My Story

How I healed from chronic stress, burnout and stress-induced illness as a highly sensitive person

A few years ago I was living my dream life. I had my own private practice, with a beautiful therapy office in the city centre. I was helping people, whilst doing what I love, but I couldn’t understand why I felt like I was drowning. I was exhausted and dragging myself through the day, all day, every day.

In my practice I was seeing about 20 clients a week, which may not seem like that much, but when you’re highly sensitive, sitting with people’s trauma all day takes a toll. When you add to that my admin, marketing, supervision, continuing professional development and other tasks out with those hours, my working week was well over full time hours.

I knew I was tired, but I was trained to help everyone with everything and I couldn’t bear letting anyone down, so I would accept every client that came to me.

And I also knew that everyone else seemed to manage working full time hours, so I couldn’t understand why I was struggling.

In hindsight I think this kind of internal gaslighting - telling myself that I didn’t feel how I felt and that I should just be fine- was what kept me stuck for way longer than I needed to be. And as you could imagine, I would never dream of saying something like that to a client!

Becoming ill

After a few years like this, I realised that I had a chronic pain condition. I’m not exactly sure when it started, because it just crept in and got worse so slowly and gradually I was like a frog in boiling water, not sure when to admit there was a problem and seek help.

When I finally went to the doctor I faced years of being fobbed off and sent from one specialist to another who didn’t have a clue what was wrong with me. Once I finally got diagnosed, about 8 years in, I of course already knew all there was to know about this condition, down to the most crucial fact that no one knows what causes it or how to cure it.

During this time I researched my condition like it was my full time job (around my actual full time job and family obligations). I tried all kinds of supplements, natural remedies, specific yoga poses, there was even a diet suggested, which involves giving up things like coffee, chocolate, yogurt, citrus fruits, etc. Basically a list of all my favourite foods. It was a nightmare.

During my research and the many hours I spent in Facebook support groups, I had come across some people who claimed that they had healed by reducing their stress levels, but I couldn’t understand this link. I didn’t actually feel stressed. Stress to me had become like water to a fish and I actually couldn’t register that my baseline was elevated. But I knew intuitively that my symptoms had something to do with the way I was living, so I kept digging anyway.

Then I came across the research on mind-body medicine and everything finally made sense. I discovered that my condition is one of many neuroplastic conditions, caused by stress and nervous system dysregulation. These include any kind of chronic pain (that doesn’t have a physical cause), fatigue, migraines, dizziness and IBS to name but a few. I started studying this in depth, as many of my clients also had these conditions and I wanted to be able to help others as well.

Through my studies I found the research on high sensitivity and realised I have a highly sensitive nervous system, making me more prone to these types of conditions.

Highly sensitive people (HSPs) make up about 20% of the population. It is a neurological and biological trait, which can be seen on MRI scans of the brain. It was like a light had come on. All of a sudden my whole life made sense. Why I had always felt different, why I got so stressed by loud noise, why I always seemed to pick up on what others were feeling, why I needed so much rest after a busy day and why my physical symptoms were actually my body trying to communicate to me what wasn’t working in my life.

Healing

As I learned to embrace my sensitivity, I realised that it was the reason not only for my struggles, but also for my heightened empathy and deep processing of experiences and emotions. It was in fact what made me such a good therapist. But what I hadn’t realised before was what I needed to stay well as a highly sensitive person living in an insensitive world.

I learned how to support and regulate my nervous system so that I wasn’t running on high alert all the time. I healed a lot of my underlying beliefs about who I thought I needed to be in order to be accepted or successful. I really had to dig deep and learn to accept all the parts of myself I had abandoned in an effort to try to fit in. I realised that the pressure I was putting on myself was completely unnecessary and that the unrealistic expectations I had of myself were keeping me in a state of never feeling good enough. I had to admit that I had built a life that looked good on the outside, but was impossible to sustain from the inside. 

I also did a lot of work reclaiming myself and my joy, taking time for myself and focusing on the things that are important to me, beyond just my everyday existence. It helped me remember and reconnect with my sense of purpose, which I had lost somewhere in all the busyness.

It seems kind of magical and if this is your first time reading about mind-body healing, I understand if you are sceptical, but through all this work, my condition healed, my energy levels stabilised and my body recalibrated itself back to health.

As a result of all this inner work and study, I have now restructured my business to reflect who I am and what matters to me. I am no longer contorting myself around meeting the expectations of others. I am shaping my work to fit around who I am, what I need and what is true for me.

This looks like doubling down on the work I love, helping and empowering people and letting go of any aspects of my work that wasn’t aligned. 

Now I have much more time and spaciousness in my life. Because most of my stress and burnout wasn’t actually caused by doing too much, it was caused by doing too much that wasn’t in alignment with my true nature or my highest purpose.

What I went through sent me down a rabbit hole that completely changed how I work. I realised that the highly sensitive people coming to me weren't just stressed by too much on their plate. They were at war with themselves in the same way I had been. Tired, internally disconnected and convinced the problem was them.

I now specialise in working with highly sensitive people helping them to heal from chronic stress, burnout and stress-induced illness caused by internal disconnection and a lifetime of conditioning being told you’re “too sensitive”.

From my own experience of healing I have created The Sensitive Soul Framework™, which now underpins everything I do, from 1:1 work, to group programmes, to guided practices and writing content. It is my life’s work to support HSPs who want to reclaim themselves from underneath lives built in service of other people’s expectations. I am now even more committed to help others so that they don’t have to learn the hard way, like I did.

I never knew, when I set out to heal my condition, that it was going to change my entire life, but it has and from where I am standing now, I can honestly say that I’m grateful it did. It’s true that if we don’t listen to our bodies’ whispers, they will begin to shout. But what I didn’t know was that those whispers were coming from such a deep place of inner knowing. Our bodies have so much wisdom, if we can only learn to listen, instead of overruling them.

If any of this resonates and you'd like to explore what working together might look like, you can book a free introductory call here.