[DAWN GABRIEL]
Hi, I’m Dawn Gabriel, your host of Faith Fringes podcast recording live from Castle Rock Colorado. I am a licensed professional counselor, owner of a counseling center and a sacred space holder for fellow therapists. This podcast is for those who want to explore more than the traditional norms of the Christian culture. I create intentional space to explore your own spiritual path, a space that allows doubt, questions and curiosity without the judgment or shame, a place to hear another story and dive deeper into how to have a genuine connection with God.

For my fellow therapist listening, I will often pull back the curtain of our layered inner world that comes with our profession. I bring an authentic and experienced way to engage your spiritual journey in order to connect you with your deepest values for true renewal and soul care. But really this podcast is for anyone listening who’s desiring a deeper and genuine connection with God. For those of you wanting to engage your spirituality in new ways, Faith Fringes is for you. Welcome to the podcast.

Hello, and welcome back to Faith Fringe’s podcast. This is Dawn Gabriel, your host. I’m glad you’re here today. We are going to be talking about burnout and I’ve really been getting into this subject of burnout lately. I feel like it’s all around us, no matter what profession you’re in. I feel like we’re all burned out from the last couple years of events in our nation with the pandemic with political stuff and I feel like we just really need to pull apart what is burnout? I feel like we need to learn about it. I’ve been studying it more. I’ve been talking about it more. So I actually have a friend here who I’m so excited to introduce, and she actually specializes in burnout.

Laura and I actually go way back. We’ve known each other for quite a while now. So let me just tell you a little bit about her. Laura Brassie is a licensed professional counselor based in Denver, Colorado. Laura is licensed in eight states across the country, is a clinical supervisor and specializes in burnout and religious trauma. She became passionate about treating burnout in a practical and holistic way after learning the hard way, which means a lot of burnout in the early days of her career as a therapist. She currently works as a therapist for a large digital mental health company. Laura, welcome to the podcast.
[LAURA BRASSIE]
Thank you, Dawn. Happy to be here.
[DAWN]
Yes, it’s so fun. I know we talk a lot off air. Laura is a friend of mine, but I’m just so excited to have you here today and to share all your knowledge of burnout. Even myself as a therapist, I’ve been like, well, what’s the difference between burnout and depression? Like it mirrors depression in my head and I realize I don’t actually know how I would define it. So I’m like, I’m going to bring people on the podcast. I was like, Laura.
[LAURA BRASSIE]
Well, I’m excited and happy.
[DAWN]
So start with what, like what do you, how do you describe burnout? How would you define it?
[LAURA]
The condition of burnout is essentially being in any stressful situation that goes on long enough or is stressful enough that your typical self-care or other methods of refueling and coping no longer help. So usually we’re talking about it with work and that’s certainly a big area for us as therapists, especially it doesn’t have to be work. It could be caregiving, it could be parenting, it could be in relationships with friends, with spouses, with other people. It can even be dealing with a chronic illness or something or any situation like this. So burnout is typically systemic and environmental as well. That’s another thing that I find is an important distinguisher for burnout. It’s always about external factors that affect the individual rather than an internal state, like you might think of with depression or anxiety.
[DAWN]
Okay. Say more about that. Like explain the internal versus systemic.
[LAURA]
Systemic, let’s take the work context for a therapist, systemic factors for burnout are going to be things like a high acuity caseload, too much work. Your caseload is too big. You’ve got too much work to do, you have too many things in your plate or being underpaid and overworked, dealing with management difficulties, dealing with insurance companies. All of these sorts of things that have nothing really to do with us as individuals or our work, but have everything to do with unsustainable conditions of our work and so often preventing us from being able to fully provide and thrive in our own areas of expertise. So that aspect is systemic in the sense of, it’s not necessarily about the work you do. It’s not really about the people you work with. It’s not really about how good you are at self care, nothing to do with any of that. It’s all about unsustainable conditions.
[DAWN]
Wow. Okay. I’m learning already. Then the internal, like you’re talking about anxiety, depression, I would imagine though that if you already struggle with that, does that make burnout more, it would happen quicker or is there a comorbidity there, I guess?
[LAURA]
I would say yes. We all have different factors that could make us more vulnerable to burnout or more resilient against burnout. So for sure factors within our own personalities are going to be a big part of this. For example, somebody who’s very introverted and constantly has to make sales calls is going to be more burned out by that than somebody who’s super extroverted and loves making calls. Same environment, personality factors is what makes it stressful for one person.

