Lately I’ve been reflecting on the words people arrive with in clinic when something in their lives has begun to unravel. Stress. Burnout. Overwhelm.
The words are familiar enough, but the lived experience beneath them is often much deeper than the language suggests.
A very commonly used phrase.
So what is burnout?
One that anyone in any profession has heard. A colleague, a friend, a family member - people are often burnt out. It is commonplace.
But beneath the story and the word, what actually is it?
When we experience pain at the most sensory level, what is actually there? Even extreme pain from physical trauma is hard to pin down as a single, isolated experience. It is many things, but first and foremost it is sensation.
We often try to block it, mask it, disable its effect. Pills, lotions, potions, physical therapy, injections. All attempts to remove the signal from our sensory experience. Sometimes with very good reason. We can be overwhelmed and consumed by it. But more often the response is habitual. We feel something, label it, take a pill, distract ourselves from having a body.Pain, whether acute or chronic, is the body ringing a well-oiled alarm bell. One it wants us to pay attention to.
Anxiety is such a common malady and one I see very regularly. It is also an experience I have had myself many times. But now rather than examining the rationale or the stimulus so to speak I am more interested in exploring the physiological and somatic experience. What are the most common symptoms and experiences. If you examine the phenomenon rather than the story certain sensations appear again and again. There is tightness in the chest. Sometimes around the breastbone, sometimes through the ribcage or lower in the diaphragm. It can extend down into the psoas and create deep tension and pain in the hips and lower back.
The sense I usually start with in treatment is hearing. Listening openly to all the sounds around us, in the body, in the room, outside. But not to discern what they are. Not to categorise or understand. Simply to let sound become a single soundstage, one continuity. As I sit with people, it’s interesting to witness how accessible this is. Sight tends to pull people into differentiation, naming, interpreting. Hearing softens people back into themselves once the habitual this is this, that is that pauses. The whole field softens. I feel it in my own body and in the space around us. There is a particular quality to being with someone as that sense of me, me, me loosens and opens wider. It is joyful, easy, open, soft, even playful. It does not require anything.
It began just before my second son was born - nineteen years ago now.
What started as a waterborne infection from a trip to India became something much more serious. Within days I was in intensive care, my organs beginning to fail. The body simply stopped. For a while, I drifted in and out - detached from it all, aware but weightless, as though the tether to the physical world had loosened. I could see the body there, working hard to keep going, while something quieter hovered just beyond it.I recovered, at least physically, but something fundamental didn’t come back. My system couldn’t find safety again. I was alive but slightly outside of life - functioning, but not fully here. And my son was born into that field of suspended energy, into a home where love and fear lived side by side.