Excerpt
What if the exhaustion you feel after a long day of caring for everyone else isn't a personal failing, but a physiological response with a name? In this episode, Anne Rajoo talks with researcher and nervous system regulation expert Dr. Julie Merriman about compassion fatigue: why learning to protect your energy and reduce work stress starts with getting curious instead of ashamed, why the dual burden of caring for clients, kids, and yourself compounds faster than most women realize, and why self compassion and real work boundaries matter more in midlife than ever. They also get into the caregiving burden that quietly shows up at home, and why sustainable energy in work depends on learning to come back into your body before you burn out completely. If you've ever come home so depleted there was nothing left to give, this conversation is for you.
Transcript
Anne Rajoo: I'm excited to speak with Julie today, because it's a topic I speak about from a different angle. When I talk with my clients and the women I work with, I use the word self-compassion a lot. Today we want to talk about compassion — but specifically about compassion fatigue. When I met you, Julie, that was a fairly new term for me, something I hadn't really thought about, and that always gets me thinking and wondering. So why don't we dive in: what do you mean by compassion fatigue, and why is it a topic we should actually be talking about?
Dr. Julie Merriman: Sure, great question. I've been researching compassion fatigue since the early 2000s. A nurse named Carla Joinson actually coined the term to describe what nurses experience when they give, and give, and give. Then Charles Figley came along and really made that research explode, and one of his students, Beth Hudnall Stamm, designed assessments you can take to see just how impacted you are.
Julie: Essentially, I'm a professor — I train students in the field to become mental health counselors, and I make a big point of teaching them about this construct. But it's not just for counselors. Women do it. We give, we connect with our clients, and our brain doesn't know that the trauma or the traumatic stories they're sharing isn't ours. We get the same chemical dump, and we have to process that. It leads to compassion fatigue, because we've given past the point we're able to give. It's a physiological response to giving so much. You might find yourself irritable, or too worn out by the time you get home to really connect with your kids — the people you need to be connected with — because you gave it all at the office. That's why I got interested in compassion fatigue in the first place: I saw myself being impacted, and I saw the interns and students I worked with becoming impacted too.
Anne: I love that, so interesting. This brings me back to my early days in entrepreneurship, especially when I started working with women — back then, mostly moms, coaching. I remember my husband telling me, 'you're carrying their problems,' and I was like, what are you talking about? But actually, now that you say it — I didn't have the term back then, but that's exactly what it was. I'd generally describe myself as a deeply compassionate person, compassionate for everybody in this world, and sometimes I knew I was carrying it, I just wouldn't have called it compassion fatigue. It's fascinating.
Julie: Yeah, and that's exactly what it is. You give a little piece of yourself to everyone you're serving — whether you're a nurse, a coach, a counselor, or even an educator. I've seen my colleagues at the university become impacted too.
Julie: We care, right? We care and we give. I'm also trained as a play therapist, and early in my career I was seeing families and little ones. I remember one little girl, maybe ten years old — I checked in with her mom, then took the little girl back to my office. It was a hard session; she had a lot of trauma she was working through, her parents were getting divorced, and she'd taken on the role of carrying the family's emotions, which isn't unusual. When I came back up front afterward, the mother looked at me and said, 'Julie, you look like you've just given a piece of your heart to my child.' And that's exactly what we do — we give pieces of our heart to those we're serving, and that's what makes us good at it. We're connected. But I find so many of the women I work with feel shame around that, like they must be doing something wrong. That's not the case. It's because we're so good at what we do — I call it an occupational hazard. So first and foremost, we need to know how to get re-embodied and set healthy boundaries. If you have really good nervous system regulation, those boundaries tend to come more naturally. But I want the audience to really hear this: it's not that you've done something wrong. It's that you're so good at what you're doing.
Anne: Yeah — because my instinct is, well, I'm compassionate, and I think compassion is important, especially in the world we live in. We need compassion. So I don't want people to stop feeling compassionate, but the fatigue part, when it starts impacting you, that's obviously a challenge. I talk a lot about productivity, and I remember times in my previous business as a virtual assistant where I'd take on my clients' stress around a launch — thinking, this is really important for her, we need to get this done — and I'd be so invested that I'd end up feeling fatigued and exhausted, even though I wasn't the one launching, I was just doing the work in the background. So how would you advise a woman whose strength is exactly this? We don't want her to lose that compassion, but we want healthy boundaries and real embodiment. Where does she even start — and how does she know when it's tipping over into too much? It feels like a sliding scale: it works, until it doesn't, and then suddenly it's broken. How do we know we're nearing that fatigue point?
