Compassion Fatigue Cure: From Burnout to Radiance for Women Healers 50+

Why the Good Girl Trap Is a Safety Hazard That Fuels Burnout

• Dr. Julie Merriman • Episode 16

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Are you exhausted from offering endless respect, support, and compassion to everyone around you, yet struggling to offer even a fraction of it to yourself?

If the voice in your head is more critical than kind, you aren't dealing with a simple "mindset issue"—you are dealing with Root Chakra depletion. For women healers over 50, the cultural conditioning of the 60s, 70s, and 80s taught us to be "polite" rather than powerful. This "Good Girl" trap is sabotaging your boundaries today, eroding your foundation, and leaving your nervous system feeling unsafe in your own life.

In this foundational episode, Dr. Juls digs into the neuroscience of inner dialogue and why self-respect is your first line of defense against burnout. You will discover:

  • The Burnout Erosion: Why exhaustion destroys self-respect first, and why bubble baths can't fix a broken foundation.
  • The 6 Baseline Behaviors: The specific, clinically backed habits that rewire your brain for inner authority and confidence.
  • The "Alter-Ego Reset": A powerful Root Chakra grounding tool to shift you from feeling invisible to feeling grounded and powerful immediately.

You deserve more than just survival. Press play to repair your foundation and reclaim your inner authority.

This podcast supports women healers over 50 navigating burnout, compassion fatigue, and midlife transitions with strategies for nervous system regulation, trauma-informed boundaries, and chakra alignment to heal resentment and self-neglect while cultivating soul joy, radiance, and a purposeful next chapter of freedom and inner peace.

Stop trying to "Self-Care" your way out of a physiological crisis.

If bubble baths and deep breathing actually fixed compassion fatigue, you wouldn't still be staring at the ceiling at 2:00 AM. Your burnout isn't an attitude problem, it's a biological pattern. You are stuck in one of four distinct "somatic signatures." Until you identify yours, you are just throwing water on a grease fire.

Take the 2-Minute Quiz

Stop guessing. Find the leak. Fix the circuit.

Episodes drop every Tuesday at 5am and every Friday at noon.

Special guest episodes drop the 4th Thursday of every month at 7am.

Speaker 1:

Hey y'all, I'm Dr Julie Merriman and welcome to SoulJoy. In today's episode it's all about R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Do you hear, aretha? That is self-respect. As always, this is a necessary component of sustainable, holistic self-care. I also call wellness. Okay, friend, I like that music that's going to come up again. Hi, friend, welcome to today's episode.

Speaker 1:

I so appreciate you taking some time to tune in and just hang out with me for a hot minute. So what's been going on at the house? Well, we, let's see. We are just kind of getting in the groove of not being in the hospital every week. It has been so great. Kelly, as y'all know, has been battling cancer and we had a lot of what I called hospital roulette, but anyway, he's healthy and he's out moving hay and I have some time to sit in my studio and make a few podcasts. So home is good.

Speaker 1:

So, professional helpers, this podcast is dedicated to preventing and overcoming the occupational hazards of this career that we chose. We love it, but it comes with. I mean, it's it's. This is hard work that we do, and I really focus on overcoming burnout and compassion, fatigue and vicarious trauma. So let's get to it.

Speaker 1:

So how do you feel about self-respect? I've seen it demanded from others. You know I've seen respect being demanded from others, but rarely do we think about demanding it of ourselves. So how does that voice between your ears disrespect you Y'all if we can extend this to ourselves? If we can't extend this to ourselves, it's really difficult to receive respect from others. You know it starts at home. We got to do our own housekeeping and make sure that that voice between our ears is a respectful voice, because it's almost hypocritical to demand it from others when we're not giving it to ourselves. So this is another week for us to look at the root chakra. Last week we looked at root chakra stuff. We're looking at that again this week. Our self-confidence radiates from that chakra. The more confident we are, the more self-respect we enjoy.

Speaker 1:

So here's the baseline things that I've grown to believe lead to self-respect. Through my own experience and working with clients over the last 30 years, what I've found are these things I'm about to talk about. So I take a much deeper dive into this y'all in my book In Pursuit of Soul Joy that you can get on my website or Amazon. But if you really want to take a deeper dive, I really encourage you to take a look there. So here's what I found and I say through my own lived experience, through working with clients over the last 30 years and through researching these constructs of burnout and self-compassion, fatigue and vicarious trauma.

