For me, healing from and preventing burnout and compassion fatigue is both professional and deeply personal.

 

As a former elementary and middle school reading teacher, I assumed I was a good teacher if I felt burnt out. I thought being tired, over-worked, and exhausted meant I was doing teaching "right." Given my deep and genuine capacity to care, I unknowingly operated under a false assumption that if I did more and did it faster, I would be more effective. I fell into the hyper-productivity and perfectionism trap. My self-abandonment started from a sacrificial place. Since I loved being a teacher, I assumed to be good at it meant I had to give 150% of myself in all the ways and all the time. 25 years ago, we didn't have the awareness we do now about the ways chronic stress corrodes one's capacity to connect with students and how it harms our connection with our very selves. 

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Motherhood forced me to confront burnout in ways I wasn’t prepared for. Having three babies in the span of 17 months created a context for burnout and postpartum depression to set in quickly. The chronic stress and emotional demands of mothering three infants overloaded my nervous system, clouded my thinking, and made it nearly impossible to care for myself or my girls.

 

My capacity to connect, respond, and nurture was severely impaired, creating a vicious cycle of disconnection, guilt, and exhaustion. I realized that, like in teaching, if I gave all of myself without any attention put toward nurturing the very sources of energy that allowed me to give, the well would eventually run dry. When the well ran dry, my caregiving capacity reflected this.

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For me, burnout and compassion fatigue were signals that my energy reserves were severely depleted. I felt alone, ashamed, and guilty that I could not meet the needs of those I cared for -- including my own self. I did not know how to balance my attention and energy among those in my care and meeting my basic mental, physical, and emotional health needs at the same time. There was simply too many chronic needs to be met of those I loved. 

 

One morning, exhausted and sleep-deprived, I had a stark realization. I thought --“No one is coming to save you.” That moment was terrifying—and also liberating. It marked the beginning of my path to understanding, healing, and preventing burnout and to developing a sustainable (and replicable) path of reciprocal relational health where I was able to meet the needs of those in my care while renewing and revitalizing my well-spring of mental health in the process. In fact, I learned that the two cannot be separated.