When your cup is empty: Healing for Healthcare Workers After Burnout and Vicarious Trauma
If you work in healthcare, you know how to care for others, often at the expense of yourself. You’ve been trained to stay calm in chaos, push through exhaustion, and keep showing up even when your body and heart are begging for rest. But after months or years of high-intensity care, something can start to shift.
The work that once felt meaningful now feels heavy. You might feel detached, irritable, or emotionally numb. Or maybe you feel everything, guilt, grief, anxiety, and frustration, all at once. You might feel confused or guilty by this or believe, “If I was only a better/kinder/patient nurse, then…”.
If this sounds familiar, please know: there’s nothing wrong with you. What you’re feeling has a name, compassion fatigue or vicarious trauma, and it’s common among people who spend their lives helping others.
The Hidden Cost of Caring
Healthcare workers often carry more than most people will ever see. You witness suffering, loss, and fear on a daily basis, and you do it with professionalism, grace, and care. But that doesn’t mean your body and nervous system don’t register what’s happening.
Over time, repeated exposure to crisis can lead to symptoms of trauma: hypervigilance, emotional detachment, anxiety, or even physical exhaustion. This responses can be so helpful when you are in the middle of handling an emergency at work, but can feel less than helpful once the crisis is over. Many providers describe feeling like they’re “running on empty” or that they’ve lost the sense of purpose that first brought them to the work.
As a former pediatric nurse, I know how deeply this can run. I remember the mix of heartbreak and determination that comes with caring for families through the worst days of their lives. It’s not something you can just “leave at work.” Those experiences stay in the body and our minds, often long after the shift ends.
Why It’s So Hard to Ask for Help
The culture of medicine often teaches us to put others first: to keep moving, stay strong, and handle it on our own. There can feel like there is no place for vulnerability in an environment that values perfectionism and competence.
But here’s the truth: burnout isn’t a personal failure. It’s a nervous system asking for care after too much stress for too long. You can love your work and still need healing. You can be a compassionate, competent provider and feel completely depleted.
It takes courage to pause, reflect, and say, “This isn’t sustainable. I need support too.”
How Therapy Can Help
In therapy, we create a space where you don’t have to keep it all together. It’s a place to slow down, reconnect, and gently explore what your body has been holding and be cared for.
I take a trauma-informed, relational approach, integrating EMDR and somatic awareness to help you return to yourself.
Therapy can help you:
Understand and release work-related trauma and stress.
Reconnect with your sense of purpose and self.
Learn how to have a more flexible nervous system.
Heal from vicarious trauma.
Many healthcare professionals find that EMDR helps them process memories or moments that still feel “stuck”, a.k.a. the one patient, case, or code that still lingers in the back of their mind. When those experiences are integrated, they no longer have the same emotional charge.
Moving from Surviving to Healing
Healing from burnout or compassion fatigue doesn’t mean leaving your profession, though for some, it might. It means learning how to care for yourself with the same tenderness and commitment you give to others.
Sometimes that starts with the simplest acts:
Learning to rest without replying your latest shift in your mind.
Saying “no” when you need to.
Allowing space for grief, anger, or exhaustion.
Remembering that you’re a having a very human response to situations that are outside of what most people experience.
Therapy gives you a place to remember who you are outside of the role, and to rediscover your capacity for joy, connection, and rest
You Deserve Care Too
If you’ve spent years caring for others, it’s time for someone to care for you. You don’t have to wait until things feel unbearable to reach out.
Therapy for healthcare workers can help you process what you’ve been carrying, rebuild your sense of safety, and reconnect to the parts of yourself that feel distant.
I offer a trauma-informed, relational approach to therapy for healthcare professionals, integrating EMDR and somatic work to support nervous system healing and self-compassion. If scheduling feels overwhelming for weekly therapy, I also offer intensives.
Offering therapy in Seattle, WA, and telehealth across Washington and Massachusetts.
Reach out today for a consultation. You don’t have to keep carrying this alone.
