Therapy for Burnout

You know you can’t run on empty all the time, yet here you are - running on empty. You try to remember the last time you actually felt energized about…. anything…. And it feels like a gut punch every time you realize you can’t actually remember. Nothing feels good anymore, you’re struggling to find anything that feels worthwhile to look forward to, and it feels harder and harder to just try and think straight.

Every day feels like you’re literally just dragging yourself through it, going through the motions of the things that have to be done. You feel like you’re practically killing yourself with just trying to financially keep up, and keeping your family afloat while trying to also not come completely apart at the seams is feeling more and more like an impossible task. Whether it’s:

**Laundry (that seems like it’s either never ending or trying to take on a life of its own)

**That darn dentist appointment that really needs to happen, but has already been rescheduled three times and now you might have to reschedule it again because something came up with your job

**Needing to remember that you have to call the vet because Ralph the Retriever is due for his annual shots

**Staying up late, yet again, to get work ‘stuff’ done (because 11pm is the only time you’re not interrupted and can actually attempt to get something productive done)

**Figuring out, with the help of The School of Youtube, how to fix the bathroom sink pipe that’s been leaking for who-knows-how-long, and you only just discovered it and now have to stress about how fast mold is going to start growing and if you’ll also have to learn how to replace the cabinet

**Paying the sewer bill four months late… again…

**Feeling like you might go completely nuts if one more person asks you to solve even just one more problem

It’s all just too much, and you realize - this isn’t about you being overwhelmed. It’s not about being overworked, or not being able to handle your responsibilities.

You’re burnt out.

Experiencing burn out is so much more than just needing a break. It’s more than being physically tired or overworked. When you’re burnt out on all the things, because you’re just tapped out in every way and from every direction, your whole life will be impacted.

You’re dropping the ball at work because you’re trying to think straight while staring through what feels like the thickest fog, and focusing for extended periods on literally anything feels like a herculean effort. You’re sleeping more than you ever have before, but are constantly tired. No amount of sleep is enough sleep at this point. You can’t truly rest or relax, because when you try, you just end up feeling guilty since you can’t stop thinking about all the other things you still need to get done. When you try to dig deep for motivation to stand up and accomplish a task or do some chores, all you come up with is the dust and cobwebs that took up residence in the home your motivation once lived in. There’s a world of difference between being tired and being fatigued - this is a ‘soul’ level of tired. It’s so much more than just physical. It’s everything.

This burnout is affecting your relationships too.

You’re anxious all the freaking time, at a level you’ve never experienced before. Sure, you’ve gotten anxious about other things in the past, but not like this. The happiness and fun you see other people experiencing leaves you feeling more and more resentful about how burnt out you are. You’re exhausted and irritable with the people you love, but all you want to do is lean on your people and beg for help. When you do finally ask for help, it’s not actually helpful… because all you end up doing is snapping at your loved ones some more, which just pushes them further away. You’re keyed up, edgy, and tough to be around, and people aren’t just noticing - they’re now commenting too.

It’s time to get support for you, your life, and your burnout.

Burnout is something that so many people experience, and it can only be ignored for so long before it really starts wreaking havoc. You deserve to feel energized, restored, happy, and excited about the future, while being able to perform and show up to life at a level you feel fulfilled by and proud of. It’s time to get back on track, living life on your terms, and living well.

Therapy for when you’re burnt out on life is more than just taking a vacation.

Being able to recover from life burnout involves more than just taking time off or practicing self-care a handful of times. This is a deeper process, starting with building an understanding of what got you here in the first place. When you understand the factors that pushed you into this place, along with what burnout shows up looking like for you, we can then work as a team to create a recovery action plan that’s tailored to your specific needs. This includes:

**Naming and getting re-aligned with your values

**Building goals that excite you and that actually make sense for your life

**Creating a realistic self-care routine

**Getting back in touch with your truest sense of self

**Doing repair work in relationships that were hurt by your burnout

**Building skills to manage burnout symptoms, such as anxiety, in the future

Once you start feeling like you’re regaining control over your daily life, we’ll then start looking out to the future. By zooming out on what your life includes and looks like, you’ll be able to create better, more realistic plans and strategies for how to prevent future burnout on an ongoing basis. In doing this, you’ll learn how to recognize when changes need to be made in different areas of your life (before it becomes a problem!), manage stress more effectively, and be more confident, successful, and content with what life feels like.