For sure anxiety and depression are going to make you more vulnerable to other stressors in your life. I generally call that like the intersectionality of circumstances. So intersectionality, as we typically talk about it around diversity and the intersection of identities for sure is also a burnout factor. So for example, people who might experience the emotional tax, having to be on guard in their work environments due to one or more of their identities that are marginalized, that makes you more vulnerable to burnout in that same environment. Intersectionality of circumstances is where depression and anxiety would show up because they’re going to be potentially at different levels at different times in your life, depending on what else is going on. It’s more fluid.
[DAWN]
Wow. So, as I’m listening to this, I do want to hear part of your story. Can you share, like you’ve said, you got into this from personal experience. Can you share part of your story?
[LAURA]
Sure. I moved to Colorado right after I finished grad school and so for those who don’t know us, that’s when Dawn and I met pretty shortly after. Right after I moved here, I started working with Dawn. In the meantime I was also working at a hospital, a psych hospital. I was working a third job for a while, just as a server learning that Colorado rents are significantly different than the Midwest.
[DAWN]
A culture shock.
[LAURA]
Oh yes. And just the newness, new place, thousand miles away, just all of those factors set me up to be deal with some burnout in a way and just sort of that not necessarily preventable, but still very real vulnerability as just a new therapists. Just being thrown into this real world experience that is different even than internships and other things at school. So for sure, I felt burnout at the hospital I worked at, my schedule was all over the place, I was frequently dealing with patients who are really agitated and dealing with psychosis and substance use and just having violent behaviors and all of those kinds of things often with very little support. All environmental factors. And yes, I essentially then left that job out of desperation but ended up in an ER, not really better
[DAWN]
ER as a patient or as a clinician?
[LAURA]
As a clinician. So I just went to the other side of the same system. I then was doing the assessments for people who showed up to the ER with psychiatric or substance abuse, detox related concerns and most of the same things. Both of those jobs also had a lot of vicarious trauma but also just a lot of primary trauma, honestly. Most of us therapists are familiar at least with the concept of vicarious trauma. That’s when we are witnessing, hearing about, experiencing trauma secondhand, usually from our clients and what they’re discussing with us. For sure that was present in those jobs, but it was also primary. It was also, I might get assaulted today. It was also the intensity. It was also someone is likely going to scream at me at some point, but I don’t know when. All of those kinds of things really just hype up your nervous system for trauma. So I had a lot of that too. After I left the ER, I then went to mostly community based nonprofit, working with people experiencing homelessness, severe mental illness and substance use.
[DAWN]
You did all the big ones by the way. Holy cow.

Yes. So had a lot more support in that role, a lot more teamwork in that role, it changed some of those acute stressors but still had a lot of the aspects of primary and vicarious trauma. I think that job is really where compassion fatigue showed up a lot too. So compassion fatigue was an aspect of burnout for sure but this is when I started to become more jaded, more cynical. This was directly related to people I work with whereas burnout is typically not about them at all. Compassion fatigue is when my own emotional exhaustion started hindering me from being able to be fully present with my clients. Again, most of that was really systemic and environmental running into barriers over and over again, people needing support, getting services that don’t exist, wait lists that are forever facing discrimination and poverty and all of these other factors.

