On Superwoman, Burnout and Childhood Trauma

Aloha, good morning, and welcome to the Secret Art of Huna. I say good morning because it’s morning here where I am but it might be morning at a different time of day in your timezone.

And today I decided to talk about trauma, superwoman, and meltdown or burnout. The reason that I’m doing this is that I’m increasingly finding that clients come to me,

and this is especially clients in their mid to late 40s, their 50s, their 60s that they’re coming to me and they’re going through some kind of meltdown or burnout, and the meltdown or burnout part of it is because they’ve been playing superwoman for a long time,

they’ve been in overdrive, they’ve been overperforming, oversucceeding, they’ve been everything to everybody, they never take time out for themselves.

So part of it’s that they’ve been living on their testosterone, which we as women have a lot less of than men, but very often there’s another piece in there, and the other piece is something to do with childhood trauma or abuse of some kind.

Now, I am not a psychiatrist, I am not a mental health professional. So this is very much a personal view of what I’m seeing.

I am a qualified clinical hypnotherapist and I have done some work around therapy, so I have a perspective on this that’s quite well informed but I’m not a mental health professional so please don’t think that I am or take it from that perspective.

I’m looking at it from the perspective as coach. Now as a coach, we deal in the present and the future. We don’t spend so much time in the past which is what a psychotherapist or therapist or a counsellor may do.

We’re focused on the present and the future. But if my clients in the present are melting down, then I’ve got to think about how I’m going to help them because it’s very difficult to focus on or even imagine a wonderful future for yourself if right now, in the present you’re going through some kind of hell.

It’s interesting as well that we, we don’t tend to talk about it a lot in the coaching community, or certainly not in the circles that I move, but what I’m seeing, when I talk about trauma, what I’m talking about is sustained physical abuse, sustained emotional abuse, sustained sexual abuse, sustained bullying.

Sometimes it’s because as a child, the individual was witness to something traumatic or was involved in something traumatic like a horrific car accident or something, but that seems to be much rarer.

What seems to be more common is something sustained going through childhood, and very often, that something sustained is actually emotional abuse with or without physical and sexual abuse.

And it seems to come to light because women get to their, say, mid-40s, 50s, 60s, and suddenly all these emotions are coming up that they just don’t know where they come from and they don’t know how to deal with them.

They can’t get out of bed, they have no energy, they are crying a lot, they’re feeling emotion. Now this may well be for men too but most of my clients are women, so that’s why I’m talking from a women’s perspective.

And as you may already know, women are four times more likely to suffer burnout than men in the workplace.

So it’s that kind of thing that I’m talking about and there’s something about that that, because it produces beliefs like I’m not good enough, I’m not lovable,

I don’t deserve, it’s selfish to do anything for myself, it seems to create those kinds of beliefs so of course they’re going to superwoman, of course they strive, they strive to be brilliant,

but all the time underneath there’s this little voice going you’re not good enough, you don’t deserve this.

This is selfish, you’re not lovable, nobody’s gonna like you if you behave like this. Those kinds of little voices which you may find familiar, I certainly do, it pushes them into the superwoman.

They’re hearing this constant thing in their head and sooner or later, something gives. Now I’m not gonna talk in this video very much about how to deal with the something that gives because it’s a big story,

it’s not a magic pill, it’s not a single fix, but it’s my invitation to you that if that’s something that’s happening for you, that you actually seek help from somebody if you’re not already receiving help.

Find yourself a coach, find yourself a therapist, find yourself a counsellor, find yourself somebody to support you through this, because it’s really, really hard to do it on your own.

One of the things that often happens to us coaches is that we attract clients to ourselves either who represent a place where we’ve been in at some stage in our past or a place that we’re in right now.

I still even now, a client will walk up and they’ll be talking about an issue that’s going on for them and I think, hmm, that’s something I still need to deal with.

So clients will come and they’ll bring issues, current issues that I know that currently I haven’t yet totally dealt with.

Very often, and maybe it’s because I’m old and maybe it’s because I’m more experienced, maybe because I’ve done more work on myself,

I don’t know, but very often what will happen is that they’ll show up and they’ll have something going on that it’s something that I actually have healed in my past and it’s almost like they’re coming to me because I have the empathy, because I’ve been through it, because I know how to deal with it.

This is certainly true for me with bullying. I was bullied as a kid. It caused me to, as a result, I started to believe certain things about myself, particularly that I wasn’t likeable or lovable,

which in turn had a significant effect on my relationship choices or my inability to attract relationships in many cases, but it did affect my relationship choices because I believed I wasn’t lovable.

So I didn’t go for what I really wanted. And eventually, when I burnt out, it was partly because I was being, I was working crazy at work but it was so much more about the problems of the old beliefs that had grown up when I was between the age of seven and 14,

These old beliefs I’d grown up about myself that had been playing out and just finally I had to deal with them.

Now, I chose a certain path, my path was to investigate NLP because I didn’t want to go down, I didn’t want to see a counsellor, I didn’t want to see a psychotherapist.

In my family you didn’t go to psychotherapy or counselling or psychiatry. Psychiatry was regarded as some kind of voodoo and going to counselling or psychotherapy was regarded as some kind of weakness, particularly by my mother.

So I didn’t do any of that. I decided that I’d sort it out without the help from the medical profession and without the benefit of drugs, ’cause they put me on Valium at 13 at school and it didn’t go well.

So I went down the NLP route, and I was lucky because I was able to find support from my NLP teacher and also to support myself out of the clinical depression that I was experiencing.

So I didn’t have an ongoing coach or an ongoing counsellor or an ongoing psychotherapy. I quickly learned some tools and I was able to apply them to myself, but from time to time I dropped back into support,

from time to time I did have some psychotherapy, I finally resolved my issues around psychotherapy and I went to psychotherapy.

It was a safety net, it was somebody who I could talk to who didn’t judge me, who wasn’t part of my family or my relationships so they weren’t having to bear a burden for me.

I was paying them to listen to me and to be my safety net. And if part of your burnout or you know somebody who’s experienced this kind of thing, this kind of meltdown,

then encourage them to get some sort of support because as family, as friends, if you’re in a relationship with somebody it’s really, really hard to support them and especially as family or as part of an intimate relationship,

you don’t know but what you might be part of the problem as it’s manifesting now.

So get support of some kind. This one is hard to deal with on your own. There are many things you can deal with on your own, but I think this one is particularly hard.

If anything I said today has resonated with you, then call me up, get into SecretArtofHuna.com/diary and arrange a call and we can talk and I can see whether I can help you, whether I’m the best person, or I can recommend people who might be better placed to help you.

Because it’s not a journey that you have to go through alone. It’s a journey that if you get the right support, it can be relatively smooth, not saying it’ll be smooth smooth, relatively smooth and relatively short.

When you resolve those old issues, when you free yourself from the baggage of the old beliefs that you’ve locked yourself into, it’s incredibly, incredibly empowering.

If you told me 25 years ago that I would be sitting here talking like this, that I in my 60s would be happy, I’d be fulfilled, that I’d be joyful, I wouldn’t have believed it was possible,

I really would not have believed it was possible because my beliefs about myself, about my good enough, about my unworthiness, my unlovability and all the rest was so deeply ingrained. It doesn’t have to be like that.

So if you or anyone you know is going through this kind of meltdown burnout, get them to get some help, wherever it might be. Talk to you very soon, bye.

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