This Isn't Burnout. It's Gaslighting.

When Trauma Gets Called Weakness

She was told maybe she wasn't woman enough for the job. And for a while, maybe longer than she cared to admit, she believed it. She had just been assaulted by a student. She was having panic attacks, and she was showing up every day to a building where the person responsible for her professional well-being had decided that her response to being physically harmed was evidence of personal weakness. Not evidence of trauma or evidence of an institution that had failed to protect its staff. Evidence that she wasn't cut out for this. She didn't have the words for it then, but she knows now what that was. The details of your story are probably different, but I'd be willing to bet the feeling is exactly the same. And that's what this episode is about. Hey school counselor, welcome back. Today I want to talk about gaslighting. Not the kind of gaslighting that happens between two people, but the kind that a profession does to its own practitioners. So routinely and so effectively that most of us never recognize it for what it is. The research on this is specific, and it's gonna name some things I think you've been feeling without a good container to put them in. 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. Let's start by talking about some things that you're probably already holding. The feeling that if you were better at this job, more visible, more strategic, more indispensable, the budget cut wouldn't have found you. That counselors that are doing the work right don't get reassigned. That the decision to move you to a different building was at some level a verdict of your value. Or maybe it's the feeling that the kids you left behind when you were reassigned, the ones who knew your name, who came to your office and who trusted you were failed by you, that a better counselor would have found a way to stay, that you abandoned them even though you had no say in the decision, and the choice was made in a meeting you weren't invited to by people who were looking at a spreadsheet instead of children's names. Maybe it's the feeling that the structural conditions of your work, the crazy caseload, all the non-counseling duties, the administrative misappropriation of your role are all the result of your own insufficient advocacy. That if you had just presented the data more compellingly, built better relationships with your principal, or made a strong case to your school board, things would be different. That somehow the school counseling profession gave you the tools, but you just didn't use them well enough. Or the feeling that your exhaustion, your doubt, your complicated relationship with work you used to love are signs of personal inadequacy rather than reasonable responses to a system that's systematically breaking you down. All of that, every single piece of all of those are the same thing. It's the experience of having the failure of an institution transplanted into your individual conscience, of being handed the responsibility for conditions you didn't create and you can't control, of being told either directly or indirectly that the problem is you. My friend, that's gaslighting. And when I say institution, let me be specific here, because I mean all of the institution, your school, your district, the representative organizations of the profession itself. All three of those participate in this dynamic. Sometimes they participate together, sometimes separately, but the mechanism is the same across all of them. And it starts, let's be real specific here. It starts before you ever walk on to your first campus. It starts in grad school, where you are trained into a model of comprehensive school counseling that doesn't exist on the majority of campuses in this country. A model that assumes administrative support, manageable caseloads, role clarity, and a school community that understands what you're there to do. You walk out of your program and into a building that looks nothing like what you were prepared for. And the profession's response to that gap, that gap between the model and the reality, has never been to acknowledge it honestly or to provide any real meaningful effort to assist you. It's been to tell you to advocate harder, implement more faithfully, close the distance through individual effort, which, if you're paying attention, you'll notice is also gaslighting. They assert that the gap isn't actually structural, it's yours to fix. The model isn't disconnected from reality. You're just not doing enough to make the reality match the model. And that's where it begins. And it compounds from there every year, every building, every professional development session that hands you a framework for a school that doesn't exist and tells you that the problem is your implementation. It's unconscionable. So, how is a profession able to gaslight its own practitioners? What's the mechanism here? First, I want to acknowledge something about who you are before I get into the research because I think it matters a whole lot for everything that's going to come after. School counselors are not people who just happen to stumble into this line of work. You are, almost without exception, people who came to this profession because it means something to you. You are meaning makers. You are wired for empathy. You chose a job that doesn't pay what your training is worth because something about this work, about being in the room with kids who are struggling, about being the person who notices, about the specific kind of difference this role can make, felt important enough to choose it anyway. That is real, and that piece of you is genuine. And it is also, as it turns out, exactly what makes the gaslighting so effective. Researchers Bunderson and Thompson, writing in the Administrative Science Quarterly in 2009, studied workers with a strong sense of moral obligation to their work. People who experience what they do as a duty, not just a job. In other words, it's people who look a lot like school counselors. What they found is that this moral orientation makes people simultaneously more effective and