The Hidden Crisis: What Every Helping Professional Needs to Hear

In this deeply personal solo episode, Dr. Nat Green drops the mask and speaks directly to the heart of every therapist, coach, healer, and helping professional who has ever felt depleted, disconnected, or on the edge of burnout.

If you're the one holding space for others but silently wondering who’s holding space for you—this episode is for you.

Dr. Nat vulnerably shares her own journey through hidden trauma, emotional burnout, and a life-altering health crisis that forced her to stop, reflect, and completely transform the way she works. She reveals the quiet crisis sweeping through the world of helping professionals and calls out the unspoken truths we rarely admit: that trauma doesn’t only belong to our clients—it lives in us too.

With wisdom from 35 years in the trauma field, and time on both sides of the couch Dr. Nat unveils her new mission—to help practitioners like you reclaim your energy, purpose, and inner peace by healing at the nervous system level.

This episode isn’t just a story—it’s a wake-up call, a permission slip, and a powerful invitation to rise into your post-traumatic growth.

🎧 Listen in to discover:

• The hidden epidemic of vicarious trauma and why so many helping professionals are burning out
• Why traditional self-care isn't enough—and what actually works to heal and regulate your nervous system
• Dr. Nat’s personal breaking point and how it became the turning point for her healing
• The ABS Method and how it supports profound, sustainable transformation
• How TRE (Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises) became a game-changer in releasing years of stored trauma
• Why the belief that "you should be strong and unshakeable" is silently crushing some of the best practitioners
• The new direction for Growing Tall Poppies—and how it will serve YOU, the healer, the holder, the helper

💡 Key Takeaways:

• You are not weak for feeling exhausted. You are human.
• Burnout and compassion fatigue are often rooted in unacknowledged trauma.
• Healing doesn’t mean stopping the work—it means doing it differently.
• Vicarious trauma is real—and it needs real solutions, not just bubble baths and short walks.
• There is a way to feel whole again. To reconnect with your “why.” To thrive.

💬 Favorite Quote:

“Empathy is beautiful—but without boundaries and nervous system regulation, it becomes depleting. This isn’t a capacity issue. It’s a trauma issue.”

✨ You Deserve to Heal, Too.

If you're a helping professional who's been quietly struggling, know this: you’re not alone—and you don’t have to keep pushing through. It’s time to shift from survival to sovereignty, from burnout to post-traumatic growth.

👉 Ready to feel whole again?

Connect with Dr. Nat and explore her upcoming programs designed specifically for therapists, coaches, and helping professionals
 

If this episode resonates with you then I'd love for you to hit SUBSCRIBE so you can keep updated with each new episode as soon as it's released and we'd be most grateful if you would give us a RATING as well. You can also find me on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/drnatgreen/ or on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/DrNatalieGreen

Intro and Outro music: Inspired Ambient by Playsound.

Disclaimer: This podcast is intended for educational purposes only. It is not intended to be deemed or treated as psychological treatment or to replace the need for psychological treatment.

