“I feel guilty even resting or taking time for me. How can I think about my own life when others are suffering so much? But I’m so burnt out!”
These are the words of Nadia (name changed), a client in a helping profession, but also involved in activism, who came to therapy exhausted, not just by her work—but by the world. Though she had years of experience helping others, both personally and professionally, she found herself increasingly unable to help herself.
Nadia spent her days at a challenging job. On her way home, she would stop in to visit unhoused individuals in a park near her home, to see if she could bring food or water. She would, where possible, take part in community protests and aid organizing on weekends. All of it noble. All of it necessary. And yet—she was breaking. It was making her miserable at work, and at home. She was agitated and couldn’t sleep properly.
Behind the burnout wasn’t just overwork. It was a deep sense of guilt. Guilt that she was privileged to have access to education, healing spaces, and citizenship rights others didn’t. Guilt that she wanted to change careers and maybe earn a bit more money—something she felt made her complicit in a broken system. Guilt that she couldn’t “do enough” while watching global violence, climate collapse, and economic inequality unfold in real time.
The Emotional Weight of Privilege in a Broken World
We are living in an age of collective overwhelm. If you are someone who feels deeply, who notices the injustices, who serves others for a living—you likely carry layers of emotional labour that rarely get named.
For some helpers, especially those from settler or dominant identity groups, this can turn into colonial guilt. They wonder: Who am I to want more peace, joy, or even a new career when others are barely surviving?
But guilt—while it may point us to empathy—can become paralyzing when it disconnects us from our own needs and keeps us stuck in cycles of burnout and shame.
Bottom-Up Healing: Why Talking Isn’t Always Enough
In traditional therapy, clients like Nadia are often told to “reframe their thoughts.” But for people carrying guilt, grief, and systemic awareness, top-down talk therapy can feel dismissive. That’s where bottom-up modalities like Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), somatic experiencing, and Internal Family Systems (IFS) offer a more integrative path forward.
With Nadia, we began by slowing everything down. She was used to responding to crises. Indeed she would feel compelled to look for them.
We focused on:
• Locating guilt in the body: Nadia described it as a tightness in her chest, like a rope she had to pull endlessly.
• Exploring her emotional parts: The part that felt she had to be “on” 24/7 was protecting a younger part that had learned love = endless sacrifice.
• Emotional processing and grief work: she noticed that beneath the guilt was grief—grief that the world could be so brutal.
• Using EFT to build self-compassion: Together, we named that guilt could live alongside a desire for rest, creativity, and yes—even career change.
We didn’t resolve the world’s crises in therapy. But we helped Nadia build an internal refuge that allowed her to be a part of the world without being consumed by it.
Guilt Doesn’t Equal Goodness
There’s a myth in many healing professions (and others)—and among activists—that guilt is necessary to stay accountable. But accountability doesn’t require us to abandon ourselves. In fact, sustainable care begins with self-attunement.
Guilt is only helpful when it invites us to repair, not when it traps us in martyrdom.
When we attend to our nervous systems—when we work from the bottom-up—we can untangle guilt from responsibility. We can say:
🌀 Yes, I am privileged in some ways
🌀 Yes, the world is unjust
🌀 And yes, I still deserve healing, boundaries, and change
A Call to the Helpers
If you work in care, education, harm reduction, activism, or any field that exposes you to other people’s pain—you deserve support that sees your complexity.
You may be:
• Carrying intergenerational trauma and colonial guilt
• Trying to hold onto your ideals and questioning your capacity
• Feeling the weight of global suffering and wondering if you’re “allowed” to want joy
You’re not broken. You’re a human with a tender nervous system trying to stay alive in an overwhelming world.
Ready to Reconnect to Yourself?
As a trauma-informed therapist, I help over-functioning, high-empathy humans come home to themselves—gently, somatically, and without judgment.
If guilt, burnout, or activist fatigue are pulling you away from your centre, I invite you to reach out. You don’t have to choose between being awake to injustice and being well.
Book a consultation today and let’s explore how you can live in integrity with yourself, not just the world.
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