Wellness Is Central to Counseling—So Why Is It Still Treated as Optional?

The helping professions are clear about one thing: wellness matters. It appears in mission statements, professional definitions, and values language across counseling, healthcare, ministry, and education. And yet, many professionals within these fields experience their work as increasingly unsustainable. Burnout, moral injury, and chronic fatigue are no longer edge cases—they are common experiences. That reality raises an important question:

If wellness is truly foundational to our professional identity, why does it remain so difficult to practice?

What the research tells us

A 2022 conceptual review by Brubaker and Sweeney offers a helpful lens for understanding this contradiction. Their analysis affirms that wellness is not a peripheral concept in counseling—it is a defining one. In fact, wellness has deep roots in the profession’s history and is explicitly named as a core outcome of counseling practice. However, the authors identify a significant gap: despite broad professional support, wellness and wellness counseling remain largely absent from counselor preparation standards, ethical codes, and applied competencies. In other words, wellness is widely valued—but poorly operationalized. The article also notes that wellness is often reduced to the more generic concept of well-being, a shift that subtly changes its meaning. While well-being often refers to life satisfaction or emotional state, wellness is historically understood as holistic, integrative, and multidimensional—encompassing physical, emotional, relational, spiritual, and contextual dimensions of life. When the language narrows, the practice narrows with it.

The cost of treating wellness as an individual responsibility

This gap between values and structure has real-world consequences. When wellness is framed primarily as a personal responsibility—rather than a supported professional practice—individuals are left to manage systemic strain on their own. Time constraints, workload expectations, staffing shortages, and organizational demands remain unchanged, while professionals are quietly expected to “self-care” their way through them. Over time, this dynamic creates something more than exhaustion. It fosters guilt, self-blame, and the sense that struggling is a personal failure rather than a predictable outcome of unsupported systems. The issue, then, is not a lack of commitment to wellness. The issue is the absence of practical frameworks that help professionals live it out within real constraints.

What’s missing: structure, not intention

The research points toward a clear need: wellness approaches that move beyond aspiration and into application.

That means frameworks that:

·       Translate wellness values into daily decision-making

·       Help professionals plan realistically rather than idealistically

·       Support sustainable prioritization instead of constant sacrifice

·       Recognize that wellness is shaped not only by personal habits, but by relationships, roles, and systems

Without this kind of structure, wellness remains something we believe in—but struggle to embody.

Bridging research and practice

My own work on the Individual Wellness Support Plan (IWSP) and the Balance Axis™ framework emerged directly from this gap between what the research affirms and what professionals actually experience. Not as a replacement for therapy, supervision, or spiritual care—but as a practical way to operationalize wellness through three interconnected anchors: planning, prioritization, and partnership. The goal is simple but often overlooked: to help wellness move from being a shared value to a supported practice.

A question worth holding

Brubaker and Sweeney conclude that wellness has the potential to function as a signature practice of the helping professions—if it is taken seriously at the level of standards, competencies, and daily application. That leaves us with an important question to consider:

What might change if wellness were treated not as a personal coping skill, but as a professional competency—one that individuals and organizations share responsibility for sustaining?

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Brubaker and Sweeney, “Wellness and Wellness Counseling,” 25–37.