Hello fellow helpers! I’m so excited that you’re considering my new book Helpers with Hashimoto’s: The Rise of Thyroid Conditions in Professional Helpers and What We Can Do About It. Written for professional helpers experiencing compassion fatigue, stress, burnout, and so much more, we have a calling to help others that, in turn, feeds our soul. We breathe it. We embrace it. We live it.
We want to make a difference and an impact in others’ lives! As a mental health therapist for more than a decade, this resonates with me. It’s the starfish story. If you haven’t come across this poem before, I hope you’ll search for it! I get goosebumps and teary eyed almost every time I share it with someone new. Of course, we all want to make a difference for each starfish/person we help. But we also struggle to slow down and take care of ourselves. How do we do both? Can we help that starfish then sit on the beach, digging our toes into the sand and feeling the sun on our faces? How do we learn to breathe it all in? Can we remain helpful without running ourselves into the ground?
As a therapist, I discovered I was suffering from burnout in 2017. I had symptoms for years before then and pushed through them. In the words of Petersen, How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation, “Like other type-A overachievers, I didn’t hit walls, I worked around them” (2020).
It’s awkward to admit that as a professional, I didn’t really register what was happening. Even though my hair was falling out, I had gained weight, and I was experiencing mood swings where I fantasized about quitting my job almost daily. I’d ignored the puffy face I didn’t recognize in the mirror between meetings. I’d feel depression symptoms in the morning and bounce back to feeling like myself by lunchtime. It was wild. I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s in late 2018, being told by the doctor that as long as I wasn’t planning to have kids anytime soon, I would just live with the symptoms as they were.
No thank you. Suffering through symptoms isn’t good enough. Not by a long shot. With thyroid conditions on the rise, there is more overlap between chronic stress, burnout, and thyroid functioning than we’d previously realized. Folks are being diagnosed with anxiety and depression who actually have a hypoactive thyroid. One in eight people have a thyroid condition now, most often women. And since women are also more likely to choose helping professions, I started to see them more frequently as clients in my therapeutic work. I could no longer ignore my own thyroid condition. My clients were paralleling my journey of desiring a better quality of life and I wanted to help them achieve it.
Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune condition that attacks one’s own thyroid and kills it over time, is the culprit for a lot of my symptoms. It contributes to fatigue, weight gain, anxiety and depression, and creates pregnancy challenges for some women. As I saw more and more professional helpers in my therapy practice, I realized they were being given the same messaging as me. Deal with it. Push through as is. This is your life now.
I refuse to accept this messaging and you should too. This book serves as a guide back to wellness. It is a journey of four professional women, myself included, who fight for the quality of their lives so they can remain impactful helpers and healthy individuals. Like Briana, who went through several doctors before she found answers as to why she’d gained 60 pounds within months. Or Liliana, who works through a checklist each month to explore if her symptoms are due to her thyroid, burnout, or something else. And Amy, who is still adjusting her diet in response to thyroid flare ups and gastric distress years after her diagnosis. Or me, a burnout consultant who questions if I’m doing enough for my clients while not wanting to ignore my own body’s needs. It’s a daily balancing act.
If this resonates with you, I’m glad you’re here! As professional helpers, we need to better understand our susceptibility to chronic stress, burnout, and resulting thyroid conditions. Join me in exploring the contributing factors of helping professions that make these challenging experiences more likely. Let’s begin our journey of reprioritizing your health as a professional helper. Grab the book on Amazon in paperback and Kindle here.
Warmly,
Khara