Speaker 1:

This is what my research has shown as well. This is what we need in order to start living a life full of self-respect. So, first, you've got to be able to set healthy boundaries. Second, you've got to own that calendar. Second, you've got to own that calendar. Third, saying no to things that drain you is eminently important, because only then do you open your life to have room to really yummy yeses about things that bring you joy. The next one is exercise. You've got to be moving your body. You've got to get those endorphins instilled in your body. You've got to build a life that's full of mobility. And also, ladies and gentlemen, I highly believe it's important that we get our ass up out of bed and get dressed every day Comb your hair, put on your makeup, get dressed, put on a nice outfit, feel good about yourself. That is eminently important, with self-respect and y'all. I think we need to plan one thrill a month, like this month my husband and I are zooming off to Jamaica. Next month we're zooming over to Windstar Brooks and Dunn will be playing Is that next month? I think that's in March. Next month is all about the holidays and so that's going to be my thrill getting my Christmas tree up and stuff. You've got to have something that brings you joy at least once a month, and it's not going to happen unless you plan it. But I would invite you to consider what I've just listed out. Those are baseline necessities. There's no excuses allowed. Those are baselines, baseline necessities to bringing self-respect to your life. And when you're living a life that's confident and full of self-respect, that's going to be a life full of soul joy. That's going to be a life full of soul joy.

Speaker 1:

In my experience, y'all, in my experience being a child of the 60s, too often we're raised to not respect ourselves, respect our needs, respect our desires. And as a good Texas girl, my mom and dad drilled being polite over self-respect into me, and by that I mean and my grandparents did too it was don't be selfish, let your friend do this, that or the other, or she's your guest. You need to make sure she has what she needs before you take care of yourself, which I mean. I'm not saying manners aren't a good thing, I'm just saying. Sometimes, I believe we drill those thoughts into children's heads to the point that they don't believe they are allowed to respect themselves and put themselves first in any instance. And that's just not true. I cry hogwash.

Speaker 1:

You have to show up, be seen and heard to practice self-respect. So do you find yourself saying poo poo to these ideas? If so, you probably have some root chakra work to do. You need to pinpoint what might be getting in your way of believing in and practicing self-respect for yourself and y'all. To be clear, I'm talking about how you've created your life. Who, pray tell who is the superstar of your life? If it's not you, then you've got work to do. There's probably lots of old, worn out schema that you need to clear because that's getting in the way of your root chakra energy. Need to clear because that's getting in the way of your root chakra energy.

Speaker 1:

There's nothing wrong with you being the superstar of your life. There just isn't the voice that's between your ears, that's you all day, every day of your life. She's hanging in there with you all day, every day, and she needs to be respectful of you and by George rooting for you. So, okay, before we move to the activity I've got planned for you. There's a couple of things, but even before I segue into that, I just want y'all to really take a step back and think about how respectful your voice between your ears is to you and that's an important voice, like I say, he or she is with you 24-7, 365. And if you're being disrespectful, y'all, that's a giant clue that there's work to be done and that's okay.

Speaker 1:

This work we do is not one and done. We're always working on ourselves, especially those of us in professional helping profession. So I want you to really think about what I've talked about, do a little assessment on yourself. Where do I have some work? Is that voice being respectful? Because only when you get that voice to be respectful can you really start practicing soul joy, and I want that for you. So, okay, I want to invite you to subscribe to my email list and get the weekly email that I send out when I send out my podcast every Monday, and in this email there's free PDFs. There might be one, there might be several, depends on what activities we've done. There's one this week, but all you have to do is go to my website and sign up for my newsletter to get on my email list. And while you're there, I encourage you to buy a copy of my book and really start digging into how to create soul joy in your life. So my website is wwwjuliemerrimanphdcom, so I hope to see you hop over there and take advantage of that.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so the activity I have for you today is really pretty easy, but then again, you know I laugh A lot of this. Stuff is pretty easy to really try to do it for yourself on a regular basis, and believe me, I'm looking myself in the mirror when I say that. But the activity I have for you today is called self-respect tools, and these y'all it's not rocket science. Nothing, believe me, nothing I talk about is rocket science. But research does show that this will help us lead a happier, more fulfilled life full of self-respect.

Speaker 1:

So first, it's simple, my friends you just need to smile more. Your body reacts to those smiles. Your yummy hormones are dumped into your system that help you feel more alive and vibrant. People react to you differently. If you see someone scowling, that's a message to stay away. If you see someone smiling, that's a message of endearment, and I've got a lot of warmth here to offer the world. Keep a self-respect journal. I go into that more in depth in the PDF I send out.

Speaker 1:

Celebrate your wins. Take time to notice them and celebrate them. If you don't, nobody else is. Create a powerful alter ego, and what I mean by this is that I invite you to combine the qualities of experts, people you respect and the ways you wish you were Taking on. This persona can help you separate from the voice between your ears when it gets disrespectful. And then I invite you to create a self-respect collage. It could be pictures, it could be words, it could be a combination, it could be giant, it could be small, but I want you to display that somewhere to remind you how important that self-respect work is.

Speaker 1:

Also, do not negate doing your body scans, doing your superpower models and taking a yoga class or two to really focus on opening up that root chakra. And if you go back and listen to earlier episodes, I walk you through a super power model and I walk you through the full body scan. All right, y'all. That's it for today. I thank you so much for hanging out with me for a hot minute. I invite you to subscribe to this podcast. Wherever you listen to podcasts, please leave a review. I'd love to hear from you. So until next time, take care of you.