces a very different kind of exhaustion. So there's a really well-established body of research that shows that lack of control, not just workload, is one of the strongest predictors of long-term occupational stress. And when you look at the research, one of the most cited models that is used is called the job demand control model. It was developed by Robert Karasek, and his research showed that high demands plus low control is a toxic combination for most workers. But high demands with high control is actually a lot more sustainable. So take a minute and think about that. Think about where you as a school counselor sit. We are all in high demand, low control, right? We almost sit in that quadrant of the model by design. Because you're accountable for it that you don't have the authority to influence. And this isn't because you haven't advocated enough or you don't have the right mindset. This is a structural stressor that has predictable psychological consequences. So when people in your family or your friends in the community kind of look at you strangely, like, why can't you just let all this go? That's telling you that they have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the kind of stress you deal with actually works. So lack of control is one piece, but there's another thread of research that really matters here too, especially if you have formal clinical training. Studies on job satisfaction and professional identity show that when workers are consistently prevented from using their highest level skills, their job satisfaction tanks. So even when they control for workload and number of hours worked, it still happens. You see this all over the healthcare literature, especially among nurses or mental health professionals that are working through some sort of agency. When you're consistently prevented from using the full scope of your skills, you no longer feel satisfied by the work. So it's not about how much you're doing, it's the repeated experience of knowing what should happen, but you're actively being blocked from doing that. So this applies if you have a clinical license for sure. Maybe you have your clinical social work licensure, maybe you're a licensed professional counselor or something of that nature. You've gone through the thousands of hours of supervision and consultation. But I think it also matters to you if you don't, because school counselors are often trained in clinically oriented programs. We are trained next to the clinical folks almost side by side with just a couple of school courses thrown in, right? And I think it speaks to why some people feel so bewildered when they finally get a school counseling job on a campus. Because they're thinking, I spent all this time and intention learning all these counseling skills, and now you're not even going to let me use them. This doesn't make any sense. So, you know, maybe you're on a campus where you assess a student either formally or informally, right? And you know exactly what intervention they need, but you get told you have to assign them to the lunch bunch group instead, right? That gap creates frustration, it creates self-doubt, and eventually you end up disengaging from the work. And that's not a personal weakness on your part, it's just a very predictable psychological response to role distortion. And then there's another piece to this tiredness. Let's talk about vicarious trauma for a minute. And I want to really be precise here because I don't want to talk about it in the way that you see through most pop psychology, right? I'm going to be very intentional in this discussion. The idea of vicarious trauma was formalized by Charles Figley. And his work on secondary traumatic stress showed that when you have repeated exposure to other people's trauma, it can lead to measurable psychological effects, even if you are highly trained to avoid that. So here's an important detail that we really need to look at that doesn't get talked about a lot. Vicarious trauma does not mean that you feel overwhelmed in the moment. Vicarious trauma accumulates quietly, especially when you don't have any sort of structured processing or consultation going on for yourself. The crud collects incrementally over the years, almost unnoticed, until it completely clogs the pipe, right? Same thing here. And I think this piece is crucial for us because most other helping professions assume that you have access to supervision or consultation as a protective factor. They actually set themselves up that way. But we're often told in schools to do trauma-adjacent work without either one of those things. And that's dangerous. That's not showcasing resilience. That is exposure without a container to hold it. And then we can go further down this exhaustion rabbit hole by talking about the systems-level trauma that's going on. Because when you read the research trauma, it makes it really clear that there is a distinction between returning to function and actually recovering. And in the case of our schools, particularly post-COVID, they returned to function without recovery, right? If you were working in schools at that time, you'll remember there was no stabilization phase. There was no system-wide decompression opportunity for students, for parents, or for staff. We were just expected to re-engage in productivity and really almost amp it up even more, right? Because everybody was telling us you have to make up these gaps. We've lost almost an entire year. We've got to go, go, go, go, go. I've said often in my school for school counselors mastermind, I wonder what would have happened had we actually taken that first year back to decompress and re-regulate and get everybody healthy. Where we weren't focusing so much on the academic skills or the perceived decline, but we were just teaching kids that school can be safe, helping them recover from mass trauma that none of us had ever experienced before. And helping them learn how to do school again, want to be in the educational environment again. And nothing for nothing give us