5 Signs Of “Recovery Burnout” And Why Survivors Of Narcissistic and Scapegoating Abuse Are More At Risk
What happens when you’re in your trauma journey and you are actually too burnt out to even talk with your coach or therapist?
How do you heal when the thought of journalling about your pain feels like it will suck you into despair and you’ll never be able to climb out?
How can you create joy and connection to support you through this journey if you’re avoiding your friends because you’re so sick of the question “How are you?” Or “What’s been going on for you lately?”
As it turns out (and I learned this the hard way), there is such a thing as doing too much healing work. Trauma recovery isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s also not for the impatient. It is an ongoing process that requires stops along the way.
Listen, I get that you just want to get to the other side of the recovery bridge already. I know you don’t want to be told “This will make you stronger” or “Look at the lessons you are learning”. Ugh! I’m strong enough. I didn’t need these lessons. What I need is for life to just give me a break. To make something work out. To make something easier. Because everything has been so, so hard.
Recovery Burnout
Recovery burnout comes from the emotional and mental exhaustion of having spent years contorting yourself to survive a toxic relationship and then having to detach, analyze, grieve, grow, and recreate your life and identity afterwards.
When you go through a traumatic experience your body shuts down, goes numb, and flees; but the deep emotional and psychological wounds (and their effects on you physically and mentally) don’t disappear. They grow inside you. And you need to specifically address them and heal them. It is hard, tiring work. Healing is an active process. And like all strenuous activity, rest and breaks are necessary.
But a break doesn’t have to be a full stop. There are other ways to ensure you are progressing, without tiring yourself out.
Typically when we experience trauma, we jump headfirst into tonnes of therapy, and support groups, talking to all our friends, researching online, and journalling like mad. We think if we purge it all, we can speed up the healing process.
And sometimes we simply take on too much. We overthink, and over-exert ourselves because we are trying too hard to get somewhere too fast, without stopping to really chart out where we are going.
As such we can burn out.
If you have experienced trauma — any trauma — everything can feel 10x harder and take 100 more steps to complete. This is because you’re not just working on facing the pain of what happened and processing it, you have to grieve what you lost due to that trauma. Then you’re also having to learn how to navigate all the triggers that arise and develop coping strategies for them. You’re even working to have hope again and find safety.
But for survivors of attachment trauma, even the most innocuous situations can be triggering — it can feel like all of life is a trigger; because our trauma came from the things most people rely on for healing: family, community, love and acceptance. Plus, safety is not something we were ever exposed to, and so how are we supposed to build it back into our life? To make things harder, we also have to unlearn all the negative messaging and beliefs that we picked up about how to exist in this world. Beliefs like “we don’t deserve to feel safe” or “taking time for ourselves to recover is selfish”.
When trauma is due to attachment wounds from narcissistic or family scapegoating abuse, you end up working even harder because you need to dismantle and rebuild an entire life, an entire identity — often without the typical supports or information that one would normally rely on to get through.
Yeah, it’s no wonder you are tired!
How do you know if you are just tired, or if you are bordering on burnout?
No one wants to be a trauma survivor. Many days I think “I don’t want to be in a trauma body anymore”. I want to go back to a time before the “collapse” (aka before the survival and coping skills I used to keep the reality of my situation at bay could no longer hold up against the truth). The problem is, for survivors of attachment trauma, there typically isn’t any time “before the trauma”. Our trauma started with our early childhood and re-wired our entire life.
We don’t know a time before we were exhausted.
And so we often look outside our lives to others to remind us that there is more to life. But that can be especially painful because then we feel envy and pain over what we don’t have, or don’t trust we will ever get. Trauma brain casts a shadow over hope. Burnout comes from the weight of that shadow.
If you can’t focus, if you’re anxious, if you are physically tired, if you’re emotionally done, if you’re dysregulated, if your compassion and empathy for others are faltering, if you’re easily triggered, if everything just feels like it is going wrong and you can’t keep up- then chances are you’re feeling recovery burnout.
Disclaimer: Of course you always need to check with a medical professional about any symptoms. Psychological and emotional wounds can affect your physical body!
5 Signs Of Recovery Burnout
Some signs that you need to take a bit of a break from the “active trauma healing process” include:
1. Literally not having the energy for therapy or coaching
2. Not having the energy for…anything. Like brushing teeth or making a meal. Life is too much and everything takes too much energy and you’re simply depleted.
3. Paralysis over making decisions. Because you’ve lost touch with your inner self, your gut, your joy, your danger indicators. You’re so stuck in fight mode that you’ve left your body. So how can you decide what to do or treat your body with kindness?
4. Not responding to texts or messages even from your bestest closest friends and chosen family. Because you’re too tired constantly talking about your crap situation. And you know they wanna support you so they ask about it.
5. You struggle to follow through on anything. Even things that typically would bring joy or hope. You’ve lost sense of who you are and your identity. Trauma has split you and you don’t know what direction you’re even heading in so it’s hard to commit to anything.
These five signs of fatigue are examples of the way trying to heal too fast or too hard can actually hold you back.
If any of these are happening, it may be time to stop trying so hard to heal, and start allowing yourself genuine rest and compassion. The healing will happen beneath the surface. As they say in the clinical world: “Slow is fast.” In other words, it will happen faster, if you go slower.
Another important reason to slow down, beyond the fact that your body and mind need it so they don’t end up in chronic illness, is because recovery fatigue can actually take you way off course and make the journey longer and more confusing.
When we are trying to get away from the pain, or just quickly get to “anything but this”, we make decisions about our future that aren’t grounded in what we actually want out of life, and what truly aligns with us.
As such we end up somewhere new and unknown, but not necessarily better than before. We have to detour back to where we want to go. More energy. More time. More effort.
Ask yourself, am I running away from pain, or running towards joy?
Escaping our situations in order to be safe is critical. But once we are safe, if we continue to flee, instead of actively create our fulfilling futures, we are burdening our body and mind even more with the weight of our efforts. Like a hamster on a wheel we are doing a LOT of work, but not necessarily getting anywhere.
This is what I call the recovery loop. We start to get comfortable talking about our pain. It becomes familiar. It’s a known and trusted path. But it’s a circle. Stepping out of your loop requires you to pause your efforts and recalibrate. And many people feel threatened by pausing, as if it is going to stall “progress”.
Productive pausing, as I call it, is about using your recovery time more efficiently. It enables you to examine how you measure success, happiness, joy, fulfillment, and wholeness in life so your efforts take you where you want to be. Productive pausing asks you to remove the heavy expectations that others (including society at large) have imposed on you (especially messages about “progress”, then trust yourself to live authentically, uncensored, and without apology.
If you have attachment trauma, these were the exact things that threatened your fears of abandonment. And rightfully so — because love and acceptance were conditional growing up. And you needed to survive. But as an adult, they are now the very things that will genuinely set you free.
Tell me, when was the last time you felt fully alive?
©Erin Watson, PhD
ABOUT ME: In my work as a Narcissistic Systems and Scapegoating Expert, I tackle the toughest, deepest pains and traumas that result from this type of attachment abuse. My work focuses on bystander silence and compliance, betrayal trauma, embedded injustice, moral injury, recovery without closure or accountability, complex and disenfranchised grief, traumatic invalidation, reputation assassination and wrongful convictions with no restoration possible, and how to take the risk of developing identity, agency, autonomy and embodiment in the face of imminent toxic backlash. Join me to learn about recovering with ease not effort, and how to reclaim your life, identity, energy, and confidence so you can experience genuine joy, fulfillment, wholeness, and connection no matter where you are at in your healing journey.
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