You are probably not calling it carer burnout. You are calling it being tired, or being short-tempered, or "just a difficult patch". But if you are managing a declining parent's doctors, medication, finances and moods — often alongside your own job, your own children, your own marriage — and you have started to feel hollowed out, resentful, or strangely numb, it has a name, and it is not a personal failing.
I have spent a great many years around families in exactly this position, including years working inside a care home, where I watched sons and daughters wrestle with every decision from the other side of the desk. Counselling for carers is not a luxury on top of everything else you're doing. It is one hour that belongs to you, in a life that has quietly stopped having any.
The guilt, and the resentment you're ashamed of
Almost every carer I have ever sat with carries the same tangle: love for the parent, resentment at what the caring is costing, and then a wave of shame for feeling the resentment at all. So it gets pushed down, and it leaks out as irritability, exhaustion, or a flatness that frightens you. Let me say plainly: resenting the situation is not the same as not loving your mother. Feeling trapped by a duty you chose freely is not hypocrisy. It is what happens to human beings under sustained strain.
In counselling, these feelings can finally be said out loud, to someone who will not be shocked and does not need protecting from them. That alone changes more than people expect.
Caught between a parent and your own children
Many of my carer clients are between 45 and 65, raising or funding children on one side while looking after a parent in their later years on the other, usually with a demanding job in the middle. There is no slack in a life like that. Something always gives, and too often it is your health, your marriage, or your sleep.
Then there are the siblings. Care decisions have a way of reopening every old family fault line: who does the work, who writes cheques from a distance, who is still "the baby" at fifty-five. I help people untangle what is a practical disagreement from what is forty years of family history — because they need different solutions.
Caring for a parent in Johannesburg from another country
A situation I know well: you emigrated years ago — London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Sydney — and now your mother or father is declining in Johannesburg while you manage everything by WhatsApp and worried phone calls. The guilt of distance is its own particular weight: every visit ends with an airport goodbye that feels like a rehearsal for the final one, and every crisis happens while you are asleep in the wrong timezone.
Because I work online and know Johannesburg's care landscape from the inside, I can be a steady point in that picture — for you, and sometimes for your parent as well, through counselling for older adults.
Grieving someone who is still here
If your parent has dementia, you may be grieving already — the conversations you can no longer have, the moment your own mother asked your name. This is anticipatory grief, and it is one of the loneliest kinds, because the world doesn't send flowers for it. It has been a central part of my work with families for decades, and it belongs in the room alongside the logistics and the exhaustion. My grief counselling page says more about how I work with loss in all its forms.
What sessions look like
Sessions are 60 minutes, weekly or fortnightly, online by video call or in person in Fairmount, Johannesburg. Some carers come for a short, focused period around a crisis — a diagnosis, a hospital admission, the care-home decision. Others stay longer, because caring is a long road and it helps to have one hour a week that asks nothing of you. Both are legitimate. We will work out together what you need.