a chance to incentivize it a little bit. But we didn't get any of those opportunities. And I think that is a large part of why we're seeing such dysfunction and dysregulation in schools right now. Anyway, I digress. When these systems don't regulate, according to the research, the emotional load gets displaced onto individuals. So then as school counselors, we become the pressure valve for all of the dysregulation. So if you're in a situation right now where you feel like your tiered intervention is inverted, meaning you feel like you are constantly just responding to tier three concerns all the time, and you can't even stop for a minute to imagine how to implement tier one, that is not because you've missed something or you've done something wrong. It's likely because your system was never allowed the opportunity to recalibrate. And so this is why all of the traditional self-care advice so often misses the mark for us. Because self-care interventions are designed to address depletion. But what all the research that I just walked you through points to is chronic role strain and ethical conflict and low control. You can't self-care your way out of moral injury, and you can't boundary your way out of authority that you don't even have. So the relief to all of this starts with first just naming the correct problems. In psychology, clinical counseling, social work, medicine, emergency response. Consultation is considered their protective infrastructure. It is intentionally put into place to reduce distorted self-blame or to address ethical drift or to help practitioners not have to feel like they're doing their work in isolation. But in school counseling, we're just told to set boundaries, take care of yourself, and be confident, right? Y'all, that is not a substitution for consultation. And the research is super clear about that. Humans do not do high stakes helping work well in isolation. We just can't. We're not wired for it. So if you're exhausted right now, here is what the research has to say about you. Your response is normal. Your conditions are abnormal. So you don't need to be tougher, you don't need to manage your time better or set stronger boundaries. You need a role that makes sense. And naming what's happening in an accurate way is the first step toward making your job make sense. So we've named it. So remember what I said earlier about consultation being a protective infrastructure. Those other fields treat that as essential, not just a nice to have support. That is how every other helping profession operates. Psychologists consult with each other. Medical professionals do case rounds. Those things are considered essential to doing the work well and being able to do it sustainably. But somehow school counselors have just been left to figure all this stuff out on their own. And so let me be real clear on my feelings about that. I don't think that's okay. And I don't think that is how you should have to work. This is exactly why I created my School for School Counselors Mastermind. It's not this Facebook group where people show up to vent, right? Or some course that you go through and you learn something and then you forget it. It is ongoing structured consultation that can help do things like reduce moral injury, address role distortion, prevent you from feeling so isolated. Consultation is not a venting session. It's not commiseration. It's not a leader asking, how does everybody feel about that? That is not it. Real consultation has structure, it has clinical direction, and it involves someone with expertise helping you through ethical dilemmas, diagnostic questions, intervention planning, and navigating school systems, not just validating that your work is hard. So if all you're getting is a space to vent, that'll feel good in the moment, but it doesn't reduce vicarious trauma. It doesn't prevent ethical drift, and it doesn't build on the clinical thinking you need to navigate the complexities of student mental health. The research on why consultation works is very specific. It works because it introduces outside perspective, it challenges cognitive distortions, it provides corrective feedback, and it helps you separate what you can control from what you can't. But all of that requires someone who knows how to consult, not someone who's just willing to lend a listening ear. My mastermind is led by someone with clinical training, me, who understands consultation as a professional practice, not a feel-good gathering. I have invested years and years and hundreds of hours of study into becoming the best professional consultant that I can be. And in our mastermind, we work through real cases with diagnostic precision. We talk about ethical boundaries and intervention fidelity and how to maintain your clinical orientation inside of a system where you're not allowed to use it. And I'll be honest with you, when I said my soul was tired last week, that was kind of a big deal because that doesn't happen very often anymore. And I don't have a magical self-care routine. I can tell you, I wish I did. But it's because I engage in regular consultation myself. I process cases with colleagues who think clinically, and then I provide that same level of consultation to my mastermind members every week. So that's how I know that this research is legit and that it works. Consultation is what keeps that moral injury from accumulating. It's what prevents that feeling of being so tired from being your permanent state. That's the difference between well-meaning support and having a true infrastructure. So if you're dealing with moral injury or role distortion or isolation, you need that kind of infrastructure that consultation provides. You can learn more about our end of things at schoolforschoolcounselors.com/slash mastermind because you deserve to work with clarity and support and people who get it. And I'm looking forward to you jumping right in. Hey, I'm Steph Johnson. Thanks for listening. Take care of yourself out there this week. And remember, you do not have to do this alone.