Is it Burnout —or Grief?

Loss can take so many forms.

Knowing the difference can be key to healing.

“I wake up heavy and feeling dread to face my day.”

“I know my identity is tied to supporting others—and I feel so shameful about that.”

“I don’t really have any clear goals—I don’t know what I want. It’s like I’ve lost who I am somewhere along the way.”

“I know I’m not depressed, but I do feel sad a lot of the time. It’s like I’m stuck and really don’t know where else to turn.”

So many folks come to me confused as to where they are in life—and who they are now that things feel so different. Have they changed? Is it the world? It must be both—how to make sense of it all?

In my work with burned-out helpers and healers, I often hold space for considering how loss, grief, and bereavement are significant players in your burnout recovery.

The truth is, grief is not the same as burnout, but unresolved grief fuels burnout. Burnout is not just exhaustion; it is a crisis of meaning, a slow erosion of spirit, purpose, and connection. Grief is the heart’s response to loss, rupture, and change. When we struggle to tend to our grief, it can show up in over-functioning, resentment, numbness—even a relentless drive to keep going—until we just plain can’t anymore.

Over-Functioning as a Symptom of Untended Grief

Most of us have learned to survive through hyper-functioning. But over-functioning is often grief in disguise. We stay busy so we don’t have to feel the sorrow. We caretake others because it’s easier than facing our own losses. We collapse boundaries to avoid the loneliness of saying “no.”

Burnout care is just another self-help to-do list unless we acknowledge the source of our pain. When we integrate grief, we begin to make space for what’s really weighing us down—not just the workload, but the heartload.

Grief vs. Grievance

In a society that devalues ritual, collective meaning-making, and rest, grief becomes pathologized or privatized. There is a tendency to rush people to “get over it” or offer only individual therapy for what can be deeply communal pain. In her book Black Grief/White Grievance, political theorist Juliet Hooker discusses the political underpinnings of grief, underlining that for white Americans, what is framed as grief is often actually grievance—an entitlement to uninterrupted ease or power. Meanwhile, authentic grief (often expereinced by black, brown, and people of color) is often silenced, ignored, or criminalized.

These distinctions matter. Because when we conflate grief with grievance, we miss the liberatory, connective, and sacred aspects of true mourning.

The “Karen” Archetype and My Own Story from Grievance to Grief

As a white cis het woman, I can fall asleep to my own biases and projections. When I feel helpless with the state of the world, I can so easily lean on blame and dismissal. I have unconsciously bypassed my own sadness (and my personal role in things) and find someone to point my discomfort towards—and when I’ve done this, I’m almost always reinforced and rejoined by others. In other words, my white privilege keeps me protected, at times tells me I am a victim of circumstances out of my control. This is a deep grievance that we see in the “Karen” archetype that may conjure up disgust but in fact be quite alive inside. I’ve learned that when I am filled with grievance, I am often contributing to the situation I wish I could change.

This happened when I felt disconnected from a community that once was deeply supportive during an important time in my life. But over time, I felt like I was not being heard and understood, so I decided to disconnect from the community. People I was close to outside the community acknowledged that they could have done better and been healthier to support me.

Initially I felt affirmed, even a little haughty to having seen toxicity and gotten out. But strangely, I didn’t feel better. I still felt these pangs of resentment and disconnection, and found myself thinking about them and what I could say to them about my hurt instead of feeling free to explore what was next for me.

I brought my grievance to my spiritual director. I found only with her support over months that my avoidance of my own grief was holding me back was keeping me resentful and disconnected not just from healthy community, but from my very truest self. I worked with my spiritual director to acknowledge my pain and sit with it, and listen to its lessons for me.

This is not easy work. If you’re anything like me, we avoid feeling vulnearble or helpless at all costs. It’s easier to project onto others than feel the feelings of loss, fear, overwhelm, and sadness that are bubbling at the surface.

But what I know in doing this work is that grief is the doorway. It is a portal to the change and transformtaion that we often crave. It is the opportunity for connection that we often are missing when we struggle with grievance. As Parker Palmer reminds us, “The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed.”

