đ„ There's something missing from the conversation about burnout: trauma
I wasnât just burnt out. I was traumatised.
Thank you for reading Beyond Survival, a publication about life after trauma. Heads up that this piece is about mental health and includes a brief mention of suicide. If youâre not up for reading that today, please skip it.Â
Thereâs been a lot of talk about burnout on this platform recently. Since
published her zeitgeisty piece back in 2019, the concept has become embedded in our cultural conversation. In the last few months, , , , and several others have written about their own experiences with burnout. Some are frustrated by the concept. Others have moved toward recovery. Some think of it as part of a creative cycle. Others are marking a âburnaversaryâ. ÂWhen the original piece was published back in 2019, Iâd already been through a significant burnout. The year before, Iâd quit my toxic job and spent 6 months crying/reading/recovering on the couch. âNo-one should feel like the decomposing monster in Men in Black at work,â I wrote in my journal. That was true, but knowing it didnât stop me from staying in a shitty job 2 years longer than I should have1. I read a lot about burnout, much of it through tears, hoping to soothe myself with research. I saw part of myself and my experience in those pieces, but nothing I read captured the whole story.Â
The World Health Organisation characterises burnout as âan occupational phenomenonâ, not a medical condition. To them, itâs a consequence of âchronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.â Itâs made up of three components:Â
Reduced efficacyÂ
Exhaustion
Cynicism
In the months before I left Amnesty, I took comfort in making lists including this long, rambly one of my various symptoms:Â
Not able to relax in the evenings
Feeling too exhausted to absorb anything new
Writing gets chaotic on the page. Not neat.2
Harder to face myself on the page - want to pull away
Wound too tightly
Feel overstimulated - shut down, canât hear things
Stop processing things emotionally/bottle things up
Trying to make bad relationships work
Hate non-traumatised people
Never feel OK, calm, rested
Head feels tangled, messy, chaotic, untidy
Not able to concentrate
Forget what I wanted from the kitchen by the time I get there. (If I lived in a mansion, this might be understandable but at the time, my kitchen was the size of a bathtub and about 2 metres from my couch!)
Think about the amount of energy Iâll have to expend to pick something up. (like a book, or my jeans)
Upset, not able to find my feetÂ
Clearly, my symptoms wandered far from the three components of burnout. Shortly after writing this list, I had a new label for my experience: Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.Â
To this day, I have complicated feelings about diagnostic frameworks. It was very useful for me to get a formal diagnosis. It gave me a shorthand to describe my experience of the world, and something for the people around me to google. Nine times out of ten that googling would surface articles about soldiers impacted by PTSD, an assumption that ignores the millions of people whoâve experienced violence, natural disasters, car accidents, health traumas and countless other life-shaking events that preceded their diagnoses.Â
The label also comes with a heavy burden of stigma and a level of ignorance that still exasperates me. âYouâre too high-functioning to have PTSD,â said a therapist friend over coffee one day. Iâm not sure if she meant it as a compliment, but I certainly didnât take it as one. Some mental health diagnoses are widely understood; everyone has a sense of what depression or anxiety is. More complex diagnoses (like mine) are rarely understood and usually require people to sort through lots of misinformation. More than anything, I hate how labels shave off the nuances of our experiences. Every person with a mental health diagnosis has a rich life beyond the confines of the DSM-5, the diagnostic manual that decides which bucket we get dropped into3.
Burnout is a devastating experience. Itâs the manifestation of chronic work stress in someone who is deeply exhausted, disheartened and unable to go on. After a decade in the nonprofit sector, and particularly my years with Amnesty International, that certainly described me well. But it wasnât the only thing.Â
I wasnât just burnt out. I was traumatised.
I was traumatised both by the content of the work and, to a far greater extent, by the culture of the organisation. Shortly after I left Amnesty, a colleague died by suicide. In his note, Gaëtan Mootoo cited work pressures as a significant factor in his decision to end his life. A few weeks later, a second Amnesty employee died by suicide. The organisation commissioned a report which found widespread bullying and mistreatment of staff. As reported by The Guardian:
âA recent review into Amnesty Internationalâs workplace culture warned of bullying, nepotism and an âus v themâ dynamic that threatened the organisationâs credibility as a human rights championâŠThe report warned that while there was a risk of vicarious trauma due to the nature of Amnestyâs work, most wellbeing issues among staff were driven by the organisationâs adversarial culture, failures in management and pressures of workload.â
What happened to me in Amnesty was not (just) burnout, it was trauma. Trauma inflicted by an organisation that, as one employee said in the report, seems to know a lot about rights but very little about humans. The report found multiple examples of managers belittling staff, deliberately excluding them and making demeaning, menacing comments like âyouâre shit!â. Â
I read the report through tears. It was both devastating and deeply cathartic to learn that I wasnât the only one mistreated while working there. What happened to me wasnât personal, but systemic.
