Epi 47:

Burnout recovery isn’t always prolonged by a heavy workload, crazy schedules, or a lack of boundaries. Sometimes it is slowed by patterns we do not consciously recognize.

In this episode, I share a personal story about how shame showed up for me and how, looking back, it clearly slowed my recovery from burnout without me realizing it at the time.

I explain how shame differs from guilt, why it feels like a threat to the brain, how it activates the fight-or-flight survival response, and how it fuels overthinking, self-blame, and chronic stress in high-achieving veterinary professionals.

If you have tried different approaches to heal and still wondered why burnout recovery has not fully stuck, this episode will help you identify what may be getting in the way.

What You'll Learn In This Episode:

• 00:00 — Why shame is rarely discussed in burnout recovery

• 03:30 — The moment I realized shame was part of my stress pattern

• 07:45 — The difference between guilt and shame and why it matters

• 12:10 — How shame activates fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses

• 17:30 — A real-life example of shame showing up in veterinary medicine

• 22:45 — Why shame feels like a threat to survival in the nervous system

• 27:15 — How unrecognized shame fuels overthinking and rumination

• 31:00 — What recognizing shame earlier could have changed

• 34:30 — How to avoid this burnout-slowing pattern moving forward

Key Takeaways:

• Shame is different from guilt and impacts burnout recovery much more deeply
• Unrecognized shame keeps the nervous system in a constant stress response
• Overthinking and self-blame are often signs of a shame-based pattern
• Burnout recovery stalls when shame remains unprocessed
• Awareness is the first step to preventing this pattern from prolonging burnout
•  

A Truth You Need to Hear:

“I didn’t actually do anything wrong, despite feeling otherwise, and that’s the biggest piece.”

Links mentioned:

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S2 Epi 48 Transcript: The Shame Pattern That Slowed My Burnout Recovery and How to Avoid It

[00:00:05]

Welcome to Stop the Burnout, a podcast for veterinary professionals who love medicine but are exhausted by the people, pressure, expectations, and the constant mental loads that comes with it. If you've ever thought I shouldn't feel this strain doing something I care about, you're not alone and you're definitely not broken. I'm Doctor Amber Parks, a veterinarian turned stress and burnout coach. And here we talk about the stuff that no one taught us, like how to actually break the stress and burnout patterns once and for all and how to stay in this profession without losing yourself. You won't find bubble baths, toxic positivity, or self-care fluff pretending to be the solution here. Let's get into it.

All right, welcome back to another episode of Stop the Burnout. OK, today is going to be a little different in a good way, I think. I hope. I'm going to share a story that I dealt with recently and it like literally smacked me upside the head. And I know if you're listening to this podcast that you have probably felt this at some point, if not frequently, in personal life, in your career. And that is the word shame. Now before you turn me off, I could not have identified that I had shame when I was like deep and burnt out and stressed. In fact, I'm now really pinpointing that this is a huge culprit in and like a place for me to heal as I'm currently healing. And I'm going to share why, like what happened to me and what that looks like.

Guilt is a strong cousin of shame. I say guilt is when we think like, oh, f***, I did something wrong, right? Like a case went wrong or hold on, let me sorry, I should have done this before I was going to plug my laptop. So that's where guilt comes in like, oh my God, it is something wrong. I f***ed up. We have probably all experienced that. And truthfully, I think it's a driver for a lot of ways that we feel about ourselves and a lot of like the overthinking and things like that.

[00:07:30]

Maybe I have to pull back because there was a podcast episode I did, geez, I don't know off the top of my head which one it was, but reward, effort, and balance. And when there is that balance, that's a perfect recipe for burnout. Same thing if we aren't getting that, you know, if we're giving too much energy and effort and it's not being either rewarded or respected consistently or I should say in conjunction with like how much energy we're giving, then there's going to be anger and there's going to be resentment. So it's very much like a warning, like hey, there's an issue here. We need to look into this a little bit further because that is what's going to give us that real change over time.

Now the problem I have with anger is that it has been labeled as just this very unprofessional, you're too emotional, you shouldn't feel this way, you should act professional. And the biggest way this actually kind of pisses me off is specifically with anger. So things like irritability, and that can be with clients, coworkers, loved ones at home, and even sometimes pets, right? Like we're not, I hope, outwardly abusive to pets, but if you have like a short fuse or you've had the worst day of your life and your pet's barking at you, that could be very triggering. And sometimes we're just like, you know, shut the hell up and you feel awful.

And so it definitely seeps into every other aspect. Another way that we kind of see it is maybe cynicism or sarcasm. Now listen, big fan of sarcasm. A healthy amount of sarcasm at work has kept me laughing through many shifts. So I don't think sarcasm by itself is anger. But if it's this sarcasm that just has like a really negative, toxic undertone, that's the stuff we're talking about. Also, anger can show up as just like explosive reactions over small things.

[00:17:45]

Until the point that we're ready to like do that. But how do we even know that that is a place that we need to heal if we are never exposed to it? I'm not saying to essentially recreate or relive those horrible moments, but awareness is where I'm at. And what came to me is that common theme of shame because that's what came through initially for me. And I really thought, holy s***, this is rampant in veterinary medicine and I think in women in general.

Just like I felt like this person wanted me to have it in a certain way. They had to provide consent and they had to do it in a certain way. And I can appreciate that for sure. But I also, there's a part of me that feels like that lends into the thought that we have to hide it and there's f***ing shame around it and we have to not show people and we have to, um, kind of keep it to ourselves.

[00:27:10]

Like, well, what do we do about that? Because like I said in the beginning, there are many people, and I was one of them for f***ing years, that we kind of just want to be angry. And you know what? That's OK too. If you want to be angry and sit in that, and some people do that their entire lives, by all means, go for it.

And those I'm realizing in my coaching, I will not frequently, thankfully, but occasionally I will encounter people and I will be talking to them and I'm like, you are, you can be angry, but you have to be open to doing things different so that we get different results. And some of them aren't. They're just still in that angry place and they want that to change and they want management to get a clue and they want their coworker to get a clue.

[00:30:17]

And it really feels like a threat to our liveness, our ability to be alive, right? Heart rate goes up, your respiratory rate goes up, you're sweating, you're shaking. So all that like fight or flight or freeze or fawn response is usually what comes out. So fight or flight, we know that, right? We fight. So in my case, I could have just been like f*** you, you're an idiot. Flight would be I don't do anything. Freeze, kind of the same thing. You're freezing like you're seeing it but you're not doing anything. Or fawn is like overly nice, trying to like make this other person feel OK even if I don't agree with it. So that's kind of like what those are.

Now I want to add in here, I mentioned previously women that are neurodivergent or humans that are neurodivergent, doesn't matter if you're a woman. There's a part of this and I honestly think I'm going to do a whole episode on this, but I didn't know this until I learned last year.

[00:39:21]

Things like what would we do different, like really methodically look at that. But then look at, OK, you gave the information, like this was the perception, but then sometimes we have to let it go because we will never get the other person 100 percent of the time to understand or want to understand where we're coming from. And that's OK, but we have to know where that line is drawn because if you continue and continue, you will get so frustrated and stressed and overwhelmed and irritated and then you're still at the end of it back to square one. There was no improvement.

So that's where that is really crucial to know that. And sometimes that's hard to know. It is helpful to have like a coach or a therapist to show you where that is because we're in the situation and then that coach or therapist is outside of the situation and can give us a better perspective.

So OK, I feel better. I hope you do too. That was my episode.