Julie: That's a great question. My first book, In Pursuit of Soul Joy, is actually about burnout and compassion fatigue, and I walk women through a twelve-week process, because it was my own walk back too. The very first thing that tends to happen is you start dreading the day — you look at your calendar and you absolutely dread it, even though you once loved what you were doing. You're approaching it from such a depleted state that it's just not as fun as it used to be. And to your point about launches — we take everyone home with us. We perseverate about a certain client, we don't turn it off at the end of the day, we're having dreams about it. That doesn't make you a bad person, it makes you a natural human being. You might dread working with certain clients because you see them on the calendar and think, oh, because you know it's going to pull a piece of your life force out of you. And that's okay. That's not something to feel shame about — it's about being aware and understanding. I really invite women to get curious: if I'm feeling this, what is that about? Instead of judging it and thinking I shouldn't feel this way, which just exacerbates things. So approaching it with curiosity is the very first step. If you find yourself resting but still fatigued, more irritable than usual, or — I remember when my own kids were little, and I'd come home from work and they'd be, 'Mommy, Mommy, this and that,' and I'd think, I just don't have it in me right this minute —
Anne: Yeah, those are big clues that something's going on.
Julie: It might even feel a little like depression — not clinical, DSM depression, but more the symptomology of compassion fatigue really setting in. And for us women, we often feel guilty the moment we add ourselves into the equation.
Anne: Yeah — 'let me make some time for me.'
Julie: Exactly, and that's such an important piece as we're working toward getting re-embodied, instead of being this floating head of competence: to really ask yourself, how do I feel about taking care of me? What am I actually doing to take care of me? And I don't mean a bubble bath — I mean saying no to something your inner people-pleaser is telling you that you should say yes to. Stepping back and asking, do I actually have it in me to do this? That curiosity is what matters.
Anne: I like that — looking at it with curiosity rather than the guilt or shame that's usually our default. These feelings are sending us a message that something isn't quite working, and that maybe we need to look at it differently, or slow down enough to look at it at all. In this very fast world we live in, it feels like a race to the next thing, and then we get there and—
Julie: — because I work with high-achieving women, mostly in the 45-to-69 range, and they get there and think, is this it? What was I racing to get to?
Anne: Yeah — I lost the essence of my life by racing, putting so much pressure on myself.
Julie: Absolutely, absolutely.
Anne: I know this is also why you talk about compassion fatigue in connection with perimenopause and menopause — maybe let's go there, because that's fascinating to me right now too, as I'm entering perimenopause myself and noticing things shifting. What's happening in that age range that makes compassion fatigue important to look at?
Julie: What's fascinating to me is that when we're young, we have an estrogen-rich body, and estrogen plays a big part in our brain function as well —
Anne: — which, when I was younger, I just thought was about reproduction. But it's actually about our brain.
Julie: No, exactly — and about our brain's tolerance. Nature is fascinating in how it designs us to have certain functions at certain life stages. That estrogen helps give us a lot of tolerance to do the sheer amount that we do. I look back at working on my PhD while raising babies and building businesses — I live out on a ranch in Texas, so nothing is close, everything is a two-hour drive. I think, how in the world did I do all of that? Well, I had a lot of estrogen helping me get through it. I was also the room mom, making little reindeer hats for the kids in class, bringing fruit to the soccer game, and managing the boardroom, all at once.
Anne: Mm-hmm.
Julie: So what happens is, we hit midlife and estrogen becomes depleted in the brain — which is fine, actually, it's a beautiful time, and I want women to get up and do the happy dance about it. Because we look at our lives and think, I'm not tolerating all of this anymore, I cannot continue functioning like this. Our brain is actually at a prime place to restructure our life to fit this new stage. I like to help women add so many things into their lives that they love, so there's simply no more room left for the things that don't serve them. Midlife is our time — our brain is ready for that.
Julie: The world wants to call it a midlife crisis, or 'she's over fifty' — no. We're at our most prime to create real space in our lives, to build the life we actually want. The kids are raised, hopefully you're with a partner you're still excited to look at — sometimes that's not the case, but that's a whole other podcast. You're at a place where you can genuinely restructure your life as you move through perimenopause and into menopause. In some circles it's called the crone stage, and I don't see her as some old, wicked-witch caricature. She's a beautiful, wise woman who has so much to offer after fifty.
Anne: Yeah, definitely — as we get older, there's this wisdom that comes online, this sense of, I'm done with this nonsense, whatever you're throwing at me, I can't carry that anymore. The word 'tolerance' really landed for me — like, I don't have tolerance for this anymore. Call me selfish if you want, whatever's going on for you is your stuff. I still do things compassionately, because that's part of who I am, but tolerance is definitely the word for what's shifted — the things I used to just tolerate, I don't anymore.