more exploitable. People who feel deeply obligated to their work put up with conditions they should refuse. They see noncompliance as a moral failure. They stay when they should leave. They cover responsibilities that aren't really theirs. And they tolerate what a more boundaried professional would push back on or walk away from altogether. And the institution, the school, the district, the profession, it doesn't have to create that orientation in you. It just has to recognize it and lean on it. The school doesn't have to support you adequately because you're probably going to show up anyway. It doesn't have to protect your role because you'll show up to defend it yourself. It doesn't have to invest in your development because you'll pour yourself into the work regardless. Your devotion is doing the institution's job. And here's where it crosses the line from exploitation to something way more specific. The institution never acknowledges the dynamic. Instead, they name your devotion as the evidence of your competence. Your willingness to absorb impossible conditions becomes proof that you're doing the job right. Your inability to push back becomes proof that you understand what's at stake. And when the conditions that finally break you, when the burnout arrives, when the panic attacks start, when you find yourself sobbing in an HR office, personal experience there. The profession doesn't say, we are so sorry, we put you in an unsustainable situation. No, it says you weren't resilient enough. You didn't advocate effectively enough. You lost your passion. It takes the damage it caused and hands it back to you as a character assessment. It doesn't just put things on your plate that don't belong there. It watches you buckle under the weight of them and uses that as proof that you are never strong enough to begin with. Ryan Duffy's research on work is calling theory makes this even more specific. His findings show that a strong sense of moral obligation to your work is protective when your conditions are supportive. But in unsupportive environments, like a 700-to-1 caseload with non-counseling duties and an administrator who treats you like a glorified paraprofessional, that same moral orientation predicts worse outcomes. The thing that the profession told you was your greatest asset becomes a liability in the environments where most school counselors actually work. And the profession knows this. The research has been there. But instead of changing the conditions or just honestly acknowledging the gap between the model and the reality, it keeps producing professional development that targets your mindset, your resilience, your self-care routine. Advocate harder, implement more faithfully, close the distance through individual effort. And when all else fails, practice better self-care. It keeps pinning the problem onto you. That is not an oversight. That is gaslighting. And I want to be careful here because I think this is where the argument could go sideways if we're not careful. And I don't want that to happen. This is not an argument that you shouldn't care about your work. This is not me telling you to be less invested in school counseling or to stop loving what you do. All of that would be both wrong and useless. What I'm describing is something more specific. Our profession has taken something real, that genuine meaning that we find in our work and has built an infrastructure around it that's designed to control. One that uses your devotion to keep you manageable. One that plants institutional failure into your individual conscience. And I think it's time we name this in our profession. So, what determines how effective the gaslighting is? Why does it seem to work so well on some school counselors and less so on others? There is a difference between caring about school counseling as a craft and needing a specific narrative about yourself as a school counselor in order to feel like a worthwhile professional. The school counselor who cares about their work as a craft has something that's portable. Their investment is in the work itself, in getting better at it, in understanding it more deeply, and in being honest about what they don't know yet. That investment can survive disruption. A bad year, a hostile administrator, or a student that doesn't respond the way they hoped, those things are hard, but they don't threaten who the school counselor is. They can be wrong about something without it meaning they were wrong to be there in the first place. And so gaslighting doesn't work as well on these folks because their sense of who they are as professionals isn't built on the story that the gaslighting is attacking. When things get tough and their head goes down, they can still manage to make clear decisions about what's really going on. But the school counselor who needs a specific narrative about themselves as a counselor to feel like a worthwhile person has something a bit more fragile. Their investment isn't just in the work, it's in the story. A story about what those kids need from them, about what they provide that nobody else can, about the sacrifice and the meaning and the significance of showing up every day in that building. And that story is exactly what the gaslighting targets. When they're reassigned, it says, you left the kids who needed you. When they're told they didn't advocate effectively enough, it says, you failed the mission. When the work goes sideways in a way they didn't anticipate, it says you should have done more. You should have been more. If only you had really been who you said you were, this wouldn't have happened. The more ingrained that story of worth is, the more devastating the gaslighting becomes. Because the gap is never really going to close, right? The expectation is never quite going to match the reality we were presented. And every year that it doesn't, the gaslighting just gains more material to work with. I know what that looks like from the inside. That person that I described at the beginning of the episode, the one that was told maybe she wasn't woman enough for the job after being assaulted by a student who