Burnout or Grief? Understanding the Differences

Burnout is not just exhaustion from overwork and living in unsustainable systems. It’s not just frustration over the state of things. It often includes a type of detachment and loss of meaning that drills to the core of your feelings of worth.

Grief is the emotional, somatic, and spiritual response to loss that can also include feelings of sadness or rage. Grief is often the secondary response to living in burnout culture that prioritizes output over rest, prioritizes individualism over collective connection, and prioritizes disconnection and violence over freedom of expression and creativity.

When we are burned out, we often are suffering, underneath it all, from deep, collective and personal grief.

Longing, Moral Injury, and Compassion Fatigue: Soul Exhaustion

Grief wears disguises: longing for something lost that was never even named, spiritual disconnection, or the quiet erosion of hope. When we witness suffering we cannot stop—especially as caregivers, healers, or advocates—we experience moral injury and compassion fatigue. These are not weaknesses; they are the wounds of people trying to care in a world structured to resist care.

Bereavement is built into spiritual practice, but these rituals have been eroded through the decades as we move away from religious systems and into more secular communities of care. Many of us were not taught how to mourn. Especially in Western, capitalist, and white-dominant cultures, transitions are often rushed, sterilized, or erased entirely. There is a profound ritual gap in our culture—particularly around grief and endings. This absence has a cost. It creates the conditions for chronic burnout, because when grief goes unexpressed, our creative output is stymied and our exhaustion becomes soul-deep.

And for many of us, the failure to engage in grief ritual is a spiritual crisis as much as a political one. True burnout and grief work includes ritual and ceremony—of what we’ve lost, of what we’ve denied, of the systems we’ve upheld—there is a tendency to collapse into grievance or numbness instead of transformation.

Thankfully, we don’t need to look far to re-engage our grief ritual instincts: they’re just under our skin. As Anishinaabe author Robin Wall Kimmerer says, “Ceremony can bring the quiescent back to life; it can open your mind and heart to what you once knew but have forgotten.”

First Steps: Integrating Grief Work into Burnout Recovery

If you recognize yourself in these words, you’re not alone. Here are some gentle ways to begin:

1. Name your losses.
   
   Acknowledge the change and transitions that have happened in the past year or years—tangibly and intangibly. This might include people, places, hopes, identities, community, trust. Naming is the first ritual.
   

2. Create grief ritual.
   
   Light a candle, connect with feeling grounded and supported, and set the intention. Drop into your intuition. Where does your body want to move? How do you need to express yourself? Do you need to make music, sing, or paint? Do you need to rock, spin, dance, lay down? Drop into your vagal toning through humming. Notice where in your body feels open, notice where it feels more stuck. Can you hold the tone, long and deep, and see what arises? (You may need support for this activity; find a safe friend or therapist who can companion you if so.)
   

3. Make space for longing.
   
   Longing is a sacred emotion. It tells us what we love. Instead of bypassing, listen to it. What is your broken heart inviting you into?
   

4. Find a witness.
   
   As Parker Palmer says, we heal in the presence of another who will not try to fix us. Whether a therapist, a circle, or a spiritual guide, find someone who can sit with you in the dark.
   

5. Honor endings.
   
   Acknowledge what has been released and what no longer serves you. Sometimes it’s about letting something go, grieving it fully, and crossing a threshold.

Grief as an Invitation

When allowed in, grief becomes a portal to integration. Embodying our grief journey doesn’t fix the burnout and the systemic oppression that undergirds it, but it softens the ground. It reminds us that we are not machines. That we are tethered to love. And that to heal from burnout, we must begin by mourning what we’ve lost—individually and collectively.

Integrative burnout care is not just about resilience or recovery—it’s about reclamation. Reclaiming our capacity to feel, to honor, to pause, to mourn, and integrating rituals that hold the endings that are thresholds of new beginnings.

Resources:

• Let Your Life Speak by Parker J. Palmer
  

• Black Grief / White Grievance by Juliet Hooker
  

• The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller
  

• I offer grief and burnout support for helpers, healers, and heart-centered folx who crave a new way forward—find support here.