Transcript

Dr Nat Green: 0:01

Welcome to the Growing Tall Poppies Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Nat Green, and I'm so excited to have you join me as we discuss what it means to navigate your way through post-traumatic growth and not just survive, but to thrive after trauma. Through our podcast, we will explore ways for you to create a life filled with greater purpose, self-awareness, and a deep inner peace. Through integrating the many years of knowledge and professional experience, as well as the wisdom of those who have experienced trauma firsthand. We'll combine psychology accelerated approaches. Coaching and personal experience to assist you, to learn, to grow and to thrive. I hope to empower you to create deeper awareness and understanding and stronger connections with yourself and with others, whilst also paving the way for those who have experienced trauma and adversity to reduce their suffering and become the very best versions of themselves. In order to thrive. Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode. Welcome back to Growing Tall Poppies, the podcast where we explore powerful stories of resilience, healing, and transformation after trauma. I'm your host, Dr. Nat Green, and today's episode is a little different. It's just you and me today having a heartfelt conversation. No guests, just raw, honest, and hopefully. Deeply resonant, vulnerable truth. I wanna have a bit more of a personal conversation with you today. I wanna talk directly to those of you who are always holding space for others to the therapists, coaches, healers, and helping professionals out there. I see you, those of you who give so much. Who carry others through darkness and who often forget that you too need light. Today, I wanna share something close to my heart, a shift in direction, a deepening of purpose, and a calling I can no longer ignore. I'm going to talk about why I am pivoting my work to focus specifically on therapists, coaches, and helping professionals. Day after day, you show up for others, you hold space for deep pain, and you guide others through healing. If you've been feeling exhausted, disconnected, or like you're just going through the motions, then this episode is for you. Today I also wanna share a deeply personal story and speak to something I believe the helping Professionals community desperately needs to hear. You see, there's a quiet crisis happening in the world of helping professionals. They're leaving their professions in droves, and all those years of experience and expertise simply can't be wasted. It can't be lost for nothing. We have to do something about this. While we can, we're trained to spot pain and trauma in others, but what about in ourselves? What happens when we are the ones exhausted, emotionally numb, losing our passion or silently carrying. The stories of pain we've been entrusted with. Sometimes the reasons that we are feeling drained, burnt out, or disconnected in our work is trauma. Not just our client's trauma, but our own. And often it's trauma that we haven't acknowledged or haven't even realized was there. So if any of this resonates, then this episode is absolutely for you. Let's start with the big picture. Over the past 35 years, I've worked with so many people navigating the aftermath of trauma, survivors of all kinds, some with Big T trauma. Others with a lifetime of smaller compounding hurts. And time and time again, the one showing up to help the therapists, coaches, the helping professionals are just as deeply impacted by trauma as the people they're supporting. But here's the kicker, they don't realize it or they do but they don't feel that they're allowed to name it, and they're often too ashamed to admit it, and certainly not to speak it out loud for fear of so many things, including being seen as impaired or losing their registration, being seen as weak, or because there's this unspoken myth in the helping world. If you're doing it right, it shouldn't drain you. You should be strong, resilient, unshakeable. That belief is crushing people. I've seen incredible practitioners gifted, heart-centered wise question themselves, burnout, disconnect from their passion and start to doubt their calling and they choose to leave, or in some cases, even take their own lives. But here's the truth. Supporting trauma survivors and people in times of deep pain is emotionally demanding work. Feeling drained doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It means you care and you are human. Empathy is beautiful, but without boundaries and self-regulation, it becomes depleting, and this is where the exhaustion creeps in. Compassion, fatigue, vicarious trauma, not just buzzwords. But very real symptoms I see in our field every single day. And the deeper truth often. What's driving the burnout, the fatigue, the chronic pushing is unacknowledged. Trauma. Yes. Even for the therapists. Even for the coaches. Even for the helpers, especially for us. Let's face it. We are often drawn to this work because of our own stories, because of what we've overcome or what we've been through in our lives. But when those wounds remain unhealed, they don't just disappear. They whisper to us in moments of exhaustion. They show up in our bodies, our boundaries, and our inability to rest. Not because we lack skill or purpose, but because sometimes we have trauma from childhood, sometimes we don't have any prior trauma, and it's trauma picked up vicariously through years of sitting with other people's pain, sometimes trauma. That's been normalized in the culture of care and we don't talk about it, at least not enough. Now, let me tell you about why this work matters to me. This pivot is personal. I've lived in both worlds and sat on both sides of the couch, the wounded and the healer, the client and the clinician. I know what it's like to sit in a therapy chair trying to find some sort of inner peace, and I know what it's like to sit on the other side of that room holding space for someone else's grief, trauma, and significant pain. And I know what it's like to be a practitioner who should know better, but still ends up burned out, depleted, anxious, or even ashamed because you're not okay. Let me take you back for over 30 years. I've worked in the trauma field. I've worked with thousands of clients in deep pain, and I was there for a year after the Port Arthur Massacre. I was there for a year after the mine collapsed, caused by the air blast at North Parks Mine. I worked with survivors, with families, with entire communities. I was driven so deeply driven to help people heal, to make a difference in the world. And I hope with all my heart that I did, but the truth is I just kept pushing through. I wore my resilience like armor. I functioned on basic self-care at best. I worked harder. I ignored the exhaustion. I told myself I just needed to rest more on the weekend, take a walk in nature, try a meditation, but it wasn't enough. And deep down I knew it and there was a turning point. Everything changed after I went through major reconstructive ankle surgery. It was meant to be straightforward, but