The Body’s Silent Scream: Understanding Compassion Fatigue as Physical Injury and Somatic Healing

Are you a woman healer over 50 struggling with compassion fatigue and emotional exhaustion, feeling like a "floating head of competence" while your body silently suffers? Your chronic pain, jaw tension, and restless nights are not just signs of aging but manifestations of your nervous system under stress.

In this episode, we dive deep into the science of polyvagal theory and allostatic load to explain how your body physically metabolizes the emotional toll of caregiving. Discover how somatic healing and boundary setting can help you reconnect your brilliant mind with your depleted body, allowing you to cultivate self-compassion and reclaim your vitality.

Learn a powerful 5-minute somatic rescue technique designed to break the cycle of burnout, compassion fatigue, and self-neglect. Reclaim your purpose and rediscover the radiance that comes from nurturing yourself as deeply as you nurture others.

If you're ready to shift from martyrdom to self-care and inner peace, hit play now. Share this episode with another woman healer running on empty—we rise together.

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.

Burnout isn’t your failure—it’s the cost of caring too long without support.
In Pursuit of Soul Joy: A 12-Week Guide for Overcoming Burnout and Compassion Fatigue is written for women healers ready to stop surviving and start living again.

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Transcript

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So if your body, girl, if it is falling apart, but everyone keeps telling you to take better care of yourself, I need you to hear this. Your body isn't failing you. It's protecting you. Empowering brilliant women in healthcare over 50 to transform burnout and compassion fatigue into renewed passion. Reigniting your spark to create a life that energizes you every single day. I'm your host, Dr. Jules. Let's get to it. I need you to stay with me because today I'm going to give you three things that can change how you understand what's happening in your body. It's where we live, right? One, the research backed reason, women, healers, over 50 experience chronic pain, exhaustion, and immune breakdown. Even when. You're doing everything right, two, while living as a floating head of competence, brilliant, capable, disconnected from your body is quietly accelerating burnout and compassion fatigue. And three, I'm gonna give you a somatic sacral chakra practice you can do today to begin restoring energy, embodiment, and choice without quitting your job or blowing up your life. If that's what you choose, you can quit too. Okay, so y'all, here's the research, and this isn't a aging. It's load. And let's start with the data because I want you to stop blaming your body. Research on healthcare workers. Over 50 shows that chronic pain, exhaustion, unrelieved by rest, autoimmune flares, sleep disruption, and muscle. S muscle skeletal. Oh, I, I slaughtered that word. Muscle. Musculo skeletal injuries. I, it's, I'm just gonna own it. It is something I have been known to do since I came into this world. I can read like a mad woman, but I, pronunciation sometimes gets in my way. But those muscle skeletal issues that. Come up for us. They're actual injuries, and it's not primarily caused by aging, y'all. They're driven by the allostatic load, the cumulative wear of tear and unrelenting stress on your beautiful, gorgeous body. So in plain language that Merriman can pronounce. Your nervous system has been running in survival mode for too long. Hear that again. You've been running in survival mode for too long. Studies consistently show that older nurses, older counselors, older professional helpers aren't leaving because they no longer care. They're leaving because their bodies can no longer metabolize the cost of the work long shifts. To a giant caseload, emotional labor, moral distress, and constant hyper vigilance. And here's the part that no one bothers to tell us. Many of these beautiful, brilliant women would have stayed if their roles had evolved, their bodies needed change before their hearts did. Yeah. This isn't weakness by any means. It's physi physiology. The floating head of competence is what we're dealing with, and girl, it is dangerous. So we're gonna talk about this. I see this constantly in the high achieving women healers that I serve. Huh? You've been rewarded your entire life for living from the neck up. You're competent. Lord knows you're competent. You're the one everyone goes to for help. You're capable. You're highly trained. You're emotionally attuned to everyone else. Somewhere along the way, you learned to disconnect from your body in order to survive. You didn't even know it was happening. When I do full body scans with the patients that I work with, many of them feel completely lost. When I try to take them into their body or during session, I ask, where do you feel that? It is very foreign because we have gotten so good at being floating heads of competence, and we don't go into our body. So as I said, this is what I call the floating head of competence, right? We're brilliant, functional, respected, and profoundly disembodied. And here's the danger. When you continue to disconnect from your body, you lose access to early warning systems. Pain becomes a background noise, fatigue becomes normal, and numbness becomes productivity. Until one day when your body doesn't whisper anymore and it collapses, your body is breaking down and it's not betrayal. Sweet soul. It is communication. Our bodies talk to us every day and we must take the time to get embodied and hear what our bodies are telling us. They're very important messages. So let's do a little chakra work. And today I wanna look at the sacral chakra. I think I did that last week too. But the sacral chakra, that's where all our emotions live. That's where our sensuality lives. Our pleasure, our play. It's an important chakra to keep healthy. And sacral chakra. A unbalanced sacral chakra has something to do with compassionate teeth and burnout ground energetically. This lands squarely in your sacral chakra. As I said, it's a very important. Chakra, it's your center of vitality, pleasure, sensation ha, emotional flow. And for decades, U sacral energy has been overridden in service of others. You ignore hunger'cause you're too busy. You ignore pain because you got shit to do. You ignore exhaustion because you got shit to do. You ignore desire'cause you got shit to do. I mean, it all falls on our poor body being neglected. When the sacral chakra is depleted, the body shows up as chronic fatigue. Hip. Pain, low back pain, pelvic pain, autoimmune issues, loss of pleasure and aliveness. Oh, my aliveness was robbed for a number of years, and I, y'all, it's awful. Please do what you need to do to take care of this. So that loss of pleasure and aliveness happens when your sacral chakra is not balanced, and you also feel very disconnected from your own needs. And it's not just physical, it's relational. You've learned to abandon your body to remain good at your job. Think about that. So I created a nifty little activity for you and I call it reentering the body. I know. Very clever. And it's just five minutes if that. Uh, but whatever you're doing right now, I want you to do this with me. Wherever you are, place one hand on your lower abdomen, just below your navel. That is where your sacral chakra lives. It's your, it's the center of that sacral chakra. And I want you to take a slow breath through your nose and then exhale really long through your mouth. And now ask yourself not from your brain.'cause your brain is brilliant, but from your body, what is my body done tolerating? Don't rush. Just notice sensations. Just approach it with curiosity. No judgment. Notice any tightness, heat, emotion. Okay? Be with that, and that's okay. Whatever comes up, just be with it. And then I want you to ask this question. If I keep asking my body to push through this for one more year. What is it going to cost me? Let the answer be physical, not logical. And finally, place both your feet firmly on the ground and say out loud if you can, I'm allowed to listen to my body. That sentence alone begins repair. Easy to peasy. But you've got to do this for yourself. Okay. Today you learned your body. Breaking down from caregiving is not a personal failure. It's the predictable outcome of chronic stress and unmet physiological knee limits. Living as a floating head of competence disconnects you from your body's wisdom and accelerates burnout and compassion fatigue. Where is your purpose? You gotta reconnect. The sacral chakra holds the key to restoring vitality, sensation and choice and embodiment is not optional for sustainable healing. So listening to your body is not quitting, it's leadership. If this soul hit home, I want you to take the shadow healer archetype quiz that's in the show notes down in, at the bottom, or if you're listing on YouTube, it's if you'll click on my website. You can get to it there. It's a really important quiz I think you need. It will help you understand how you've learned to override your body and what your system actually needs next, because your body isn't breaking down, girl, it is calling you home. If this episode hit home, don't just nod and move on. Give yourself what you actually need. Tap the show notes right now, and girl, if you know another woman healer who's running on empty, please share this episode, y'all. We rise together.