One thing I have found to be true over my 20 year career, is how imperative setting boundaries is when working with emotionally draining clients. Clear boundaries not only prevent burnout and compassion fatigue on the clinician's side, but they also encourage clients to take responsibility for their own emotional well-being and solutions. This fosters their independence and promotes personal growth rather than creating a dependency. Boundaries encourage clients to develop their own coping mechanisms and solutions, and they enable clients to become self empowered and self-reliant rather than dependent.

When faced with emotionally charged cases, you're directly into a conflicting situation. From one side you have to maintain professional boundaries for the benefit of the client and on the other side you might have the urge to do what feels natural and humane when you meet someone in need or in a charged emotional situation. Doing the latter alleviates your personal burden but directly conflicts with the first one. A practical way to find a balance could be the re-alignment of what it means to support the client and understand that boundaries are there to empower the client to take care of themselves and protect them from "false" attachments and sometimes exploitation. This relationship is not friendly and sustainable, but ephemeral.

Better said than done, self-care often gets skipped. The most basic self-care practice is to be able to ask for help, especially peers, as they are these who know best your situation. Then, it is absolutely necessary to have psychological supervision. On actual self-care, it is important to sleep well as sleep deprivation increases anxiety, eat well, exercise, meditate. Have ready some quick stress management techniques when needed or take breaks when you feel so to be able to process what happened so far and realign to your core values, motivations and priorities.

In the context of receiving asylum seekers in Greece, when I was designing and then implementing operational procedures for my case management team, I established a multi-disciplinary case review meeting, bi-weekly, to discuss all the difficult cases, exchange information, agree on an action plan per case and most importantly have a sense of not being alone in this. It is very important to receive validation or guidance by specialised peers, as well as redistribute actions to the most relevant professional. Also, it is crucial to have psychological supervision as it is extremely easy to burn-out or even cross professional lines to ease the psychological burden of managing a difficult case.