We were in this uphill battle with our clients. Shat typically went on for the clients for years and decades. It was in some ways a hospice program, our clients didn’t typically graduate. All of those things then added up into that compassion fatigue because I was so tired. It started to spill out on my ability to care, on my ability to have healthy boundaries in ways that were balancing out going to one extreme of being really aloof, kind of too strict a boundary to stricter boundaries and being able to balance that from going to loose. Those really flexible boundaries can also be compassion fatigue, because maintaining the boundaries feels too hard.
[DAWN]
Okay, I feel like we have to slow down for a minute because that, I feel like you unpacked some big stuff here. I was like, oh my gosh, I feel like I should be taking notes because we talked about, you talked about Vicarious trauma, you also talked about compassion fatigue, and burnout and you said some really good stuff. So let me get this straight compassion fatigue is more your internal response on how you can handle your environment. So it’s different than burnout because burnout is more external factors, but compassion fatigue is a response, almost like a deadening yes of your feelings, which a lot of us get into our roles of work anywhere, whether we’re a therapist or not because of our passion and our values. So what I don’t think I realized, but it totally makes sense when you said it is with compassion fatigue, you can go one or two ways. You can get really strict boundaries or really loose and that’s terrifying, but we see it. That’s when ethical boundaries get messed up.
[LAURA]
Yes, absolutely.
[DAWN]
It makes sense.
[LAURA]
You think about many of those ethical sorts of things we might have seen happen in our places of work and et cetera. They’re almost always. Somebody who is generally a good person, they cared about their work and it can become so overwhelming and they can be so chronically stressed that they’re just truly not thinking clearly anymore. This is also in more subtle ways, like when you’re having nightmares about work. You are always worried about your clients, even though it’s midnight, even though you’re on vacation —
[DAWN]
You can’t turn your brain off.
[LAURA]
Yes, yes.
[DAWN]
Even the subconscious brain.
[LAURA]
Yes, exactly. So we might not all be pushed to making these huge egregious ethical errors with capacity. Hopefully not but that’s where it starts. It’s I can’t turn my brain off. So even more energy is being stolen every single time and you can’t disconnect anymore. That’s also loose boundaries.
[DAWN]
Oh, interesting. Like self-care, like self-boundaries.
[LAURA]
Yes.
[DAWN]
But it’s like intertwined with our subconscious
[LAURA]
All three of them burnout, compassion fatigue, and vicarious trauma can show up together for sure.
[DAWN]
They sound like they’re friends.
[LAURA]
They’re all friends. They can all show up together. That’s usually when we finally take them seriously as a gang. Yes, when we’re outnumbered finally. But they’re all pieces of the same big pie. The systemic practical factors of burnout, the really personal, my compassion well is just tapped out and I’m being traumatized by it as well. So my stress threshold is shifting and my ability to regulate is changing and of course put all those together and it’s perfect. It’s very much what I experienced just in those first few years. So one big thing I realized, and this happened at the ER because of the hospital, this happened before I went to the nonprofit, think about the system of the emergency mental health generally speaking.

People in the ERs are regularly talking to people in the psych hospitals. Can you, do you have an opening? Do you, can you take this person right? They’re on the phone all day of each other. I switched sides so to speak. You would think I would be talking now to all of the psych hospital people, but I ultimately ended up talking to a lot of people I knew. For sure we’re both in the Denver Metro front range, Colorado. Like it’s not that big of a community at the end of the day, but I started to realize, oh, we were all just jumping around within this micro system, hoping that the next place would somehow be better when the issue was really so much bigger than that.
[DAWN]
Oh, geez, yes. I feel like we can go on all these different tangent because now I want to talking about taking care of mental health workers in those systems. I can go off on that because it’s not set up. The only reason I survived working at a psych hospital is because somehow there was a band of friends that we still, 10 years later still go out and connect. That was the only way I survived three years there, is because of the friend group I was in but it was so toxic.
[LAURA]
Yes.
[DAWN]
I remember being in it, I worked in a jail as well and I remember feeling my compassion fatigue. I started to turn, I felt like my innocence was completely gone and I started to turn and I was like, I have to get out of here. Because I can’t, unless I want to be a politician and go all the way up to change huge systems I can’t do much work here. I just remember feeling so depressed, but I wonder if it was more compassion fatigue. I looked at it as depression. Or I was turning evil inside
[LAURA]
Yes.
[DAWN]
But now I have different words to put to it.
[LAURA]
Absolutely. I do think burnout and depression symptoms are almost exactly the same really.
[DAWN]
Okay.
[LAURA]
The only major difference is where it came from, whether it was because of burnout, environmental factors or because it was from something else, other stressors in your life or genetic components or all of those things that depression shows up from. But honestly, I think that’s the only difference. So that being said, many of the things that we use to treat depression are at least helpful when we’re working with burnout in ourselves or in clients, including medications and things like that, as well as a lot of the same therapy techniques. But we also have to be thinking about where this came from. So when we realize, yes, this is burnout and this is compassion fatigue, then the typical depression type of work may not really get to the root of it.
[DAWN]
Okay. Why not say more about that?
[LAURA]
Think about having an open wound, a big cut in your arm or something. Things like compassion fatigue can actually kind be the original wound. Your internal well is completely tapped out or you might be struggling with depression or anxiety or your own trauma responses, that stuff. Burnout is the wound getting infected. So it’s like, how are you going to build up your internal well of compassion if you have a 50% caseload and there’s absolutely nothing you can realistically do to take time off? How are you going to build up your well of compassion and feel refueled again, if you can’t pay rent with your full-time job as a licensed master’s level professional? You’re not. You’re probably not. It’s going to take a lot more time and a lot more work and a lot of other things are going to have to change. So those things that have to change are the burnout things. The fact that make this unsustainable and that’s like, you got to clean that infection out of the wound before you can actually stitch up the wound and let the internal part here.
[DAWN]
If you’re a therapist and you are feeling burned out or just needing a break and being around other therapists who really understand what you’re going through, or if you are feeling like you just need some space to connect with God and get grounded back into what really matters to you and your spirituality, I would like to invite you to come to a soul care retreat for therapist, exclusively for therapist. I host sole care retreats for therapists, and I just love holding sacred space for you to just reconnect with yourself, reconnect with God and connect with others who are in the same profession and have probably experienced similar things as you have. So I’m inviting you. My next retreat is September 23rd through the 25th, 2022 in Colorado.

