EP 262: Why Helpers Burn Out- and what to do about it

The helpers ~ therapists, coaches, teachers, advocates ~ are burning out at alarming rates. We talk endlessly about self-care, caseload management, and having better boundaries but almost nobody is addressing the root cause. 

This is a special episode that I recorded for all the professionals who listen. All the helpers who show up day after day because they love to help the parents of kids with big, baffling behaviors. All the helpers who are tired and wondering how much longer they can keep doing this. 

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why working with clients in chronic protection mode pulls helpers into protection mode too - and how that's the real starting point of burnout
• Applying the "all behavior makes sense" framework to your own nervous system responses changes everything about how you work
• The skill that actually prevents burnout - and why bubble baths and calendar blocking aren't it

And if you want to learn more, you can join 4000+ other professionals and me in Making Sense of Baffling Behaviors- a 4-part free audio training for professionals!

Resources mentioned in this podcast:

• All Behavior Makes Sense {EP 198}

Read the full transcript at: RobynGobbel.com/burnout

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:39

So when your kid's behavior is baffling and yours is too, sometimes, yeah. I know. Let's take a break from all the babozle here on the baffling behavior.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Hey, hey, hey, everybody. Welcome. Or maybe this is a welcome back to another episode of the Baffling Behavior Show. I'm your host, Robin Gobel. And y'all, in today's episode, I'm gonna pivot just a touch and talk directly to all of the professionals who listen to the podcast. I know that there are a lot of you, and I know that you listen to the podcast as a way to support the work that you do with parents and caregivers and families. And today I'm going to talk right to you. I want to talk about something that really almost nobody that I hear of is talking about when they are talking specifically about burnout. Because y'all know we have a burnout problem, right? Whether you listen as a therapist or a parent coach or an educator or maybe you're an occupational therapist, just in some way you support the families of kids who have big, baffling behaviors, right? There is a burnout problem. We were burning out before 2020, like before the pandemic, which really turned everything completely upside down. And in the years since then, it's just gotten harder. Right. It's interesting to look at my 20 plus year career and really kind of grapple with the question of what has gotten better? And I don't know if that's kind of a question that we're all asking when we reach the age that I do, right? When we reach kind of middle age and we're in that reflective place, what has gotten better? But I really sometimes sit back and think, oh my gosh, what has gotten better? And in so many ways, since the pandemic, things have gotten so much harder. It's gotten harder for kids, it's gotten harder for families. And then of course, it's gotten harder for those of us who have really committed our lives to helping and supporting kids and families. And of course, there's so much conversation about self-care. We talk about, you know, from a from a professional standpoint, we talk about things like supervision, consultation, uh, managing your caseload, saying no when you need to, like enforcing your boundaries. And those are important things, absolutely very important things for our wellness, for our energetic boundaries, as well as our physical boundaries, of course. Those things are all very important. But I also really believe that there is a root cause of burnout that almost nobody is ever really addressing directly. And when I started addressing it directly for myself, I mean, really addressing it, that's when things started to change for me. And in a way, I didn't really even realize that it was what I was doing. A lot of this has been um, you know, I've become aware of it in retrospect, right? Like as I reflect back on really hard times. When did things shift for me in my work? What really has helped me do this really, really hard work for a really, really long time. And honestly, y'all with a lot of people. I've also been so privileged to work with so many professionals and support so many professionals over my career. And so I looked at what's helped me, what's helped my colleagues, what's helped my professional friends, what's helped the folks that I work with and support and train. And in today's podcast episode, I want to kind of share with you what I've learned from that and in a new lens at looking at burnout, a different way of understanding why this work wears on us the way that it does. And then I absolutely, I promise, we'll talk about. Okay, so now what? Like what's the path, what's the path forward? If it's possible with where you are right now or what you're doing, I want you to bring a parent to mind, a parent who has come into your office furious, right? Insisting to you that all of this stuff that you're teaching them or trying to support them with, it's just, it's not working, right? That you don't understand what's happening for them, that their kid is doing all this stuff on purpose, they're ruining their family, right? So just pause in a second and imagine what happens for you? What comes up for you? Maybe in this moment, as I invite you to reflect on a scenario like that, or also just like reach back in your memory and remember the last time that happened. I mean, y'all, it could be like today or yesterday. What happens inside your body? What happens in your body when you're with a parent or a child, even someone you're working with somebody and they're completely shut down? They really aren't responding to anything that you're saying. Right? They're staring at the floor. It feels like you've tried every tool in your toolbox and nothing is landing. Or what happens in your body when you get to the end of a week and it feels like every single session, you are just swimming upstream. And it's the end of the week, and you crawl to your car, and you're generally wondering whether you're actually helping anyone at all. What I hear from helpers, professionals, people who are supporting kids and families in some kind of way. And this can be in, it doesn't have to be in like a paid position, right? Like I've worked with folks who are volunteering at their church or running groups in their community, right? They, they're they're in a role in which they are there to help other people, right? What I hear from those folks so often, especially when we're talking about these really hard moments, these really hard weeks, is something like I feel like I'm failing. Or I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing at all. Or, and this one's my favorite, I feel like I should go and be a barista or work at a bookstore, right? Or some other, you know, favorite hobby-related retail store. And of course, y'all, that one's my favorite because I love coffee, I love books, you know, being, you know, being surrounded by coffee and books sounds like a really great day. But I also know when I start to fantasize about that, something's going on. Right? There is something to pay attention to in my own nervous system. And it isn't that my nervous system is failing me, it's giving me information.

