There are words we say in the room, and there are words we don’t.

As healers, we learn to listen, to hold, to stay steady. But what happens to the truths we hold back? The doubts, the fatigue, the silent prayers, the moments of awe...

Eight years ago, I tried to answer that question in my dissertation. I chose an autoethnography, which is a form of research that uses personal experience as data, because I wasn’t just studying burnout. I was living it.

At the time, I believed mindfulness could protect us. That if we paused, breathed, and noticed our own internal weather, we could shield ourselves from the invisible wounds we carry: compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, moral injury, secondary traumatic stress, survivor's guilt, and professional grief burden.

But life had other lessons waiting...

The Juxtaposition: Then vs. Now

When I moved to San Francisco for my pre-doctoral internship, my stipend didn't even cover rent. I couldn’t afford to bring my three-year-old daughter with me, so she stayed with family for a year. It was the hardest decision of my life; trying to become a psychologist while mothering from a distance, carrying guilt, and carrying silence.

Back then, I thought burnout could be solved with self-care. Eight years later, the juxtaposition is clear:

• Then: Burnout was an individual challenge, something to fix with resilience.
• Now: Burnout is a systemic wound — intensified by silence, stigma, and workplaces that treat healers as disposable.

I’ve seen it in corporate America, where executives collapse under relentless pressure.

I’ve seen it in hospitals, where nurses and doctors push through moral injury until they break.

I’ve seen it the military, where service members are trained to be unbreakable, yet often carry invisible wounds that no one else sees.

And I’ve seen it in myself, when “pushing through” was celebrated even as it hollowed me out.

We ask healers to pour endlessly into others, while quietly making them feel disposable.

What Mindfulness Gave Me and Why It Wasn’t Enough

Mindfulness kept me afloat when I thought I might drown. It helped me name the tension in my chest, the grief of being separated from my daughter, the exhaustion that seeped into my bones. But it couldn’t take away the weight I carried. Mindfulness calmed the storm inside me, but it couldn't calm the systems around me that demanded more than anyone could give.

Real healing required more.

While I was living in San Francisco, the separation from my daughter was already an open wound. But then came another blow: a traumatic event that shook me to my core (and not in a good way). In the quiet that followed, I did what so many of us are told to do: I went to therapy.

I went to therapy hoping for relief. My therapist was good. He was everything I had been trained to be myself. But after every session, I walked back into the world unchanged. The grief was still there. The exhaustion was still there. The hollow feeling that maybe I couldn’t keep going was still there. Therapy saves lives, but in that season, my life needed something more than just saving...

That realization unsettled me. If therapy, the very path I was training to devote my life to, could not reach me in my own moment of unraveling, what did that mean for the countless others who suffered silently under the weight of their own exhaustion?

It was then I began searching beyond the borders of psychology. I turned to mindfulness, hypnosis, and coaching — not as theories to teach, but as lifelines to practice. I had to learn to rewire my own brain, to challenge the narratives handed down through generational trauma, family expectations, and the loud opinions of people who never truly knew me.

Everything I now offer professionally grew from those nights of doubt and those mornings of trying again. My work is not abstract theory. It is the lived map I had to draw for myself to survive.

Why I’m Writing This Blog

This blog is a continuation of my dissertation — but this time, it’s not written for a committee. It’s written for us.

For the therapist who leaves the office holding back tears.

For the nurse who holds steady in a trauma room but collapses in the parking lot.

For the executive who performs at the top but quietly feels like they’re failing inside.

For the teacher who gives endlessly and wonders if it will ever be enough.

It’s for every healer, leader, and caregiver who feels unseen in the very systems they keep alive.

My hope is simple: that in these words you’ll find not just recognition, but relief. That you’ll discover reflections and practices you can carry into your own life — small ways to reclaim the compassion you so freely offer others.

Closing Reflection

Eight years later, here’s what I know: burnout is not a personal failure. It’s a signal. A message that something larger needs to shift — in us, and around us.

So this is where I’ll begin: by telling the truths we usually hold back, and inviting you to do the same.

This week, ask yourself: What truth am I carrying in silence that deserves to be spoken, even if only to myself?

And in my next post, I’ll go back further — to when I was 17 and learned the art of reinvention in the most unlikely place. It’s a story about survival, identity, and why traditional psychology never gave me the full tools I needed to heal.

Because healing should not come at the cost of the healer.