We will have about 10 rooms to ourselves in this little beautiful retreat center in the Black Hills forest. We have three hot tubs, there’s trails around there, we can see the mountains. It’s so peaceful there. I just want to invite you to come. Come and just experience what it’s like to have soul care. We do some guided exercises as a group. We also do guided exercises as individuals. I have a workbook that can help walk you through what do I do with all this downtime because I know, even though we are longing for the downtime, sometimes it’s hard to get there.

Sometimes we get anxious when we’re there or sometimes we get scared. So I will have a workbook that helps you walk through that, that gives you exercises to connect with God and figure out what’s really going on inside you. We also have there’s great food here. We have great conversations and there’s plenty of time to connect with one another and we have a lot of fun. So if you’re interested, send me an email dawn@faithfringes.com. I only have 10 spots available for this retreat. We like to keep it small and intimate. Again, it’s September 23rd through 25th. That will be in Colorado. Reach out to me, dawn@faithfringes.com to find out more information today.
[DAWN]
So then how do you work with people who are working in a job that they’re burned out, they have compassion fatigue, and they might have depression or it looks the same? How do you treat that?
[LAURA]
I work with a lot of people, especially in healthcare. So this comes up a lot, that they’re experiencing all three. That’s, even though it can be really, really difficult at times that is who I love to work with is fellow healthcare professionals and therapists who properly are getting all three
[DAWN]
All three being vicarious trauma, burnout, I would say, is there a fourth depression? I still feel like, I have to, I don’t know, maybe because I’m so used to, like is there a diagnosis for burnout in the TSM?
[LAURA]
There’s not. There’s not. If somebody, and depression’s usually what I would diagnose it with if I have to.
[DAWN]
Okay, I was just curious, sorry.
[LAURA]
No, I mean it’s totally realistic. For therapists that might work with people with burnout, if you do have to put in diagnostic codes, depression usually fits. There is not a true code for burnout. At least you can capture it in Z codes. It’s not going to get paid for, so insured.
[DAWN]
But still you saying the treatment looks different. This is what I’m so excited to hear. Tell me what do you do for these fellow clinicians that you have such a heart for?
[LAURA]
We usually integrate building up the internal stuff, managing your emotions, thinking through different coping skills and grounding and all of that stuff, distress tolerance type work, along with the very practical side. So we’ll talk through finding an individual’s burnout factors. What do you maybe like about your job? Why are you still there versus what are some of the factors making it particularly more difficult for you? So that might be, I’m super introverted and I have to talk to people all day. That might be, my schedule is terrible. I can never pick up my kids from school and that’s stressful for me every single day trying to figure it out. It might just be salary and benefits and I can’t support my family with this, all of that stuff. We’ll try to piece out what those things are for this person in this role and start by, is there any low-hanging fruit here? Can you maybe actually change your schedules so you can pick up your kids and just never asked to do that? Can you put in a request for that new office chair that you’ve been complaining about for 10 years?
[DAWN]
Some of this is again the personal boundaries and you get into the personal uncomfortableness of what can I start to speak up for and what have I just ignored because my boundaries were pushed?
[LAURA]
Absolutely, yes. Any one of those three, burnout, fatigue, vicarious trauma, they take up so much of our mental and emotional energy that we do just have to start cutting out other things, even though a lot of times, those other things could help. So being able to come back to that and look at it a little bit differently could help a lot. One thing I always think about was when I first started at the ER, my schedule was just an absolute mess. It was like three days on and then two off and then like one on and then two off. It was just horrible. Eventually I was like, oh, can I actually change this?