unknown 8:20

Right?

SPEAKER_01 8:21

My mind and my heart and my brain and my body, my nervous system, it's giving me information. And it's doing exactly what it's designed to do. There's also some costs to it. There are also some repercussions that come along with falling into that place of helplessness or hopelessness or that flight place where we just want to like run away and do something else. There are costs to that. But first, we want to listen to the wisdom of it. The reality is that most of us weren't ever taught what to do with that wisdom. So instead of it kind of helping us or guiding us or supporting us or being uh a flag that says, hey, pay attention to something that's hurting. Instead of that, it kind of just like weighs us down, right? It we start to kind of almost reinforce this belief that something's wrong with me, I'm doing something wrong. And it's session after session and week after week until one day we decide to stop doing what we love because it's become something that we dread. And that is the most painful day for me when I watch professionals who love this work, they love their clients, they're good at this work. And they've come to a place of I don't want to do it anymore. I don't want to dread going to work anymore. I know that you love this work. And also just a real brief aside, okay. So, for all of you who are parents or caregivers, and you're listening to this episode, because usually I have podcast episodes for parents and caregivers, I want you to hear me say this so clearly. These professionals love their work. They love you, they love your kids. Well, at least the really good ones do. The professionals in our field experience what we call a parallel process. They feel so much the same way that you do as a caregiver. They feel confused, they feel overwhelmed, they feel unsupported. They feel like they're dealing with a situation that they weren't giving training or instructions on how to manage. They feel like they don't have the support that they need in order to be able to really do what they want to do, what they need, they know needs to be done in order to actually be helpful. Those are all the same things that you feel, right? As a parent, as a caregiver. And the professionals in this field who have dedicated their lives to supporting families like yours, they're supporting clients who are pretty much in chronically in protection mode, right? Because you probably recognize that at times you are chronically in protection mode. Just like your kids are pretty chronically in protection mode. And your kids' chronic protection mode impacts you. And so, of course, the clients, the families, the caregivers who you know reach out to a professional to support them, those parents, their nervous system impacts those professionals. And what that can mean is that one day a professional who really loves this work starts to feel dread is experience extreme exhaustion. It feels like there's no way out. And the only option is to just run away. I mean, that describes burnout for parents, but that's burnout for professionals too. And today that's what we're gonna focus on. Okay. I'm gonna focus on the professionals. And y'all, it doesn't actually start with working too hard. It starts by working with clients in chronic protection mode. Now, this is no fault of the clients. That's why they're seeking help. That's that's what they're supposed to do, right? And we work with clients who are in chronic protection mode. And then we, right, because of neuroception and stress and the lack of co-regulation that we need, kind of outside our jobs, right? All that kind of stuff, we end up falling into chronic protection mode too. Then our capacity to really truly resonate and be with our clients, it starts to decline. And then actually, what happens, what's what's even more important and more related to burnout, is that our capacity to truly resonate and be with ourselves starts to decline. If you've read Raising Kids with Big Baffling Behaviors, you've read about how I met interpersonal neurobiology expert Bonnie Badnock, how I met her at this point over a decade ago, and how she was the one who really challenged me to consider the idea that no behavior is maladaptive. And y'all, I was aghast at that idea first. I was like, what? Right? How could these kids' behaviors not be maladaptive? I actually thought maladaptive was a very compassionate and generous way for me to describe some of what were really bad behaviors, right? Because in maladaptive, I'm recognizing that that behavior came from somewhere. It started as adaptive and then became maladaptive. Eventually, y'all, eventually, I learned the science that helped me really know she was right. No behavior is maladaptive, all behavior makes sense. And here's what I mean by that behavior, any behavior, even the most baffling, even the behavior that makes parents drop into bed at night wondering how they could possibly do this again for one more day. And yes, y'all, even the behavior of the parent clients who come into your office, right? Even the most baffling behavior, it is simply what we can see on the outside that gives us