Keep changing the world without burning out: resilience skills for changemakers and feminists
I’ve spent most of my life among changemakers and feminists and I can say these are the most caring, creative, and burned-out people I’ve ever met.
What do I mean? Here are a few common challenges in the lives of changemakers:
- Imbalance between workload and organizational resources
- Discrimination and Marginalization
- Legal persecution
- Financial insecurity
- Trauma and secondary trauma
- Various types of threats, harassment, online stalking, and violence
- Lack of support from family or the community
All of these factors make work and life more challenging. Changemakers and feminists experience stress, anxiety, burnout, difficulties in preserving motivation and commitment, and damaged relationships.
To create change, we must have changemakers with the resources to deal with these challenges. But this is where “The Helper’s Dilemma” comes into play. It sounds something like this: “How can I dedicate time to take care of myself when the cause feels more important and crucial than my own well-being, especially when I’m so privileged compared to those I’m helping?!”
I’ve heard this sentiment from changemakers around the world. What follows is often a tendency to deprioritize their own well-being, leading to high turnover rates and prolonged mental health damage.
A Special Note for Feminists
- Are you the one at the dinner table or the team meeting giving the feminist perspective?
- Have you encountered people who dismiss your ideas, roll their eyes when you speak, or insist that you exaggerate or imagine things?
- Did you find yourself in situations where your feminist beliefs were belittled, leaving you feeling drained and frustrated?
- Perhaps you feel like you’re always “on” – as if you can’t take a break from constantly fighting for what you believe in.
While everything I mention about change-making applies to feminists, my experience has shown me that we face additional stressors in our lives and higher chances for burnout.
Feminist changemakers work on the macro level, challenging gender norms, breaking down power structures, and advocating for better conditions for women. But they’re also always working on the micro level—fighting oppression when they’re victims of it themselves.
Facing the current trend of belittling feminism is making feminists encounter the cancellation of their own oppression. This brings many of them to the brink of burnout, sometimes ending with a retreat from feminist activities for self-preservation reasons.
My mission is to support changemakers and feminists in finding the balance between caring for others and caring for themselves, ensuring they have the resources to continue improving the world.
I have been a feminist and a changemaker for 20 years. I’ve seen the burnout that my friends, colleagues, and myself have faced.
As a social worker specializing in resilience and feminist therapy and an embodied facilitator, I have developed this program to promote social change by supporting the people who make it happen.