Julie: Exactly — and we show up so much more alive because of it. As I help women get embodied — my PhD isn't in counseling, but I'm also trained as a yoga therapist, which really helps me with the somatic work, and with the chakra energies. It's interesting: if I'm wearing my neuroscientist hat, I'm talking about the vagus nerve and how it runs through the body. If I'm wearing my yoga therapist hat, I'm talking about the chakra system — but it's really the same map, running through the same places in the body, helping to balance energy. For my clients, it gives them a more intuitive way to map their bodies than an anatomical chart that looks like a plate of spaghetti going everywhere. When we look at that chakra system, we realize that for so many years, we swallow our truth to keep the peace.
Anne: Yes.
Julie: So the throat chakra gets blocked, the heart chakra fills up with resentment — and then we feel guilty about feeling resentment, when really, resentment is a sacred emotion. It can teach us so much about what we actually need. The better we get our own needs met, the better we show up for the people we serve, because we're balanced. My newest book, Are We Gonna Have Sex or What?, isn't about positions — it's about the nervous system, and about letting pleasure come back online.
Anne: Yeah — because when we're that compassion fatigued, our brain has basically said, nope, we don't have room for that, let's just get on with the things.
Julie: Exactly — survive, get through the things that need to get done. There's no space, no room, no feeling left over for any of that.
Anne: Yeah, so true. Before you wrap up — do you have a favorite tip for getting back into the body that a woman could actually try tonight, if she's feeling that compassion fatigue?
Julie: Absolutely. I have a podcast called Compassion Fatigue Cure, and in one of the first episodes I walk listeners through this: it's so important to learn how to do a full body scan. Scan from your root, up through your crown, your third eye, your throat, your heart, your sacral or solar plexus — all the way back down to your root chakra. We need to feel safe in our bodies, and when we're deeply compassion fatigued, our bodies don't feel safe. So do a full body scan, with self-compassion and curiosity: what physical sensations am I feeling? Oh, my chest is really tight — what's that about? Not judging it, just noticing. I ask my clients this all the time — if they say, 'I'm feeling anxious,' I'll ask, where in your body? And they'll often say, 'I don't know,' a little irritated, because they've spent forty years never going there. But that's exactly the place we have to go.
Julie: I'd also invite her to walk outside — I don't care where, I was just in New York City, you can do it there or out here on my Texas ranch. Walk outside, get grounded, kick off your shoes if you can, feel the sun hit your face. We're from nature, and we have to get back to it. Those are two very quick things — and they genuinely help with balance and joy. It's not some big lightning-strike moment. These are tiny things you build into a regular practice.
Anne: Yeah, that's it — regular practice, staying in the curiosity, just being open to listening, to questioning, to seeing what's going on. And then somehow the answer, or whatever change you need to make, presents itself. Sometimes it works the first time, and then ten times later it doesn't, and that's okay too — it's playing, trying, figuring it out. But before you can do anything, you have to stop and actually listen to what's going on. I love that. The body scan is so powerful.
Julie: It really is. And — go ahead, go ahead.
Anne: No, no, go ahead.
Julie: Well, I was going to say — even if you press, not too hard, on your solar plexus, right under your ribs, there's a lot of vagal nerve there that wraps around the heart area. Even working around things a bit, go to the sternum and the solar plexus, put some pressure there, and say out loud: I am enough, I can do this. That's very powerful if you're feeling dysregulated — it helps bring you back into your body.
Anne: Love that — a bit of pressure to stimulate the nerve, perfect. And you've got plenty of other resources — you mentioned your podcast, I'll link that in the show notes, and I think you have a quiz as well. Tell us about that, and where people can find you.
Julie: I love that, thank you. Yes, I have a Somatic Signatures Quiz, it's free, on my website, and it helps women understand which somatic pattern is leading to their burnout and compassion fatigue. I always give a quick technique too — I'm such a hands-on therapist, so you're not just going to get talk, you're going to get something to actually do.
Anne: Yes, exactly — we can talk all day, but we've got to get to application. We need to actually do something.
Julie: Yes, yes. And I have two podcasts — one is Sex After 50, and the other is Compassion Fatigue Cure. Everything's on my website: my books, my techniques, it's all there.
Anne: Love that. So everything will be linked. You've done so many amazing things — all these different qualifications — and I think it's so beautiful how you've combined them in your work. I'm really glad you were here today. Thank you so much, Julie.
Julie: Thank you so much. I enjoyed it.