some cues and clues about what might be happening on the inside. It's information about the nervous system, about the body. It's information about memory networks. All behavior starts as a neural firing, right? It starts well before we actually see it. And well before I mean like a micro moment before, right? But all behavior starts as a neural firing. It starts in the brain, it starts in the nervous system. I'm not going to rehash all the science here in this episode. You can check out episode 198, which is called All Behavior Makes Sense, has an accompanying infographic. You can join my Making Sense of Baffling Behaviors free audio training for professionals, which is registering now. It starts May 4th, 2026, but it's registering now and it's totally free. So if you do want to go deeper into the science, you can register for that. And of course, you can go and you can read or reread Raising Kids with Big Baffling Behaviors. So I'm just gonna give like the superest, briefest overview. Okay. When the nervous system feels safe, is experiencing felt safety, neurosives felt safety. We rest into what I call connection mode, the owl pathway. We're connected, we're regulated, we're curious. That doesn't mean we're calm, but we can pause before we react, right? We can hold disappointment without totally falling apart. We have access to our real, true, full, authentic selves. And when the nervous system detects danger, neurosceives danger, and for many of the children and families we work with, that danger detector is extremely sensitive for really good reasons, but it's extremely sensitive and tends to see danger everywhere. Then the protective side of the nervous system takes over. It shifts into protection mode. And depending on how activated the nervous system is, we are going to see very different behaviors. Some nervous systems go down the watchdog pathway, high energy, high activation, aggression, opposition, controlling behavior, defiance. The watchdog has energy and activation. And folks on their watchdog pathway are often hard to be around. Some nervous systems go possum. The energy drains out, shifts into like shutdown, dissociation, disconnection, going somewhere kind of far, far away. The possum is usually quiet. And the possum actually can be really easy to miss. Possums also can be hard to be with, but in a in a different kind of way. And possums can be hard to miss. Both the watchdog and the possum are trying to do the same thing, right? They're trying to survive. They're trying to find safety and return to connection mode. That is always the objective of the watchdog and the possum to find safety, return to connection mode. And when someone on the watchdog pathway or on the possum pathway is having a hard time finding safety and returning to safety, returning to connection mode. When they're having a hard time feeling safe when they are safe, then we know that that person has a very sensitized stress response system. They are spending a lot of time on the protection pathway. This is exhausting. The watchdog and the possum are doing the same thing. They're they're trying to survive, right? They're trying to find safety. When I can see it that way, when I can put on what I would call my x-ray vision goggles and look past the behavior to what the nervous system is really communicate, communicating, I become instantly more regulated because I find what's called coherence. It makes sense. Those are cues of safety. I now have the capacity to shift back into connection mode, reconnect with regulation, curiosity comes back online, judgment quiets down. And what's really cool, I think, that shift, that change in how I see, that is a tool. It's its own tool. It changes what my clients see when they look at me. What they see in my eyes changes them. Now, the part that I think is the most important, the part that I think that's left out of a lot of professional trainings is that everything I just said about children applies to their parents. And everything I just said about parents applies to you. Your own watchdog and possum don't turn off because you put on your therapist or educator or parent coach or OT or whatever hat. Your longing for connection doesn't switch off because you're in a professional role. Your nervous system is doing exactly what nervous systems are supposed to do: scanning for safety, looking for connection, responding to the activation and the intensity in the room. When a parent comes in furious, telling you that nothing is working, your nervous system doesn't experience that as neutral professional feedback. It experiences it as a threat. Now, real quick before I go on, just a super quick aside to anyone listening as a parent or a caregiver, right? You're not a listening as a professional, please, please, please don't sense your feelings, right? Don't censor the feelings that you're bringing to the people who are helping you. Don't worry about how their nervous system is going to shift into protection mode. You don't have to worry about that. You don't have to take care of their feelings. We want you to come with us with your dysregulation so that we can offer you something