Burnout carries an impact with it that’s truly serious, and is very real. When you do the work to recover, everything gets better, easier, and starts to be fun again.

And best of all - you get back to thriving. I think you deserve that. Don’t you?

Parenting comes in different forms. Maybe you spent hours as a child wondering what being a mom would be like - I did.

When you landed in adulthood and found yourself dating the love of your life, you’d catch yourself smiling dreamily at the idea of having a family with this person, watching them hold your child and become an amazing co-parent and teammate with you.

Perhaps parenting was not planned or something you stumbled into.

However you came to be a parent, there may be some things that are just not feeling right.

Here you are. Frustrated with all the things, resenting how you feel about all the realities of parenting no one told you about or prepared you for, along with resenting the people you love for needing so.freaking.much of you, all the time. On top of that, you know you’re showing up for the people you love in really big ways, giving them as much of your energy as you possibly can - but it just keeps reminding you of how much you wanted that same kind of nurturing and care when you were young, and never got it in the way you needed… or maybe you never got it at all.

You’re constantly overwhelmed and feeling pulled in sixteen different directions, from:

**The endless school projects

**Kids in activities that happen on the same day, at the same time, on opposite ends of town (like… who schedules this stuff?!!)

**Kids who want to be involved in everything, and end up with activities or events every day of the week

**Running your special needs child from one support service to another, every single day

**Figuring out how you’re going to leave work (again) to bring kid #2 his science paper at the high school (again), while kid #4 is throwing up in the nurse’s office at the elementary school, and how to explain it to your very understanding boss, who’s reaching the end of their willingness to be so understanding

**Realizing the dishwasher has been full for three days, and your kids or spouse have noticed it… but no one took the time to just push the start button

You’re so tired. But it’s more than that - parenting has left you burned out.

You love your children, and you love your family. There’s no question about it, but loving your children and wanting to be the best possible mom for them has left you with practically nothing else to give. You didn’t realize how many different stages your children would go through as they grew up, and that each stage had its own phases packed into all the nooks and crannies of it. On top of that, the challenges that have come with each stage have been harder than you know how to describe or explain, and each one has felt like a shock to your system.

From babies that turn into teens; taking one blink and realizing your elementary or middle school child is all of a sudden an adult in college… it leaves your head spinning. You knew, somewhere in the back of your mind, that there would be challenges you’d face as a parent. But you never expected this.

Being burnt out on parenting leaves you feeling:

**Unappreciated

**Exhausted in a way that is so much more than just physical

**Wanting to pack a bag and just run away from it all

**Questioning every single thing you do and say, and every decision you make

**Isolated

**Ashamed of being burnt out, and feeling embarrassed to admit it, so you just keep on hiding and plastering a smile on your face when all you want to do is stare at a wall, alone and in silence

You don’t have to be ashamed or embarrassed about being a burnt out parent.

Being a parent is an incredible, rewarding, and joyful job - and it’s also REALLY hard. You’ve practiced so much self-sacrifice for the sake of your children and family, thinking it was the right thing to do and that you were being a good mom by putting everyone else first… but you didn’t know what it would cost you.

You deserve to have a space that’s all yours, that’s just for you, where you’re not going to be barraged with the constant ‘Mom, mom, mom, mommy, mama, mother, MOOOOOOMMMMM,’ or DAAAAAAADDDDD and you can actually hear yourself think.

That’s where therapy for parenting burnout comes in.

Recognizing that you’ve hit the point of burnout as a parent means that, in order to recover, you have to start with a clean slate. This means taking the time to get back in touch with your core sense of self, exploring the parts of you that you’re really proud of and feel confident in, along with understanding how your strengths show up in your life - especially in parenting. We’ll work together to get you reconnected to your community of people in ways that invigorate you as a human, and you’ll learn how to reorient yourself by using new skills to calm the chaos that naturally happens in parenting.

Being a parent is powerful, and you deserve to feel fulfilled, excited about your present life and even more excited about your future life, while knowing you’re in control of yourself, your thoughts, your choices, and your emotions.

Remember - you matter just as much as your children and family matter to you. You deserve to recover from being this burnt out, and get back to feeling joy in the process of parenting.

