You can run a thirty-person meeting and still feel your whole body drop at a three-word email from your manager. That's not thin skin — it's an old attachment pattern wearing a corporate badge. Here's why your nervous system files your boss under "the person who decides if I'm safe," and what healing actually involves.

You are the one everyone looks to, and you have not had a single safe place to say how heavy it has become. Burnout is an energy problem that rest can fix. What you may be carrying is leadership trauma — a nervous system worn down by years of isolated, high-stakes responsibility. Here is what it is, written from twenty-five years inside the C-suite, and what healing the collapse actually involves.

Your performance review measures your output. It cannot see the second full-time job you have been doing underneath it, scanning for threat and managing other people's comfort. For BIPOC professionals, racial trauma is the wound that does not show up on paper. Here is what it is and how it heals.

You have already tried the vacation, the new role, the meditation app, and the boundaries you finally drew. And still the body braces for Sunday night. What you are carrying may not be burnout. It may be workplace trauma. A clinical definition, for the high achievers who have outgrown the word.