🔥 There's something missing from the conversation about burnout: trauma

I wasn’t 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 you’re not up for reading that today, please skip it. 

The Patron Saint of Burnout: Wiley Coyote

There’s been a lot of talk about burnout on this platform recently. Since

Anne Helen Petersen

published her zeitgeisty piece back in 2019, the concept has become embedded in our cultural conversation. In the last few months,

Emma Gannon

,

Sophie White

,

Anne Helen Petersen

,

Ali Griffin Vingiano

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 ‘burnaversary’.  

When the original piece was published back in 2019, I’d already been through a significant burnout. The year before, I’d quit my toxic job and spent 6 months crying/reading/recovering on the couch. “No-one should feel like the decomposing monster in Men in Black at work,” I wrote in my journal. That was true, but knowing it didn’t 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. 

The World Health Organisation characterises burnout as “an occupational phenomenon”, not a medical condition. To them, it’s a consequence of “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” It’s made up of three components: 

1. Reduced efficacy 

2. Exhaustion

3. Cynicism

In the months before I left Amnesty, I took comfort in making lists including this long, rambly one of my various symptoms: 

• 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, can’t 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 I’ll have to expend to pick something up. (like a book, or my jeans)

• Upset, not able to find my feet 

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. 

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 who’ve experienced violence, natural disasters, car accidents, health traumas and countless other life-shaking events that preceded their diagnoses. 

The label also comes with a heavy burden of stigma and a level of ignorance that still exasperates me. “You’re too high-functioning to have PTSD,” said a therapist friend over coffee one day. I’m not sure if she meant it as a compliment, but I certainly didn’t 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. It’s 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 wasn’t the only thing. 

I wasn’t 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:

“A recent review into Amnesty International’s workplace culture warned of bullying, nepotism and an “us v them” dynamic that threatened the organisation’s credibility as a human rights champion…The report warned that while there was a risk of vicarious trauma due to the nature of Amnesty’s work, most wellbeing issues among staff were driven by the organisation’s adversarial culture, failures in management and pressures of workload.”

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 “you’re shit!”.  

I read the report through tears. It was both devastating and deeply cathartic to learn that I wasn’t the only one mistreated while working there. What happened to me wasn’t personal, but systemic.

A snapshot from that time in my life. (👀 with dead eyes)

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 I’d seen before. Very slowly, my burnout symptoms lifted. But trauma is much more complicated. It’s 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 don’t 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. “You are worthless. You are contagious. You don’t deserve to live.” It turns your body against you. Your heart perma-pounds. You can’t sleep. You’re too nauseous to eat. You’re light-headed and disassociating in meetings, when crossing the street, in the middle of a conversation. You can’t concentrate. You can’t think clearly. You can’t get to the end of the sentence without forgetting what was at the beginning of it. You have flashbacks and nightmares. You feel someone’s paws on you when they’re 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 weren’t able to eat. You cry yourself to sleep. You wake up crying. 

For people going through burnout it can be deeply destabilising. I don’t mean to minimise the pain of it, indeed in some cases the trauma of it. It’s 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 don’t want to hear about trauma. They don’t 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 you’re a bit dramatic, a bit much. 

Burnout and trauma are fundamentally different things. 

Burnout happens when we use up the body’s reserves, stealing from our future productivity, creativity and time. 

Trauma is living in an ever-present past. The traumatic events we’ve experienced loop and overlap, replaying endlessly in new and exhausting ways. 

Burnout is extreme exhaustion, an inability to do anything. 

Trauma is hyperarousal. You also can’t do much of anything, but you can’t sit still. 

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. 

Perhaps it’s me most of all who needs to understand the distinction. 

I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’ve been triggered and exhausted and just less able for the world. 

With loved ones, I described this constellation of feelings as burnout. I just needed some rest, I said. But I was wrong. I’m dealing with the long term consequences of severe trauma. It’s not something I can solve by optimising my workflow or prioritising more self-care. These feelings can’t 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.

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Thank you for reading. From today, I’m going to take some time away for the holiday break. I will be back with some ‘end of year’ content soon. Thank you for your time and attention this year. I never take it for granted. 

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1. Story for another day!

2. To this day, an inability to write along the lines of my moleskine is a sign that I'm in trouble.

3. 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.

4. Other people may have found complete recovery and I applaud them, but that’s not my metric for success.