Book Review - Fried: Why You Burn Out and How to Revive by Joan Borysenko, Ph.D.

I have been under the weather the past couple of days and was fortunate to have Fried by Joan Borysenko at the top of my reading pile. Dr. Borysenko used the social network, Facebook, to gather input from her Facebook Friends (FBFs) to write about people’s experiences with burnout. By combining the input of the FBFs with research about burnout she was able to give a comprehensive view of the experience of burnout and the possibilities that come with surviving the experience. The information she provides would be extremely helpful to anyone working in the field of domestic violence and sexual assault.

Dr. Borysenko uses the allegory of Dante’s Inferno to map the progression of burnout from the descent into hell to the rise to Paradise. In the first chapter she provides the stages of burnout with the first stage being “Driven by the Ideal” and the last stage as “Physical and Mental Collapse.” I was extremely affected by the quote she provided from Thomas Merton’s Letter to an Activist which I think is very applicable to the work we do in our work to end violence against women and children.

“Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially apostiolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”

In this first section on the stages of burnout, Joan Borysenko provides writing exercises to help determine where a person may be on the continuum. In other chapters she addresses the “depression industry” that fails to recognize the effects one’s life history and prefers to medicate symptoms rather than address trauma and grief and may have actually done more harm than good. I found this section particularly interesting.

Dr. Borysenko also discusses the Adverse Childhood Experience studies of Dr. Vincent J. Filletti and outlines how childhood experience effects out ability to maintain our physical and mental health. She also encourages the use of McClelland’s Thematic Apperception Test and the Meyer’s Briggs to determine temperament and how one responds to stress. It was not necessary for me to take the TAT to know where I would fall and I found it helpful in validating the work I currently do. Dr. Borysenko recommends the use of such tests as a means of finding out whether or not one is working in a situation that will lead to increased risk of burnout.

Dr. Borysenko’s wisdom and stories from her own life are beautifully intertwined with the wisdom of the FBFs that she invited to participate in discussion regarding burnout and the revival that occur once a person makes the journey from Hell to Paradise and the recognition that we can let go and move one to a new life with even greater excitement and productivity.

I hope readers will find this book as wonderful as I did. I plan to refer to it often

I will end with a quote Dr. Borysenko included by John Milton (from Paradise Lost): “The mind is its own place, and in itself I can make Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”