started having panic attacks, who showed up every day to a building where her response to being harmed was treated as a character flaw. My friend, that was me. I had built my entire professional identity around a story about what those kids needed from me, about what I was there to provide, and the sacrifice and the significance of showing up every day in that building. But when the building turned on me, that story crumbled. And because the story was bearing so much weight, because my sense of who I was as a person was wrapped around who I was in that professional role, when it broke, I broke with it. And then the gaslighting told me that the breaking was the proof that a stronger person, a better professional, someone who was really cut out for this work would not have broken. It took me years to understand what actually happened there. To separate what was really my responsibility from what had been assigned to me, to see the gap between the model I'd been trained on and the building I was actually in, and to recognize that gap as structural rather than a personal shortcoming. And that understanding, not the surviving of the situation, but the actual understanding of what happened and why is what eventually led me to build a school for school counselors. Because I went looking for something that could explain what my profession never would. And I couldn't find it. So I built it. But ask yourself, honestly, and I'm going to warn you, this is going to be uncomfortable if you do it right. Which one are you right now? Are you invested in school counseling as a craft, or are you invested in a story about yourself as a school counselor? Because the answer to that question determines how much sway this gaslighting is going to have over you and whether or not you're ever actually going to be able to see the situation for what it is. The profession will tell you that the difference between what school counseling should be and what it actually is on your campus is a problem you can solve. It will point you toward better data presentation, stronger program implementation, more intentional professional development. And some of that advice is legitimate. Let's be honest about that. Building relationships with administrators matters. Using data to tell your program's story matters. And developing your advocacy skills matters. I teach all of that and I believe in it. When it's applied to problems that an individual school counseling effort can actually solve. The issue is not the tools. The issue is what happens when you're handed these tools to fix problems that don't belong to you. When the answer to an impossible caseload is better time management. When the answer to systematic role erosion is crafting a more compelling position statement. When the answer to being broken down by conditions you didn't create is a better self-care routine. At that point, the tools become something else entirely. They become the weapons the profession uses to redirect your attention from the broken system and instead direct all of that uncertainty and anxiety and angst onto yourself. They become the way the gaslighting gets delivered. So the tools themselves are not the problem. It's what happens when they get aimed at the wrong target. Because the message underneath is always the same. The problem is yours to solve. The conditions are yours to fix. And if you can't fix them, if the tools aren't working, if the advocacy isn't landing, if the data isn't inspiring change, or if you haven't managed yet to attain some perfect program award, that says something about you. What the profession will not tell you is that the majority of this misalignment is structural, that the model will never be reality for most of us, that the conditions that produce your distress were created by institutions and sustained by policy failures and enabled by a profession that has more to gain from your compliance than your clarity. What it will not tell you is that your response to these conditions, the exhaustion, the doubt, the panic, the grief is not evidence of inadequacy. It's evidence of perception. If what I just described resonates, if you recognize a piece of yourself in any of that, I want you to remember I built something for this. It is not a support group. It is not a place to vent. It is a place where school counselors build the kind of clarity that this gaslighting cannot penetrate. Weekly clinical consultation, honest peer community, and people who are going to tell you the truth about your work. It's called the School for School Counselors Mastermind. The link is in the show notes. That's exactly what it is built for. And ask yourself honestly, whose failure is this actually? Is this something you did wrong? A genuine professional failing that you have the power and the responsibility to address? Or is this an institutional failure that has been transplanted into your conscience by a profession that needed a scapegoat? Sit with that. Really sit and think on it. Slow it down. Look at one specific thing that you are battling and trace it back. Figure out where it actually came from. What decision was made? By whom? Under what conditions. And were you even in the room when it happened? Ask whether the standard you're holding yourself to was ever realistic for the campus you're actually working in. Ask whether a colleague in the same conditions would be carrying the same guilt, or whether the guilt found you specifically because of the story you tell yourself. This is not a comfortable process by any stretch of the imagination. And again, I know because I have put myself through this, but it does bring clarity. And once you have clarity, the gaslighting can no longer affect you. Hey, I'm Steph Johnson. I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. Make sure and hit that follow button so you grab the next episode because I promise you it's going to follow right along with this one. In the meantime, evaluate the guilt, be critical about the stories, and don't allow yourself to get caught up in the mechanisms intending to gaslight. you. You are not the problem. You never were. Take care.