Therapy for Burnout in California
Burnout therapy for people who are hitting every deadline and feeling nothing about any of it.
You Are Still Performing. That Is the Confusing Part.
Here is the thing about burnout that makes it so hard to catch: you are usually still doing the work.
That is the part nobody warns you about. You picture burnout as a collapse, some clear moment where you cannot get out of bed and everyone finally understands. What actually happens is much quieter. You hit your deadlines. You show up to the meeting. You answer the email. And somewhere along the way you stopped feeling anything about any of it.
The good news you got last month landed like a weather report. You snapped at someone and couldn’t quite explain why. Sunday afternoon has a dread to it now, starting earlier every week. You are still functioning, which is exactly why nobody has said anything, including you.
What burnout actually is
Burnout is not a synonym for tired. The World Health Organization classifies it as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, and it has three recognizable components.
Exhaustion, which is the one everyone knows. Not the kind a weekend away fixes. The kind that is still there Monday morning after you slept nine hours.
Detachment, which is the one that sneaks up. Work you used to care about starts to feel pointless. Clients or colleagues become obstacles rather than people. You develop a running internal commentary that is meaner than you used to be.
Losing faith in your own competence, which is the cruelest one. You start believing you are bad at a job you are objectively still doing well. Your output has not dropped. Your confidence in it has fallen through the floor.
If you recognized all three, that is not a character problem. It is a recognizable pattern with a recognizable course, and it responds to treatment.
Burnout, depression, or both
This distinction matters more than it might seem, because it changes what we do.
Burnout is tied to a context. It tends to be worst around work and it usually lifts, at least partially, when the demand genuinely lets up. Depression is not context-bound. It follows you into the weekend, into vacation, into things you used to enjoy for their own sake.
The clean test people reach for is the vacation test: if a real break restores you, it points toward burnout. If you came back from ten days away feeling exactly the same, that points somewhere else.
I’ll be honest that the test is less clean in practice than that makes it sound. Prolonged burnout very often becomes depression, and by the time most people come in, both are present. That isn’t a problem for treatment; it just means we need to know what we’re looking at rather than guessing. Part of the first few sessions is sorting this out properly.
If what you’re reading here is landing, but the flatness follows you everywhere, the page on high-functioning depression may describe your experience more accurately.
How I work with burnout
I want to be direct about something, because a lot of burnout content is not.
Most burnout advice is insulting. Self-care lists, gratitude journals, and suggestions to set better boundaries handed to someone whose boundaries are being overridden by a partner with actual authority over their career. If your job requires 2,400 billable hours, no amount of deep breathing is going to resolve that arithmetic. Pretending otherwise wastes your time and mine.
So the work is more specific than that. We start by getting accurate about the demand. What is actually required of you, what has been added by other people’s expectations, and what you have added yourself. Those three categories are almost always tangled together, and separating them is genuinely useful because two of the three are more negotiable than they feel.
We look at the recovery side, which is usually where the fixable part lives. Burnout is a mismatch between demand and recovery, and most high performers have optimized demand to the last inch and given no thought at all to recovery. Not vacation. The ordinary daily and weekly rhythm that lets a nervous system come down.
We address what is driving the overfunctioning. There is almost always something underneath: perfectionism, a fear of being found out, an identity so fused with performance that slowing down feels like disappearing. That is the part that makes burnout recur in a new job with a new title eighteen months later.
And we deal with sleep, because burnout and insomnia travel together and neither one resolves while the other is running.
I use cognitive behavioral therapy as a foundation, which means the work is structured and you leave with something you can actually apply, not a nice conversation you forget by Thursday.
Who I see for this
I am a former attorney. I passed the California Bar, practiced employment defense litigation, and then became a therapist, and a large part of my practice is lawyers.
That background matters here for a practical reason. You will not have to explain the billable hour to me, or why you cannot simply stop answering email after six, or what it means when a partner says something is urgent. We can skip the twenty minutes of context that a general practice therapist would need and get to the actual work.
But burnout is not a legal condition and you don't have to be a lawyer to be here. I work with physicians, executives, founders, academics, and people in demanding creative fields. The structural pattern is remarkably consistent across all of them: high standards, high stakes, high autonomy in the work itself, very little control over the volume of it.
What changes, and when
Burnout recovery is not fast, and I would rather set that expectation honestly at the start than have you feel like you are failing at recovering.
What usually shifts first is not the exhaustion. It’s the self-blame. Understanding that you are experiencing a recognizable pattern rather than a personal deficiency tends to produce noticeable relief within the first few sessions, and that relief is not cosmetic. It frees up energy that was going into the internal argument about whether you have a right to feel this way.
The behavioral changes come next: sleep, recovery rhythm, specific boundaries around specific things rather than boundaries in the abstract.
The deeper work, the part about identity and overfunctioning, takes longer. That is the piece that determines whether this happens again.
Getting started
All sessions are by secure video for clients located in California, Washington, D.C., and Virginia. Sessions are also available in Spanish.
The first step is a short consultation call. We talk about what has been going on, how long it’s been building, and whether this is the right fit. It is a straightforward conversation with no pressure, and if I’m not the right person, I will say so and point you in a helpful direction.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Tired resolves with rest. Burnout does not. If you came back from a genuine break and felt the same within a few days, if you have become cynical about work you used to care about, and if your confidence in your competence has dropped while your actual performance has not, that pattern is burnout rather than fatigue.
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No, though they overlap heavily and prolonged burnout often becomes depression. Burnout is tied to a context, usually work, and tends to ease when the demand genuinely lifts. Depression is not context-bound and follows you into the parts of life you used to enjoy. Sorting out which one you are dealing with, or in what proportion, is part of the early work.
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Usually not, and I don’t go into this work with an agenda about it. Some people come in assuming they need to leave and discover the problem is narrower and more fixable than the whole career. Others decide to stay and renegotiate the terms. A smaller number do leave, and that is a real outcome too. The goal is to get you clear-headed enough to make that decision well rather than under duress.
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It varies. Meaningful relief from the self-blame and a workable plan usually come within the first month or two. Full recovery of energy and engagement takes longer, and the underlying pattern work that keeps burnout from recurring takes longer still. This is not a six-session protocol.
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Yes, though not by pretending your workplace is fine. If the demand is structurally unsustainable, therapy will not make it sustainable. What it can do is help you see the situation clearly, work out what is actually negotiable, protect your health while you are in it, and think properly about what comes next instead of white-knuckling until something breaks.
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Yes. A large part of my practice is attorneys because of my own background, but I work with high-achieving professionals across many fields. The burnout pattern is very consistent regardless of industry.