Feeling Everything: How I Stopped Treating Nurse Burnout Like a Clinical Problem and Started Healing

By Sarah Bergakker, Founder of MOOXLI

Why Nurse Burnout Made Me Emotionally Numb

At MOOXLI, I lead retreats focused on self-compassion, emotional resilience, and recovery from compassion fatigue. But recently, I realized something surprising: I was treating my own emotions like a patient in the OR—rationally, methodically, and with strategic distance.

Emotional Detachment in Healthcare: A Survival Skill That Stops Working

In a conversation with my therapist, she kindly called me out:

“You’re intellectualizing this. You need to feel it—in your heart, in your body, in your soul.”

She was right. Somewhere along the way, I stopped letting myself feel and started trying to fix. I’d reduced vulnerability, grief, and resentment into solvable problems.

Sound familiar?

The Truth About Emotions for Nurses Facing Compassion Fatigue

Here’s what I’ve learned the hard way:Emotions can’t be charted, coded, or treated.

They are not a lab value to correct or an infection to cure. They are guides—sometimes painful, sometimes beautiful—that help us come home to ourselves.

Journaling for Nurse Burnout Recovery: My Personal Practice

So, I tried something different. I stopped analyzing and started writing.

I sat down with my journal and asked:What would it look like to actually feel my emotions instead of managing them?

Here’s what came out:

A Healing Meditation for Nurses: Permission to Feel Everything

Let sadness simply be sad. Let grief linger, a constant companion. Let heartache remind me I am alive—fully breathing, fully feeling, bleeding, and breaking. Let burnout etch the story of my lived experience into the iron of my resilience. Let resentment become my guide. Let jealousy stir my awakening. Let guilt question my assumptions. Let shame propel me into community. Let longing break me open. Let vulnerability run wild and reckless. Let joy burst freely, unapologetically. Let happiness soak these cynical bones. And above all, let the wild vibrations of this human experience course through my veins until all that remains of me is the story of how the emotions that once held me captives set me free.

Whole-Person Healing for Nurses: What We’re Never Taught in School

If you’re a nurse who feels disconnected, exhausted, or numb—you are not broken.

You’re human.And you’re not alone.

What we offer at MOOXLI isn’t just rest. It’s a return to yourself. It’s permission to be whole, even while working in healthcare.

Fall 2025 Nurse Retreat: One Spot Left to Join Us

The heart of everything I’ve shared here?It’s the theme of our Fall 2025 MOOXLI retreat: Living life as a whole person with a wild heart.

And we have one final spot left.

If you’ve been waiting for a sign, this is it.MOOXLI will show you how to stop surviving—and start feeling again.Grab the last spot for your wild heart today. 💙

With you in the messy middle,~Sarah