S1 Ep1 Burnout Is Not A Personality Trait

Your body doesn’t “randomly” fall apart after years of pushing. It sends signals, and when we ignore them long enough, it eventually pulls the plug.

We’re telling the most personal origin story behind Clear Path Psychotherapy: how a high-performing career, chronic endometriosis pain, and years of people pleasing quietly stacked up until burnout stopped being a word and became a full shutdown. We talk about the kind of burnout that still looks functional from the outside: emails answered, dinners made, appointments remembered, all while brain fog, anxiety, irritability, and exhaustion get normalized as “just life.” When COVID hit, the cracks widened, and the cost showed up in a way we couldn’t outwork.

From there, we walk through what actually helped: therapy as a real ally, the leap back to school at 38, and the unexpected clarity of discovering ADHD after burnout. We connect the dots between ADHD in women, hormones across perimenopause and menopause, chronic pain and inflammation, and why healing has to include both mind and body. You’ll hear why an integrative approach matters, including nervous system regulation, polyvagal theory and the vagus nerve, plus supportive care like nutrition, physiotherapy, osteopathy, and other collaborative health supports alongside psychotherapy and, when appropriate, medication.

If you’ve been asking “What’s wrong with me?”, come listen for a different question: “What happened to me, and what do I need now?” Subscribe to Clear Path Podcast, share this episode with someone who’s white-knuckling life, and leave a review so more people can find a sustainable way forward.

Transcript

Welcome And The Crash Story

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Welcome to the very first episode of the Clear Path Podcast. I am so excited to have you join me today. I'm Katrin, Clinic Director and Registered Psychotherapist at Clear Path Psychotherapy located in Stittsville, Maine. I'm an executive coach, former banking professional, recovering people pleaser, ADHD woman, burnout survivor, and someone who spent far too many years believing that if I just worked harder, pushed more, and tried a little harder to hold it all together, everything would magically just get better. Spoiler alert, it didn't. If you've ever found yourself lying awake at 3 a.m. wondering why you're so exhausted, overwhelmed, snapping at people you love, and forgetting everything, and struggling with chronic pain, or asking yourself, why can't I seem to handle life the way everyone else does? This podcast is for you. And if you're a woman navigating ADHD, burnout, chronic inflammation, endometriosis, perimenopause, menopause, or just feeling like your body suddenly stopped following the instructions, you're definitely in the right place. For our first episode, I want to tell you the story of how ClearPass Psychotherapy was born. Because it wasn't born from a business plan. It was born from a complete and utter total crash. So if you're listening while folding laundry, driving kids to activities, sitting in school pickup, commuting to work, scrolling in bed because you should be sleeping, or hiding in the bathroom for five minutes of peace and quiet. I see you. Actually, I was you. And that's exactly why this podcast exists. Today's episode is probably the most personal one that I'll ever record or share because I'm sharing the story of how Clearpath Psychotherapy was born. But really, it's the story of what happened when my body finally said, absolutely not. You know that moment when your computer freezes because you've had 47 tabs open, 12 spreadsheets running, Zoom meetings going, Spotify playing, and somehow you're shocked when it crashes? Well, that was basically my nervous system. And if you're a woman with ADHD, chronic pain, endometriosis, burnout, perimenopause, menopause, oh god, I'm getting tired, just saying the list, anxiety, or just chronic habits of putting yourself last, you might recognize parts of yourself in this story. And if you do, I hope today's episode reminds you that you're not broken. You may just be exhausted, and that there is actually a difference. At 38 years old, I had what many people would consider a pretty successful life. Husband, two beautiful children, a home, friends, career in banking, financial stability, yada yada yada. All the things society tells us should equal happiness. On paper, everything looked great. Actually, if you had asked me at the time how things were going, I probably would have smiled and said busy but good, because that's what women do, especially

Pain Meets Productivity And Normalized Symptoms

SPEAKER_00 4:37

high achieving women, especially people pleasers, you know mamas, you know who you are. We say we're fine even when we're absolutely not. What nobody saw was what was happening behind the scenes. For years, I had been living with endometriosis. The kind of pain that doesn't stay politely in one area, the kind that radiates, spreads, moves, the kind that leaves you exhausted before your day even starts. My body constantly felt like it was fighting a battle that nobody else could see. And yet I kept going. Was it stubbornness? I don't know, because that's what we do, right? We keep going, we show up, we perform, we smile, we push through, we tell ourselves, I'll rest after this project, I'll slow down next month. I just need to get through this busy season. The problem is that busy season, it became years. And eventually my body sent me an invoice with interest. I want you to take a moment and ask yourself, what symptoms have I normalized? Because I've been carrying them for so long. Are you experiencing fatigue, brain fog, pain, anxiety, irritability, forgetfulness? What if your body isn't failing you? What if it's trying to talk to you instead? I want you to really think about that. It's a different way of thinking about your body. The funny thing about burnout is that most people who have it don't think they have it. When people hear the word burnout, they picture someone crying on the floor, unable to function. Well, that wasn't me, at least not at first. Burnout looked like productivity. Burnout looked like answering emails, showing up to meetings, making dinner, helping with homework, and paying bills, managing a household, remembering everyone's appointments except my own. Burnout looked like functioning until it didn't. And then COVID happened. And suddenly all the cracks I had spent years patching over started to split wide open. Work demands increased, stress increased, uncertainty increased. And underneath all of that, my body was already struggling. I remember feeling like every ounce of energy I had was being squeezed out of me. My chronic pain was at an all-time high. I was