So we changed it. Then it became five on two off, three on four off. Made a big difference and nothing else really changed, but that helped. So there can be some practical things that we just need to be able to focus on and take care of and scrape that bit of infection out of the wound. After we look at those things, then it’s often more about boundaries and so a lot of work on boundaries whether that is always saying no first and then coming back to, can I say yes? That might just be practicing boundaries with clients, with coworkers, with supervisors, with anybody where you realize they’re getting pushed and you haven’t been able to really shift that. We also talk a lot about self-advocacy because again, I don’t really want to treat burnout as this internal problem when it’s an external issue.
[DAWN]
I love that. Advocacy would be huge in this situation.
[LAURA]
In individual therapy, we’re still not truly getting at many, many things in your organization need to change for this to get better. But we do take a hard look at, is there a realistic version of this role where you could feel like it’s sustainable? So we can either make those changes or we can talk about making bigger changes, like leaving a role or something, but we can’t leave the environment the same and expect it to get you better. So that is a huge part of it. Advocacy is often, how do I ask for things that I need? How can I ask effectively? How can I get involved to make changes where it’s possible? Advocacy is also boundaries. How can I stand up for myself and my work and my value? So those are three major areas we talk through a lot in addition to the coping skills, the self-care etcetera.
[DAWN]
Wow. I think I could have used more study and talk on burnout like years ago. I’m just looking at my own journey. I remember experienced some panic when I worked at the hospital and some depression later, which I had never, I’m more bent to anxiety than depression, but when depression showed up was after my mom passed away. So dealing with a personal, huge grief in the middle of being a therapist, I ran my own practice then, but I still was like shoving in 25, 30 clients a week and then decided to start a group practice, which I love and like all passion projects. But the way my personality does things can be over the top.

I know you teach on personality too, which we don’t have time to get into that, but how personality and burnout, but the way my personality just keep going, push through. Now I’m all about soul care and slowing down because I know I cannot live that way because I will get burned out. My compassion fatigue, I get super angry and irritable and mean, internal mean thoughts. I don’t like living that way with myself, let alone interacting with other people. So I don’t know, just processing this, like I would’ve named it burnout and I never named it that before.
[LAURA]
Totally. Well, we’re really not taught how to name that. I mean, we’re not. I have never met a therapist who’s like, yes, my program was really great about preparing us for burnout. And I mean, and otherwise excellent grad programs but most of us really did not have any idea what that was truly going to look like. For sure, I mean when your mom passed, it’s such a powerful example of when those, that intersectionality of circumstances, personal circumstances and grief shifted your burnout threshold a lot.
[DAWN]
No threshold.
[LAURA]
Didn’t much. You also mentioned that piece of like you were running your own practice. That’s also just survival. Especially too, to an extent, every therapist learns how to shut some of their emotions off in order to be present for our clients and not make our own stuff, get in the way and all of that. So we learn this intentionally and it can easily go overkill to where we’re just functioning and getting stuff done and we got nothing inside.
[DAWN]
Well, and then it comes out. Unfortunately, it came out with my husband and kids and I realized this is not okay for me to live like this. I had to do some serious, for me I did some spiritual directions, some counseling. I did a lot of changes and boundaries. I had to say no to a lot of things.
[LAURA]
Yes, absolutely.
[DAWN]
What else would you say would help someone if they’re like, oh yes, I’m naming it now. I’m burned out. What are like some top three things you would say they could do after looking at circumstances and advocacy? Are there any tips to let’s start doing this, if they’re not in mental health, and in general what would you have them do?
[LAURA]
One thing I would have them do is strengthen the burnout awareness pipeline basically. So we might think about this as just really more sematic embodiment, polyvagal type stuff when it comes in therapy. So at the basis of this, basically everything else, our body picks up burnout first. So our bodies notice this. They notice they’re not in a sustainable pattern. We might just be a little more tired. We might just be a little more anxious. We might be like little sluggish, brain fog, all this stuff might really be the beginning of burnout. Our bodies know it first and then our emotions. Then we’re starting to be more irritable and now we’re noticing the anxiety more and now our mood is going down and all this stuff. I’m just so stressed all the time.