it wasn't. It was disastrous. I almost died. I developed systemic sepsis and spent eight months in and out of hospital. And then in that same year I experienced another significant trauma. That was my breaking point. I had no choice but to slow down, and for the first time I saw the truth. I had my own trauma, not just secondary trauma, not just emotional exhaustion. I had PTSD on top of everything else, so I started to rebuild. I changed the way I worked. I began navigating my own healing. It was raw, it was messy. It was long and extremely painful. But through this journey, I developed my ABS method. The Accelerated Breakthrough Strategies method, a process that I'd been using with incredible results on coaching clients individually and now with groups. And when I finally had someone guide me through my own method, I had a revelation. There were layers. I hadn't seen layers that weren't even mine. I was carrying other people's trauma stories and experiences I'd absorbed into my nervous system across decades of helping others. Despite all my attempts at self-care, despite all my knowledge, I had never truly cleared it. And it was keeping me stuck in a loop of burnout, compassion, fatigue, and unacknowledged trauma. I finally saw it for what it was, vicarious trauma, and that changed everything. When I finally acknowledged what I hadn't been ready to admit that experiencing my own trauma. Had a further hidden gift in that it actually served as the excuse I needed to be able to fully deal with the years of vicarious trauma, and then I began to truly heal. I began using TRE Tension and trauma releasing exercises to literally shake it out and shake out what was stored in my nervous system. And for the first time in a long time, I felt free. Yes, I'm still a work in progress, but I'm now solidly in post-traumatic growth and I'm moving towards thriving. That's what finally pushed me to ask the deeper questions, what's really going on under the surface of all this burnout, compassion, fatigue, and exhaustion. Why are so many incredible helping professionals silently suffering, and why are we treating it like a capacity problem when it's actually a trauma problem? That's the truth. It's trauma. It's unacknowledged trauma. Its unprocessed grief, its nervous system dysregulation, marked as ambition. It's over-functioning, disguised as professionalism. And it's a culture that tells us to suck it up instead of slow down. So now I wanna share my revised and bigger mission that even though I love helping people who've experienced trauma, I know my mission is to make a bigger impact. Because I can't help everyone, but what I can do is provide therapists, coaches, and helping professionals with tools that allow them to help themselves or that allow them to heal themselves so you can do this work more effectively and sustainably. I can take you through my ABS method and teach you how to recognize and release the trauma that you've unknowingly carried and help you to truly regulate your nervous system. And I can support you to stop just pushing through and start transforming because you deserve healing too. And when you are grounded, present, and whole, you create ripples of healing. that go far beyond anything one person can do alone. So here's where we go from here. You're going to see a shift in my work and probably in this podcast to more directly serve therapists, coaches, and helping professionals who feel stuck, tired, or disconnected from their purpose, not just with surface level tips for self-care. but with deep transformative support that gets to the root of what's going on, we are going to explore the signs of unacknowledged trauma in practitioners. How compassion fatigue, burnout, and vicarious trauma often stem from our own unhealed parts, the nervous systems role in everything, and how to regulate it. How to reconnect with your original why and how to move from surviving your work to actually thriving in it.'cause you deserve that. You're not here to be a martyr for the cause. You're here to be fully alive, present, empowered, and available to the people that matter the most to you to give from your overflow, not your depletion. To rise just like the Phoenix archetype so many of you embody. So if anything I've shared today resonates with you, if you are a helping professional who's secretly struggling, questioning your capacity or even wondering if this work is still for you, I want you to know something. You are not broken. You are not alone. There is a way through. I'm creating something specifically for you, a free masterclass called The Hidden Cost of Helping. What's Really Behind Your Burnout, compassion, fatigue, and Exhaustion. It's powerful, honest, and practical, and it might just change the way you see yourself. End your work forever. Stay tuned for more info and I'll include it in the show notes once it's ready to go. And beyond that, I'm opening the doors to the Rising Phoenix Coaching Program, a trauma-informed nervous system-based experience. Designed specifically for helping professionals ready to heal their own wounds and reignite their purpose so that we can help you to reclaim your identity, release your stored negative emotions, and reset your nervous system. When the healer heals the ripple effect is unstoppable. So thank you so much for being here with me today, for listening, for showing up, and for all the invisible ways you serve the world. We need you, but we need the whole you, not the burned out version, not the disconnected version, the authentic, grounded, fully resourced version of you. You deserve that. Your family deserves that, and your clients do too. Thank you for being here, for doing the work that you do and for being open to this conversation. It's not always easy. It's always worth it. Until next time, keep growing, keep healing, and remember even the tallest poppies need tending to. Remember, you're not alone in this. Bye for now. Thank you for joining me in this episode of Growing Tall Poppies. It is my deepest hope that today's episode may have inspired and empowered you to step fully into your post-traumatic growth, so that you can have absolute clarity around who you are, what matters the most to you, and to assist you to release your negative emotions. And regulate your nervous system so you can fully thrive. New episodes are published every Tuesday, and I hope you'll continue to join us as we explore both the strategies and the personal qualities required to fully live a life of post-traumatic growth and to thrive. So if it feels aligned to you and really resonates. Then I invite you to hit Subscribe and it would mean the world to us if you could share this episode with others who you feel may benefit too. You may also find me on Instagram at Growing Tall Poppies and Facebook, Dr. Natalie Green. Remember, every moment is an opportunity to look for the lessons. And to learn and increase your ability to live the life you desire and deserve. So for now, stay connected. Stay inspired. Stand tall like the tall poppy you are, and keep shining your light brightly in the world. Bye for now.