COVID Exposes Burnout

SPEAKER_00 7:46

so exhausted, my brain fog felt so terrible. I was forgetting things. And for someone who had built her entire identity around being capable, dependable, and high performing, it was terrifying. I started wondering, what's wrong with me? Why can't I keep up? Why does everything suddenly feel so hard? What I didn't know then was that I wasn't failing. I was actually burning out. I just didn't know it. And maybe as you're listening right now, I want you to ask yourself something. What exactly have you normalized? I mean, seriously, what symptoms have you convinced yourself are just a part of life? The fatigue, the anxiety, the irritability, the brain fog, the chronic pain, the emotional exhaustion, the constant overwhelm. Because one of the biggest lessons I've learned is that just because something is common, it doesn't mean it's normal. And just because you've lived with it for years doesn't mean you have to keep living it forever. Eventually, things got so bad that even my boss noticed. One day he pulled me aside and he looked at me and said, Cat, I think you need a break. Now let me tell you something. If you've spent your entire life being the strong one, hearing someone say that feels devastating. Because in my mind, taking a break meant failure. It meant weakness. It meant I wasn't good enough anymore. But looking back, it was probably one of the greatest gifts anyone ever gave me. Because shortly after that, my body went into a complete shutdown. And when I say shutdown, I really mean shutdown. I went on short-term leave, then long-term leave. I developed type 2 diabetes, my chronic pain became unbearable. My nervous system was in utter chaos. I struggled just to get out of bed, and through all of this, yeah, I was still a mom of two young children, ages two and five. So while my body was collapsing, I was also carrying crushing mom guilt. Career guilt, financial guilt, the guilt of feeling like everyone needed something from me when I had absolutely nothing left to give. Honestly, it was the hardest period of my life. And if you've ever experienced a season where your body, your mind, and your life all seem to fall apart all at the same time, I want you to know that I understand. Not as a therapist, but as a human, as someone who's been there. And the reason I'm sharing this isn't because I want sympathy. It's because I know there are people listening right now who are quietly struggling and thinking, I should be able to handle this. No, you shouldn't have to handle everything alone. And that lesson changed everything for me. I finally went to therapy, and that was when things started to change for me. I had an ally, someone who actually cared and did not want anything from me. Over the next few months of therapy, I finally remembered and rediscovered what I wanted and needed to change. I realized that my purpose was to help others, and it was not in the capacity of a banking system. Don't get me wrong, working in the bank was such a life-changing experience where I learned

Therapy Sparks A New Career Path

SPEAKER_00 12:17

so many incredible and valuable skills that I could not have gained elsewhere. I will forever be grateful for my experiences and how it helped shape me to be the person I am today, especially with running a clinic. During a therapy session, I was having a really hard time with trying to figure out what to do with my life and asking myself how I even got here. I felt like such a failure and that everything I had tried, I was not good at. She turned to me in a serious voice and said, Why wouldn't you be able to? I asked her, but how? In my early 20s, I looked into becoming a therapist, but I needed to have two years of volunteer work and mental health. I can't afford to go and volunteer at 38 and then go to school for another three. She said, You don't need to do that. There is an online school that is condensed, but it is very expensive. And you could totally do it and become a therapist with more balance. In that moment, I broke down into tears, and for the first time in my life, it felt like, oh, finally, a door that has opened. I realized that this difficult journey needed to happen for me to be open to the next possibility that would be my life for the next three years of being a master's student. Ask yourself, what dream have I convinced myself is no longer possible? Not because it's impossible, but because you've spent years believing it is too late. Returning to school at 38 with ADHD, I then spent the next three years going back to school and overcoming all kinds of difficulties with late night research papers. Oh God, those late night research papers, they were brutal. And my final thesis. It was both torture and a wonderful lesson in how much I needed to tweak my last-minute approach of writing papers and how to do all of that with ongoing health challenges of my own. I felt like by the end of my program, I had become a new person, someone who had found compassion for herself again. Wasn't always in fight or flight because that had been my whole life. Just always fighting to survive and making something of myself. I felt like the whole universe had come together to create this path for me. This path that finally allowed me to find purpose. A path that allowed me to make a difference in meaningful ways. A path that allowed me to create more balance and self-care for myself. A clear path to meaningful and lasting change. I can distinctly remember the very first time I had my first client. I was so incredibly nervous and scared that I would say something silly or that they would not want to come back. All I remembered during that session is my own therapist's voice saying, Kat, it's about relationship building and not about how many tools you can provide. Build the relationship and the rest will come. After that first session ended and I hit end call, my body just went into a state of euphoria, and emotions were coming out of me that I didn't even know existed. I literally sobbed for 20 minutes, thanking myself for putting myself first for the very first time and allowing myself this gift. I was thinking, I can't believe that I get to do this for a living and actually love what I do. I just could not contain my emotions. It was so overwhelming for me. The feelings of gratitude to my first client for making this experience be such an incredible one, for allowing me in and sharing such difficult emotions and thoughts with me. I thank the universe for showing me this path and providing me with the strength to actually finish it. Discovering ADHD after burnout, over the following year, I continued to search for answers to my burnout and discovered that I actually ended up having ADHD. And it just felt like finally the answer I had been looking for. My journey in discovering my ADHD was like many of my clients who had their own burnouts, put on all kinds of antidepressants and anxiety meds, but all to just mask the root causation. The things I learned during