new, regulation. I mean, truly, this is what we want. This is our job. We want you to bring us your dysregulation. And it's also true that it's really hard to have a job receiving somebody else's dysregulation. And it's really hard to maintain really strong energetic boundaries so that you don't internalize all that dysregulation yourself. Now, depending on your own history, so maybe depending on how often your younger self learned that it was your job to make sure the adults around you okay. And that's just one example. But depending on your own history, that is gonna impact how you respond to that quote unquote threat, right? The threat of a very dysregulated client coming into your office. Your own history is gonna impact how you respond. And you might have a very fast response that pulls you down a very familiar or comfortable pathway. So for me, sometimes what can happen is that my watchdog brain, oh, it's hard to admit this out loud, but my watchdog brain can kind of come in with some indignation, right? And so what could happen if I'm with somebody who is talking about the same thing in their kid over and over and over again, right? Because of my own past, because of my own past experiences and my own, you know, sensitivities, I can go into my watchdog brain and maybe even kind of feel something like, oh my gosh, seriously, we're still talking about this months and months later. Like, are you even listening to me? Why are you even coming here? Oh, you guys, I hate to really admit that publicly on the podcast. Um, for all the parents listening. But I also think, you know, if you're a parent and you're listening, I want you to hear that we love our job so much and we love the work that we do with you so much that we really want to learn to hear those, you know, those watchdog words and that watchdog energy. We really want to learn how to be with those words and with that energy with some curiosity. Right. And sometimes, y'all, sometimes my possum brain can take over in a session. And it, my possum brain can leave me feeling something like, oh my gosh, I'm so terrible at this. I Help anybody. I need to be a barista. Oh, also for all the baristas listening, I know your job's really hard. I'm not saying that I think it's any easier and that I would be relieved of all of these feelings if I just worked as a barista. Your job is really hard. I just really love coffee. And so I have this like fantasy that being a barista is like the perfect job. I know that it's not as a fantasy. Okay. Y'all, none of these things are true. I'm not terrible at my job. I do help people, right? My dear, wonderful, hardworking clients aren't just ignoring everything I have to say and coming in week after week to complain about me. Like none of those things are true. So much of this work is being with the reality that having a thought or having a feeling doesn't make it a true thought or feeling. But it is information. The truth is that all true selves are lovable. The truth is that all nervous systems are looking to find coherence. The truth is that my client's experience, even of me, is not something for me to take personally. It's information and helps me think about where my client curly is and where I should go next with them. When I'm able to observe my own watchdog and possum reactions, not shame it, not try to muscle through it, but just notice it with genuine curiosity, I get so much more useful information about what my client might be experiencing, about what the child in the family is carrying, and sometimes about the tender parts that are connected to my own history that are still waiting to be seen and tended to. This is the work that actually prevents burnout, not bubble baths or, you know, protecting your calendar. And again, all these things are fine. And if you like to do them, do them and definitely honor your own boundaries with scheduling. But they're not the route. The root is can I stay regulated in the presence of dysregulation? Can I resonate with my clients without drowning in their experience? Can I be with them, be fully present, fully myself without losing myself? This is a skill, a learnable, practicable skill. And when you develop it, something I think pretty cool happens. The work gets easier. Not because your clients get easier, but because you are no longer fighting yourself. I mentioned a few moments ago that I believe all true selves are lovable. This belief comes from a mentor that I had a long time ago. She said something in a group training that genuinely stopped my breath. She said, I've never met a true self I haven't fallen in love with. And what I took from that, what I still carry with me every single day, is this. When I'm not feeling love for a client, when I find myself with that whisper of contempt or frustration or just pure exhaustion, I don't have to feel ashamed of it. I don't have to act on it. I don't have to believe it's true. I can pause. I can remember. I'm not seeing their true self right now. I'm seeing their watchdog or their possum brain, or I'm bringing my own watchdog and possum brain to work and seeing them through that lens. Those protectors, the watchdog