Lisa Alfrey
My name is Lisa Alfrey and I am a Counselling Psychologist in Training at Regent’s College. My research explores the counselling psychologists’ experience of burnout using the qualitative method of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). I explored what the experience was like and how the participants managed. It was my aim to look beyond the commonly used meanings of the word by attempting to understand the lived experience for that individual.
The meaning of an experience can change constantly due to our ever-growing lived experience impacting upon our perspective. For example, my perspective about ‘burnout’ has slowly changed during the process of conducting this research. Originally I thought of it as an existential crisis, where a person is searching for meaning after a breakdown in their world. Now that I’m coming to the end of the research, I feel that I’ve experienced something like ‘burnout’ and I would describe it as an experience of disconnection from oneself, others and the world. I felt in a fog, like a robot going through the motions of my daily activities, but not feeling anything. I began exploring this topic with the naive assumption that I would be aware of any impact I felt from listening the participant’s material. However, I was not aware of the significant effect that hearing such raw accounts of ‘burnout’ would have on me. I found myself procrastinating excessively before beginning the analytic process. I would sit in front of the transcripts and be unable to concentrate on what was in front of me. There has been a tension between the fear of discovering what I may have missed in the interview process and the idea that I may miss a significant theme in the transcript. When looking back, I realise that my experience of ‘burnout’ paralleled the descriptions of my participants. I believe that my lived experience influenced the themes that I found and the way that I made meaning from their experiences.
Five out of six of my participants felt a loss of connection with others, as they did not have the energy for others outside of work and wanted to be left alone. The emotional impact was experienced within the workplace and outside of the workplace. They expressed a need for passive entertainment because they are so tired of having the responsibility of taking care of others. It is a way of handing over the responsibility and being able to shut off from reality. They were no longer able to provide any further responsibility or support for another. This can demonstrate how depleted their emotional resources were after work and the knock on effect that occurred in their personal life. This level of disconnection from others and themselves seems connected to Maslach’s concept of depersonalisation (Maslach et al., 1996). For example the Maslach’s Burnout Inventory items related to depersonalisation are “I’ve become more callous toward people since I took this job” and “I don’t really care what happens to some recipients” (Maslach et al., 1996). I imagined the participants feeling like machines that need to have their ‘off’ button pressed. They no longer had the resources to feel like a relational person as they have been continuous giving to another or their workplace all day instead of having a balance of giving and receiving. I felt that there was an overwhelming sense of each participant wanting to be taken care of by others, whether they were explicit about it or not.
By using IPA, I was able to keep the idiosyncrasies of each participant’s experience. Within my analysis, my participants delved into their experience wholeheartedly. I was surprised at the candour that they shared their feelings of resentment towards their clients and context or their unprofessional behaviour. I feel that my research has shed some light on the different aspects of a person’s life that can be affected by ‘burnout’. It is another step in raising awareness about the effect on the practitioner from life’s pressures. I saw the participant’s descriptions of pushing the boundaries, sometimes with unprofessional behaviour, as a cry for help. The variation in the participants’ experiences could demonstrate that ‘burnout’ can happen at any stage of working as a counselling psychologist. This was apparent to me when the participants would mention their transition from being a trainee to being qualified or their professional identity transforming over the years. I began to wonder whether ‘burnout’ was part of the experience of the profession itself, as the nature of the field of counselling psychology is ever changing with more research and guidelines being introduced or whether ‘burnout’ is a life changing experience.
I can be contacted through www.psychologicalbeing.com for further information.
Reference:
Maslach, C., Jackson, S. E. & Leiter, M. (1996). Maslach Burnout Inventory (2nd ed.) Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
QuAFE blog 