By the time we can verbalize intellectually, wow, I’m going through a lot of burnout, it probably is severe. So strengthening the connection between those systems within ourselves can really help catch burnout earlier next time before it ever gets that bad. I think that might sound a little bit fatalistic, but it’s just for therapists to get in particularly we’re always at risk. So we’re always in prevention mode, even if we’re doing really well. That’s awesome. We can be in prevention hopefully a long time, but to say that you can just heal burnout and then never have to worry about it again, it’s just not realistic for any of us, but certainly not realistic for people in health.
[DAWN]
What’s prevention mode? What would you do in prevention mode? You said strengthening like body awareness? Is that what you were saying?
[LAURA]
Yes, definitely one piece of it. It could be really simple embodiment things. It could just be referring to your body by your gender identity, treating your body like a person. It could be just focusing more on somatic sensations, just checking in, being in tune, just checking in with your body, approaching your body with curiosity, those kinds of things with mindfulness and noticing what you appreciate about your body, noticing the information your body gives you, all that stuff. That’s not particularly complicated or even related to burnout, but it is because then when your body says we’re really tired. You can pay more attention to what’s really going on instead of just, yes, I’ll sleep it off on the weekend.
[DAWN]
So it’s more like honoring what your body’s telling you too. Like I’m feeling really tired. I’m going to take a nap or I’m going to take a rest or I’m going to slow down and do what my body is saying and what it needs.
[LAURA]
Yes, absolutely. Your body is giving you signs of panic. Pay attention. What is my body actually telling me here? There can be some benefit with chronic anxiety or chronic depression, for sure. There can be benefit in realizing like, okay, it’s not because of a stressor. It’s because I have anxiety. That’s great. But if that is not your experience and all of a sudden panic attacks are showing up out of nowhere, for example, that’s your body screaming at you. So increasing that awareness can help us pay attention so much faster. Then doing the same thing just with our emotions, what are my emotions telling me? Am I just being unreasonable or am I actually responding to a dozen different stressors throughout my week that I’ve just gotten used to? All of those kinds of things.
[DAWN]
As you’re saying that it reminds me, I know at the retreat we were on, I was talking about the therapist matrix, and I was trying to articulate it, but I feel like you just articulated it well as I’m putting this all together. It’s like with therapy, with therapists, we get so good at maybe pushing ourselves and because intellectually we can like say what’s happening I feel like we do disassociate from our body and our emotions because we’re used to managing other peoples. Like that’s part of the therapist majors. We could fake it well and because we can, like, we know what to say when to say. So sometimes we get so distanced from our own internal workings in life that it like sneaks up on us and we’re like, oh my gosh, I’m in panic or grief or chaos or that. I think that’s how so many therapists get into like, oh, what just happened? How am I here?
[LAURA]
Very much so. Yes. It makes me think about how that dissociating from our bodies, again, we have to do that. How many times have you had to go to the bathroom during a session and you get through?
[DAWN]
That’s hilarious.
[LAURA]
I mean like it starts there
[DAWN]
I know. Or like, do you ever try doing a card trick, like I’m on minute peace schedule every hour to go to the bathroom?
[LAURA]
Yes. So it’s like, we do this stuff all the time and we justify it all the time by it benefiting our clients. So yes, we can certainly see how that’s a good thing in some respects, but it just also is another layer of got to pay close attention to what’s going on in ourselves in order to be sustainable for those same clients.
[DAWN]
It’s true. I heard once and I love this analogy. I was reading an article and she was saying if insurance agent was coming through your house and looking at your assets and putting value on it she’s like, think about yourself as your biggest asset. As a therapist, like you being present and you being able to give has to be from a full cup. You’re the biggest asset to your business.
[LAURA]
Absolutely.
[DAWN]
If you don’t take care of you on a deep level you’re not going to be sustainable, especially those of us who are in private practice. Or not. It’s like we have to be present in a way that’s different than if I was just doing something else. I mean, I don’t want to say an actual job to offend anyone, but it’s very different, but yes. So I think, wow. I feel like Laura, we could talk so much and I’ll probably talk to you off air about some more things but I was wondering, I think people are going to be really excited to reach out to you and I know you have a really cool free gift. Can you tell us about it? You’ll probably better at explaining it than I will.
[LAURA]
Yes, absolutely. So I have an audio, not really an audio book. It’s more like an audio excerpt. It’s not that long, 20, 30 minutes of thinking about burnout in terms of personality. So it is going through just different some personality systems, going through, thinking about the emotional tax, thinking about intersectionality of both identities and circumstances and getting into helping you determine where those vulnerable places could be for you. So that is available on Script. So if anybody has a Script, a subscription already, then you could just search my name and that will pop up. Dawn will also share that link as well directly. If you don’t have access to Script they always have a free trial if you’re interested. So I guess, free gifts, slightly a stretch, but it’s available on Script. Okay,
[DAWN]
Okay, cool.
[LAURA]
But yes, it’s pretty short 20, 30 minutes.
[DAWN]
So Laura, if there’s a therapist out there who wants to maybe get ahold of you for supervision or even consultation, how do they get ahold of you?
[LAURA]
My website is ivoryandpine.com, all spelled out and supervision and consultation is the main way I’m supporting other mental health professionals at this point. So for sure, with interns or licensed candidates that really just want more of a holistic focus in supervision and are looking for that or consultation can be great for picking out more of those strategies. So we may not be getting into as much of the therapy component and the coping skills and the internal trauma healing, but for sure can talk through strategies for adjusting the environmental factors to reduce that infection in the wound of burnout so that somebody feels more capable of working on the soul care often, healing afterward.
[DAWN]
Yes. Then I think you also have a class on burnout. Where is that at?
[LAURA]
Yes. So you can get to that just from my website as well. It is right at the top under burnout support and that will lead you through to my full online course. So the Script course is actually an audio version of one module in my bigger burnout course. That will walk through understanding burnout and compassion fatigue, and trauma and preventing and working through it, managing and treating it and also the advocacy and healing. So it’s a 10 module course. There’s two different versions. There’s a general version that’s less about compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma and there’s a healthcare version that is more on all three.
[DAWN]
Wow. That is so cool. I love that you have that for us to reach out. And is it like, do it on your own pace type of course, the 10 module?
[LAURA]
Yes.
[DAWN]
Perfect.
[LAURA]
Yep. So the 10 module is a paid course and is all self-paced. There’s some videos and then just reflections for each module.
[DAWN]
Okay. My last question, Laura is going to be a personal favor. Laura went on my first, so care retreat for therapist and I would love if you just could share what you thought about it or what you think How it would help with burnout or anything.
[LAURA]
Absolutely. Soul care and burnout are so tied together. It can be a chicken or yet you might be dealing with a soul issue and get burned out so much more easily because of that, or vice versa. Burnout is usually soul crushing situations. So they go together. I definitely think that the burnout healing needs to come first really because that’s the external stuff. I think that if somebody has done a little bit of moving things around and making more space and making some changes, very likely, you’re now going to notice a need for soul care. So being at the retreat, I think gave me that more internal space to be quieter, to be away from the burnout potential situations, and to just be in that space of reflection and of really getting into the wound, not just the infection on top, beginning into the wound and thinking through what I really do need and supporting those deeper connections to myself and to the divine and to others too.

