Why Should I Try Therapy for Burnout?

I guess you’re here because you have experience of burnout and are looking for answers about why you’ve burnt out, how you can change the patterns that have brought you to this point and how you can recover. You might be ill, chronically fatigued, stressed, overwhelmed, anxious, depressed or just plain tired. You might identify yourself as a perfectionist, a people-pleaser, an over-thinker, a chameleon, a mask-wearer. Your self-esteem might be rock bottom. You might have lost your sense of who you are, what you need, what you enjoy.

But right now, life is tough. You’ve recognised some of the patterns of burnout in yourself and you really do want to do things differently, learn a new way of being that works better for you so life can be easier and more fulfilling. You may have noticed that you are in a cycle where you burn out, take some time to concentrate on yourself more, put yourself first a bit more until you start to feel better only to fall back into your old ways and find yourself sliding, inevitably back down into burnout – and you want to break that cycle for good but you just don’t know how.

​Whatever route you have taken to get to this point, you’re here. You’ve arrived. Now the real work can begin! The work to understand what stories you have learned in your life about how you need to be in order to be loved, accepted and appreciated. The experiences that have shaped your picture of who you are today.

These stories are important – they were your way of making sense of the world and your place in it when you were younger and more vulnerable than perhaps you are today. By uncovering these stories, you can examine them more closely and decide whether or not they remain useful to who you are now. Do they serve you any more or is it time to let them go?

​Once you’ve uncovered your stories, examined them all and decided which to keep and which to let go, you can start to see what has been buried beneath them – your true YOU.

​When you have (re)acquainted yourself with who you are without the stories and expectations you’ve been carrying around with you all this time, you can rebuild that most crucial relationship – the one with yourself. You can get to know this you: find out what matters to you, what you care most about, what you need, want, crave, what you love to do, what brings you joy, makes you angry, makes you sad.

Then, armed with this new sense of who you are and what matters, you can start to write a new story that you can take forward into the future.

Find out more here or drop me a line.