Burnout: A Systemic Problem
In Spring 2020, as the newsfeeds were ablaze with breaking news about a worldwide pandemic, I found myself in the strange position of thinking, “I hope I get sick”. Looking back, this disturbing thought of wishing for ill health (which was really a wish for rest) was actually the culmination of a loss in health that was already well underway. I was burning out, but doing it gradually, such that I wasn’t really seeing my decline.
Sure, I noticed that my sleep was disrupted more and more nights every week. And yes, it was taking more energy to do regular things like plan a meal or write an email. But I could still muster myself out of bed every morning and mostly function in the roles I occupy, even though it meant I would feel exhausted at the end of every day. Plus, I was doing what therapists tell their clients to do all the time: I doubled-down on my self-care. Because it must be that I’m not trying hard enough right?!
Women’s health educator Emily Nagoski coined the phrase “human giver syndrome” in the book Burnout (co-written with her sister Amelia Nagoski) to highlight the often unspoken and “contagious belief that you have a moral obligation to give every drop of your humanity in support of others, no matter the cost to you”. They note this belief thrives in patriarchal systems of power and disproportionately impacts women, and women of colour. Human giver syndrome shows up when we feel selfish for taking time for ourselves. It shows up when we feel guilty when saying no, or putting ourselves first. It is often imposed if you work in a service profession that is meant to meet the needs of the collective, like education, health care, agriculture and hospitality. Can you relate?
Turns out, it didn’t matter how hard I tried. All the yoga, meditations, healthy meals, and quality time with my loved ones, was not going to change the larger systems surrounding me, even with the privileges I experience in my social location as an educated, white, cisgender, able-bodied, heterosexual Canadian. My personal strategies couldn’t touch the systemic environment that had me feeling like a cog in a big machine. Of course, the pandemic wasn’t helping, but it mostly amplified the cracks in our systems that were already there.
It was hard to see beyond myself at first, to think critically about the culture surrounding me as a service professional. Vikki Reynolds wrote (2019), “Self-care is often prescribed as the antidote to burnout, but it is individualized, positions workers as damaged, and does not respond to the social determinants of health and context of social injustice in which persons suffer and workers struggle.” She continues, “The problem of burnout is not in our heads or in our hearts, but in the real world where there is a lack of justice. The people I work alongside don’t burn me out and they don’t hurt me, they transform me, challenge me, inspire me. What harms me are the injustices and indignities suffered by clients, and my frustrating inability to personally change the unjust structures of the society they struggle with and live in…this is the problem - not the lack of self-care of the workers who strive to support them and dignify them.”
I am coming across this every day in my counselling practice. People quietly suffer in broken systems, individually blaming themselves for somehow “not being enough” or for simultaneously being “too much”. Too “emotional”. Too “needy”. Too “sensitive”. Part of my role as a therapist is to help people to expand their field of view, to take a broad perspective where we can start to notice and deconstruct the systems that are harming us. These might be the values we were taught about gender expression in our families. It might be the beliefs we were taught about money or productivity within a capitalist framework or religious tradition. It might be the sub-culture of stoicism or machismo within your industry or workplace. But almost for certain, it’s bigger than you or me. And when we start the critical work of questioning these systems and unlearning these values, we can also free up some resources to resist shame.
Dan Hocoy (paraphrasing Greenfield, 1997) wrote, “The structures that undergird contemporary society developed from a particular set of power relations and tend to privilege some individuals at the expense of others; these structures are usually taken for granted because they have been the consistent ground of our existence and are as invisible as the air we breathe.” It’s like all those things our family did that we thought were “normal” until we started hanging out with other families and learned their “normal” was very different. What’s become invisible in your world?
Greenfield, P.M. (1997) “Culture as Process: Empirical Methods for Cultural Psychology.” In J.W. Berry, Y.H. Poortinga and J. Pandey (eds) Handbook of Cross-cultural Psychology (Vol. 1). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Hocoy, D. (2006). Art Therapy As a Tool for Social Change. In F. Kaplan's (Ed) Art Therapy and Social Action : Treating the World's Wounds (pp. 21-39). Jessica Kingsley Publishers.Nagoski, A. and Nagoski, E. (2019). Burnout: The secret of unlocking the stress cycle. New York, Ballantine Books. Reynolds, V. (2019). The Zone of Fabulousness: Resisting vicarious trauma with connection, collective care and justice-doing in ways that centre the people we work alongside.Context. August 2019, Association for Family and Systemic Therapy, UK, 36-39.