and the possum, they're doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing. Protecting something very precious underneath. And my own watchdog and possum brain isn't evidence that there's something wrong with me. It's just evidence that I'm human. And it deserves the same curiosity, the same compassion, the same all behavior makes sense that I offer to the families that I work with. When I personally got really lucky and started therapy with a therapist who really was able to go with me into the deepest, darkest, scariest places, I was able to go there because I knew that she believed the same thing. I knew that when she felt irritated or contempt for me or annoyance with me, that she would see those feelings as information. She'd get curious. She'd seek help. She wouldn't change how she felt about me. I really, really, really needed to believe those things, to have enough safety to show up in therapy the way that I needed to for important things to finally be able to change and shift. We all deserve to have helpers who believe that. All of us, all of the families we work with, all of the parents and caregivers who listen to this podcast, we deserve that. You're listening to this podcast because you still love this work. Or maybe because you did love it and you want to love it again. That matters so much. My invitation to you then, if you want to go deeper in this framework, the neuroscience, the practical tools, and especially the being with yourself piece, the self-attunement piece, come hang out with me and about 4,000 other professionals the week of May 4th for the Making Sense of Baffling Behaviors free audio training. It's for professionals, anybody who works with parents and caregivers of kids with baffling behaviors. It's delivered in a private podcast. So you'll listen just like you're listening to this podcast, but you do have to sign up to get access to it. It's not just available in a podcast app. You have to go sign up for it. The training consists of four 30-minute audio trainings that you can listen to on your own time, even while you're multitasking, doing laundry, right? Washing dishes, doing your weekend chores. And then if you want to, you could join me and my colleague Rose, who is so amazing. I can't wait for you to meet her if you've never met her for two live QAs during the week. All you got to do, go to Robengobel.com slash bafflingbehaviors to sign up. It's an audio training that runs May 4th through the 11th, I think, 2026. So if you're listening to this in the future and it's not those dates anymore, then just hold on because I run this audio training at least once a year. And if you get my emails, you will hear the next time that I offer this training. So for all the parents and the caregivers who are still listening, I hope that this little peek into the heart and mind of your helpers leaves you feeling relieved, leaves you knowing that a good helper, one who is really taking care of themselves and getting good consultation and is grounded in relational neuroscience, isn't judging you. You can bring them all your hard feelings and they will hold them without judgment. If you don't have a helper who is able to do that, just know that I can do that. Now, you might not ever actually talk to me. I know there's thousands and thousands and thousands of you all over the world who are listening. I might actually never interact with you. But what listeners have told me is that even if you never meet me, it matters if you can really believe the truth that I could hold all of it if you brought it to me. I could hold all of it. I would see everything about you, your thoughts, behaviors, your feelings about your kid through this lens. And I would never judge you. There's not one thing you could say to me that I haven't heard before. And I've never wavered from this. You're lovable, you're worthy of compassion. The intensity of your feelings is evidence of the intensity of your hurt. It's not evidence of your goodness. It's certainly not evidence of your goodness as a human or a parent. I founded the Baffling Behavior Training Institute to be able to help more professionals get the support that they need so that more of them can give you the support that you need. Alrighty, y'all. It has been fun to do an episode just for professionals, not just for. I know lots of you are parents and caregivers and you're listening, but I really wanted to speak to professionals in this episode. And I think I might just do one more next week. Remember, you can always go to rob and google.com slash podcast, use the search bar. So if you are looking for a topic that you would like me to address, go to robingobel.com slash podcast, use the search bar. You can also go to robandgobel.com slash free resource hub, and you can get access to about 25-ish free resources. You'll get access to them all at once, and you'll have like eternal access to them. So that's robanggobel.com slash free resource hub. Otherwise, I want you to make sure you're subscribed to the baffling behavior show so that next week, when I'm back with a new episode, you are back here as well. All right, y'all. Until then. Bye.