Women experiencing burnout
You’re tired, but you feel like you’re missing out on so much.
You’ve been to therapy before. You’ve done a lot of thinking, growing, questioning. You’ve had big dreams for yourself, for what you want to achieve, yet, when you try to actually live it, you keep hitting a ceiling. You know you’re meant for something more, but you can’t seem to do the things that will get you there, or you keep running out of steam.
You perhaps learned somewhere along the way that you couldn’t rely on others to do things for you, or with you, so you learned how to do it all, yourself. Or when others do offer to help, you know you could do it better, or more efficiently, so you end up doing it anyway, even though you long for deeper connection and support. Or perhaps it has never really felt safe to trust others to hold you or care for you, because that hasn’t been your experience.
You feel stuck between what you know you want or dream about, and the walls you keep running into when it comes time for more vulnerability, or more expansion.
Burnout can be about more than doing too much
Sometimes burnout comes from the distance between how you know yourself internally and the life you want, and where you find yourself stuck right now.
You may have spent years living according to things you thought would lead to happiness or success, about what you thought made you valuable or good, what success was supposed to look like, about whose comfort mattered and what you were supposed to want. It’s just that you still feel lonely, still feel like you’re carrying so much alone.
You got used to pushing through, making things work, meeting goals, but then when you achieved something, it didn’t feel as celebratory as you thought it would, it felt anticlimactic, flat.
Sometimes there is grief underneath the exhaustion
Perhaps you’ve been working so hard for so long, but you still feel stuck in a place that isn’t lining up, and it has started to feel like a hamster wheel. And feeling this way, makes you feel… guilty. Or shame. or defeated. And the cycle repeats.
You want to want more, but you feel either guilty for wanting it, nervous about the vulnerability it might bring, fearful that you’ll lose it once you have it, or you feel split between believing in your own worth, but not quite trusting that belief. It’s frustrating, defeating, and perhaps even confusing at times.
There can be grief in recognizing how time and energy you’ve spent building a life that no longer fully fits… or that perhaps never really fit. Grief for the creativity, connection, pleasure, or parts of yourself that haven’t had enough room or that even feel lost, like you miss yourself but don’t know how to find it. And also grief in realizing that some of what once gave you belonging may not be able to come with you in the same way.
This is where depth work comes in.
You likely already have insight into the pattern. The question for us is why something in you still pulls back when you try to expand, or move beyond where you have been.
My approach integrates Brainspotting, depth and narrative therapy, somatic work, and yoga therapy. Together, we can get curious about the deeper patterns beneath the burnout and work with what we find there.
Burnout feels like exhaustion, but There’s also a gap between knowing who you are and being able to live from that place more fully.
This work is about closing that gap, understanding and processing what still gets in the way, making space for the grief that comes with outgrowing old ways of living, and building the capacity to embody more of the life you’ve been working so hard to build.