When I finally left (two long, painful years after I should have), I was too sick to work. I was physically, mentally and emotionally shattered. I sat on the couch and read and cried and re-watched TV shows Iâd seen before. Very slowly, my burnout symptoms lifted. But trauma is much more complicated. Itâs a spiral rather than a linear path. You can never outrun it. You face trauma and it floors you. You heal from that, and then it knocks you out again. Everywhere you turn, you are in a maze littered with traps. You can try to develop some skills, to find a way forward but you will never be fully free of it. Or at least, I donât believe that I will ever be fully free of it.4
Severe trauma takes your coping mechanisms and removes their usefulness. It grabs you in its irrational claws, worming its way into the core of yourself. âYou are worthless. You are contagious. You donât deserve to live.â It turns your body against you. Your heart perma-pounds. You canât sleep. Youâre too nauseous to eat. Youâre light-headed and disassociating in meetings, when crossing the street, in the middle of a conversation. You canât concentrate. You canât think clearly. You canât get to the end of the sentence without forgetting what was at the beginning of it. You have flashbacks and nightmares. You feel someoneâs paws on you when theyâre not there. You cry all the time. You cry in the shower. You cry walking to work. You cry (very quietly) in the office bathrooms. You cry on your lunch break, running your hand along a rail of workwear basics in Next. You cry into the soup you werenât able to eat. You cry yourself to sleep. You wake up crying.Â
For people going through burnout it can be deeply destabilising. I donât mean to minimise the pain of it, indeed in some cases the trauma of it. Itâs not useful to create hierarchies between different kinds of suffering. But the path back from burnout, though it can be long and painful, is much more straightforward than the path back from trauma. Burnout is also easier to talk about. People donât want to hear about trauma. They donât like to think about sexual violence or car accidents or serious mental health conditions. You scare them with your honesty and your emotions. They think youâre a bit dramatic, a bit much.Â
Burnout and trauma are fundamentally different things.Â
Burnout happens when we use up the bodyâs reserves, stealing from our future productivity, creativity and time.Â
Trauma is living in an ever-present past. The traumatic events weâve experienced loop and overlap, replaying endlessly in new and exhausting ways.Â
Burnout is extreme exhaustion, an inability to do anything.Â
Trauma is hyperarousal. You also canât do much of anything, but you canât sit still.Â
Both make it impossible to enjoy life. Both can be devastating. Both require a serious commitment to recovery. But if we are to have a meaningful conversation about either, we need to acknowledge the differences between them. We need to use language carefully to accurately describe our experiences. And we need to be open to hearing about things that scare us.Â
Perhaps itâs me most of all who needs to understand the distinction.Â
Iâve been feeling a little threadbare recently. This time of year can be tough. The weak, wintery light reminds me of all the tough winters that came before. I started working on an essay about all the Christmases Iâve spent alone and was overwhelmed by how much it upset me. I changed jobs this year and the transition has been tough. We had a pet medical emergency. War is everywhere. Iâve been triggered and exhausted and just less able for the world.Â
With loved ones, I described this constellation of feelings as burnout. I just needed some rest, I said. But I was wrong. Iâm dealing with the long term consequences of severe trauma. Itâs not something I can solve by optimising my workflow or prioritising more self-care. These feelings canât be shifted or changed. They just have to be felt. It was easier for me to say I was burnt out than to say I was traumatised. But if I want things to change, if I want to get better, I have to label my problems correctly.
Thank you for reading. From today, Iâm going to take some time away for the holiday break. I will be back with some âend of yearâ content soon. Thank you for your time and attention this year. I never take it for granted.Â
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Story for another day!
To this day, an inability to write along the lines of my moleskine is a sign that I'm in trouble.
The DSM has a controversial history pathologising homosexuality, neurodivergence and countless other human experiences that diverge from what is considered the (capitalist, white supremecist) norm.
Other people may have found complete recovery and I applaud them, but thatâs not my metric for success.
I found this a very insightful read. Thank you.
Yup, this resonates. CPTSD really isnât well understood publicly and most people donât know how to relate to it (for the record, Iâm high functioning AF and Iâm sorry anyone said that to you!) It took me a long time to accept the diagnosis for that reason, and to trust what was happening in my body in order to work through it. Thanks for writing about it!