The findings of a collaborative research conducted in the north of France between 2012 and 2017 among health care professionals and social workers (N = 52) highlight the feeling of loss or lessening of their power to act, impacted by the deterioration of their working conditions and their budgetary, temporal and symbolic resources. The emotional charge of these hardships of professionalism can have real effects of psychic numbing. Nevertheless, professionals cope with these situations, struggling with varying strategies of resistance, through their capacities to deconstruct established rhetorics, to set up alliances or even by investing groups analyzing practices. Marginalized, exhausted, some professionals take temporary defection paths (such as vocational training) or more radical (turnover, resignation).