Reclaiming Balance: Moving Beyond Narrative Burnout in Healing Culture
There are many behaviors associated with the healing culture we see today. There is a current prevailing expectation that every experience we have in life needs to be unpacked, analyzed, and turned into teaching or insight. Social media provides personal growth threads, and therapy sessions strongly encourage us to produce insight from self-reflection. The message from society is to Mean-Make, but the pressure to obtain some lesson from every moment of our lives can lead us to experience a new form of mental exhaustion that could be labeled Narrative Burnout. We are living through a period where vulnerability and storytelling of personal experiences have provided us with the means to connect with others and the ability to heal through that connection. This is a positive cultural shift helping to dismantle counterproductive views of mental health and emotional expression. However, at times, this cultural shift tiptoes into the territory of Too Much Expected. The underlying belief is tha...