Counsellor, wake me up when January ends

Photo by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash

I’m just squeaking in to maintaining my blogging streak each month by writing to you today on the last day of January 2026, where I am looking back on this first month of the year and how tough it has been (and long it feels!).

Everyone I work with this month has shared a new play on the concept of “500 weeks of January” or it being “January 57th”, and I have laughed each time, because this year it really does resonate. And this sense of a long month has not been helped by the annual dose of illness that my toddler brings home in the colder seasons. In the last month, we have survived a brutal (say no more) bout of gastroenteritis, and I am presently fending off the final stages of the flu. Grateful as ever that I received the vaccine back in November 2025, this flu has been monstrous, and there is no other word for it. I dare not think of what it could have been like if I had not been fortunate enough to preempt it.

Nonetheless, I am wiped - with a busier practice this month and client numbers picking up, I have also enjoyed the concretisation of directions that I hope to take my business in over the next twelve months, including new texts, downloads and an entire website migration. Fortunately, my tech background means that I get to do all of this myself (!!), but it does take me away from writing for a while, which is where my appreciation for sharing my blog with you is renewed afresh, if not each week, certainly each month.

Over to you

So my focus this month is on the topic of illness in private practice. I’m wondering how you - the therapist - handle this? I know that my own approach to taking care of myself has evolved throughout the journey of working in private practice, with necessary modifications and tweaks throughout my experiences of serious illness, becoming a parent, managing childcare and the inevitable waves of viruses and germs.

However, looking after ourselves in private practice can be layered - as anyone who was practising during the COVID 19 pandemic will recall, both our own and our clients' physical safety and wellbeing have to be paramount - we cannot ethically continue to show up to sessions when we are fluey or have an illness that we could pass on to someone else. I am fortunate to work exclusively online, and so this issue impacts me less than others, but it is a serious consideration for those who hire rooms and see clients in person.

Similarly, this is a resource-hungry career - I have found out since the early days of chronic pregnancy insomnia, that performing as a professional counsellor and delivering the quality of therapy and care that I pride myself on is not something that I can do if I am under-resourced in terms of energy, health and sleep. Flu and toddlerhood have been rude awakenings to me as to just how little sleep and energy a person can wake up with in the morning, and it has taken no insignificant effort to set up systems and methods of resting and self-care that allow me to continue to function and work effectively in the event of a disturbed night or feeling unwell.

This is partially what limits me to currently "only" offering three days of client-facing time per week. I would dearly like to do more - as I used to face-to-face from my old office in Bristol - however, I now know that I can reliably commit to a certain number of well-resourced, attentive and attuned sessions per week, and no more. I intend that my clients are only as aware of my life around the edges of sessions as I choose to make them, to remain focused on their process - and this is one of my methods for doing so.

Helping therapists manage practice when sick

It strikes me that this kind of decision-making and setup is really something that arrives in our practice after years of trial and error, of testing availability and timings of sessions, of client subgroups and work types. I take it for granted that I know how to do this now, as I have been through this process over the last decade and a half of private practice - and so I believe it is incumbent upon me to support colleagues and other therapists as they seek to do the same. No doubt there is a book in there (there almost always is, as my hard drive will attest), but I’m considering also offering this as part of my Therapy for Therapists offering.
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I truly see therapists as an underserved community - ironically, but perhaps somewhat predictably - in the landscape of mental health care. Due to stigma, due to economic and time pressures (few people have a “to-spend” list like a therapist with CPD, insurance, membership, subscriptions etc) and I know as well as anyone in this field how hard it can be to prioritise the self when there are so many responsibilities and tasks to take care of in a timely, ethical and professional way.

So I come back to the question for you, therapist - how do you handle your workload, client lists, therapy responsibilities, costs, when you are sick, unwell, tired or otherwise underresourced?

I’d love to hear about it in the comments.