Let’s get you feeling better, starting today.

You pushed yourself so hard to get to this point. Thousands in student loans. All the late nights spent writing papers, studying for tests, cramming for finals. Fighting to stay at the top of your class, so you could have an incredible resume and chase down your dream job as soon as you graduated.

You knew you were playing with fire, chasing burnout, but decided the risk was worth it in order to push through school, get your degree, and start your career. You made it through without burning out - but now you’re here, working in what you thought was supposed to be your forever job, your dream career, making ‘big kid’ money… but you hate the way it’s making you feel.

You’re exhausted all the time, but it’s not just that you’re exhausted - you’re completely, utterly empty. This isn’t what you signed up for, and you realize…

Work has completely burnt you out.

It feels like you’re dragging around a 10 ton ball-and-chain, and in the middle of being totally drained, you realize how hard it’s become to focus and concentrate, let alone form a cohesive thought process. You’re irritable almost constantly, feeling like every single thing you come across isn’t just a minor inconvenience anymore - everything is now a major disruption to your day, your work flow, and your life.

You know you’re trying desperately to hold it all together, but your work friends have said they’re worried about you, and you’re worrying more and more that your boss is starting to notice. That feeling of being on edge all the time just isn’t going away, no matter what you do to take better care of yourself, nothing is calming that edgy feeling down.

Feeling like this has made you unsure about your career, which just makes everything worse. Some days, you think to yourself that you do still love your work, but it’s just draining. And on other days, you completely hate your job and career, but feel stuck under the weight of school debt and having to pay back all those student loans. The struggle of trying to figure out if you love your career but hate your job is just too much for your exhausted brain, but questioning yourself constantly just makes you more and more anxious and on edge.

Anxious thoughts have become your norm:

**‘What if I can’t get it together?’

**‘Did I choose the wrong career?’

**‘Will I be stuck here forever?’

**‘I know I’m dropping balls lately - what will happen if I get in trouble?’

**‘Will I ever get back to feeling like myself again?’

You know you want to feel better, more fulfilled, and excited to show up to work again… but imagining how to get there or achieve those feelings is, well, feeling more and more impossible.

Starting therapy for Work Burnout is a first step on the path to recovery.

It’s incredibly normal for all of us to create pictures in our minds about what it’s going to feel like when we achieve a dream, getting to ‘check a box’ on our list of life goals. When we do that, though, it’s easy to fall into the trap of idealizing something and ignoring the possible realities that something also comes with.

Recovering from work burnout isn’t just about taking time to rest - it’s about getting realistic first, and then learning how to be strategic and active in your recovery.

One of the most important first steps in recovering from work burnout is taking the time to understand how burnout shows up for you, along with the different things you’ve been dealing with, that have now stacked up to get you to this burnt out, crispy place. The more honest you’re able to be with yourself during this step, the better - and more successful - the process will be.

From there, it’s all about strategy and action. Just because you’re burnt out, doesn’t mean you’ve lost the parts of you that are high achieving, driven, and success oriented. What it does mean is that those parts got packed away, for a whole bunch of different reasons, and they’ve collected some gnarly cobwebs. We have to go collect those parts (because they are still wildly valuable), dust and clean them off, and point them in a new direction.

When you’re strategic about your burnout recovery, you’ll find yourself:

**Getting back in touch with your values

**Restructuring your goals for your career and overall work life

**Orienting new daily and weekly self-care routines towards those values and goals

**Setting healthy boundaries at work

**Creating more reasonable and realistic expectations of yourself, your colleagues and management, and your work environment

**Building out new skill sets and reinforcing old ones, that help you manage burnout symptoms in the future

**Feeling consistently more calm, focused, and back in ‘get-sh*t-done’ mode

**Settling back into a place of confidence and focused energy

And most importantly -

**Remembering (and being really freaking proud of) the Boss that you are.

You deserve to feel fulfilled by the work you do, because the work you do matters. You started your career full of hopes and dreams, with a vision of what you wanted to achieve and what you wanted fulfillment to feel like. All of that is still possible, with maybe some tweaks and changes to the overall vision. After all, pulling a Ross Gellar and shouting ‘PIVOT!!!!’ is sometimes exactly what you need.

You don’t have to do this alone - call today, and let’s get started on rebuilding your peace, happiness, and purpose in this world.