ADHD Hormones And Integrative Healing

SPEAKER_00 18:07

this time was the vast correlation between endometriosis, PCOS, PMDD, and how they are all made worse with ADHD. The deeper I dug, the more connections I was finding. My journey in learning about ADHD allowed me to create a more complete picture about myself, my constant chronic pains and ongoing struggles with burnout, perfectionism, my strained relationships, and always feeling like nothing really fit quite right. I am sure that these feelings resonate with many of you, as I know I am not alone in these struggles. As women, our ADHD goes undetected or overlooked for so many reasons, but it isn't until we hit perimenopause that things really take a very big shift for us. Our emotions become overloaded. We have fatigue and brain fog, and that's just to name a few. And what I learned was simple. Healing isn't just about your mind, it isn't just about your body, it's actually both. It always is because your nervous system doesn't separate the two. This then led me to my journey about naturopathy, nutrition, physiotherapy, and the importance of how these can all impact symptoms in healing. I also learned about the importance of the vagus nerve through polyvagal theory, how the vagus nerve plays such a key factor in being able to heal more effectively and to create more calm throughout your body. My interest in this approach then led me to go through my own personal journey of osteopathy and traditional Chinese medicine as a gateway to help bring more calm to my own nervous system. For the first time in my life, I finally learned how to hack my body and brain into doing tasks and new regimens more consistently, such as working out and allowing self-compassion to lead rather than constant criticism and negative thinking loops that would keep me stuck in never being able to achieve my goals. I too shared a lot of the same concerns as to their side effects and whether one should bother with taking them. I personally went through my own journey of taking these meds and am on medications currently to help me with my ADHD. Medications can be helpful, but medications alone are simply not enough. What I have learned and am a big proponent of is that it needs to be an integrative and holistic approach. Your body is a very complex organism, and medications can be extremely helpful. But to many, they do not teach you how to create meaningful lasting changes. ClearPath exists because I couldn't find what I needed when I was really struggling. I want a care that looked at everything, not just my symptoms, not just a diagnosis, and not just medications, not just therapy, everything. Whole human, the whole story, the whole nervous system. Today, our clinic supports individuals navigating ADHD, burnout, chronic pain, endometriosis, perimenopause, and menopause, trauma,

Clear Path Model And Closing Message

SPEAKER_00 22:52

anxiety, addiction, and stress. But more importantly, we help people understand themselves. We connect the dots. Because healing starts when you stop asking, what's wrong with me? And actually start asking, what exactly happened to me and what do I need now? This is why our clinic is so unique in its approach, because it comes from lived experiences, collaboration of other health practitioners like naturopaths, nutritionists, osteopaths, TCMs, and physiotherapists. I have purposely aligned our clinic with such experts so that all of the extra time you would spend on trying to find a good match or practitioner is basically done for you, should you choose it. We treat a number of different symptoms and problems ranging from ADHD, chronic pain, inflammation, hormonal issues like endometriosis, addiction, burnout, depression, menopause. Our mission is to approach every client holistically from the root. This also means that should it be appropriate and with our client's permission, we will work together as a team at the clinic to help clients by utilizing a team approach. As not every practitioner is able to or should have expertise in everything. In other words, you seek support from us. We will look at everything from your biology to all the experiences that have made up who you are today. Our approach is not one that only tells you to go and get meds to receive relief. Instead of a band-aid approach, we support our clients holistically. That goes deep into your nervous system to provide real change and lasting ones. If you've listened to this episode and found yourself thinking, wow, that sounds familiar, well, you're not alone. And you're certainly not the only person trying to hold everything together while your body is quietly asking for something different. My burnout was one of the hardest experiences of my life. But it was also the beginning of everything that followed. The life I have today, it didn't just happen despite my burnout. It happened because I finally listened to what burnout was trying to teach me. And maybe that's where your story begins too. Thank you for joining me on the Clear Path podcast. If today's episode resonated with you, please share it with the person who's carrying the world on their shoulders while insisting they're totally fine. And remember, you don't need to white knuckle your way through life. At Clear Path, we help you stop surviving, start understanding, and create a path that actually feels sustainable. Until next time, be kind to your nervous system, question your inner critic, and remember burnout isn't a personality trait. I'm Katrina Aslani, your local therapist. Thank you for listening.