For sure the social deep connection with a big group of therapists was also so refreshing. So yes, I had a great experience at the treat and I think anybody that’s been dealing with burnout, figure out a few ways to clean out some of that extra stuff and give yourself time to focus on the soul down at the bottom.
[DAWN]
Oh, I love that. Thank you. That was a really good definition of even, it sounds like preventative or maintenance with burnout, not so much if you’re just realizing, oh, I’m burned out. I love your perspective on all this. I’m so excited that you’re here. Thank you so much for being with us today.
[LAURA]
You are so welcome. Thanks for having me.
[DAWN]
Thank you for listening today to the Faith Fringes podcast. For those of you wanting to take a deeper dive into your own faith journey, you can grab my free email course, Spiritual Reflections on my website, faithfringes.com. If you’re a therapist and would want to work with me, I offer sacred space holding for you through my consulting, as well as my soul care retreats. To find out more, go to my website or email me, dawn@faithfringes.com.

I love hearing from all my listeners. Drop me an email to tell me what’s on your mind. You can also connect with me on social media. I’m on Facebook and Instagram at Faith Fringes. As always, if you’re enjoying this podcast, I would love it if you could show it by your reviews. Go to Apple Podcasts and leave your review so that others can find this podcast and get curious about their own spiritual journey. Thanks again for listening.

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This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.