Delphine is a 35-year-old marketing assistant. She returns to work after a burnout, diagnosis validated by the occupational physician, and an absence of 6 months. She requested and obtained from her HRD a position without stress and without responsibilities, within the framework of a therapeutic half-time. She is also followed in psychotherapy and works on stress and self-esteem.
Contrary to what it expected, the HR department realizes that this return, under the conditions described above, does not ultimately go so well. Delphine is stressed, makes mistakes and, not wanting to ask anyone for help, isolates herself. Conscious of her fragility, she fears to relive a situation identical to the one that led her to burnout.
Delphine's observation
She says she did not anticipate the difficulties she is facing. She chose a simple job, without responsibilities and yet nothing is easy.
However, she wants to do everything on her own, without help. She avoids her colleagues who ask her questions about her health, the reasons they led her to change jobs, questions that she finds intrusive.
She is also disappointed with her psychotherapy turned towards her past while her difficulties are current and professional.
In fact, the schema in which it is enclosed is the following:
- His hope is to be able, competent and recognized as such
- The way for her to get there is to be beyond reproach
- But she continues to encounter the same difficulties, which feeds her anxiety and her doubts and she isolates herself more and more.
She comes to the conclusion that there is no recovery from a burnout.
Our intervention system
In this specific case, we made an operative diagnosis for:
- Identify during individual interviews with Delphine and her professional entourage the difficulties that everyone (the manager, the HRD) encounters in their relationship with Delphine
- avoid looking at Delphine as a fragile person, a “handicapped” person to whom we will now have to adapt, which happens in most cases of this type
- implement targeted actions.
The results
After 5 sessions, Delphine regained her self-confidence. She has reestablished normalized relations with her colleagues and regained a balance in the context which is hers, that of a therapeutic half-time.
His manager gradually gives him more responsibilities
HRD no longer pressures her to return to work 100%
General information on burnout
People “threatened” by burnout are:
- guided by high ideals; they seek to “reach the horizon”
- usually unaware of their own limitations
- prone to creating disillusions as we have seen in the case of Delphine and one day, they say to themselves that nothing has any meaning, they lose the desire to go to work and find themselves at the doctor's, even to the hospital.
The environment tends to:
- consider these people as fragile and therefore to adopt radical solutions (transfer, release from all responsibilities) sometimes at the request of those concerned
- to think that they pose a particular threat to managers
- or to overprotect them, thus weakening them even more.
If we go back to the case of Delphine, she was ashamed and afraid of the judgment of her superiors and especially of her colleagues. We taught him to turn that shame into pride and to immunize him against negative thoughts about himself.
In general, we advise companies, rather than resorting to radical solutions, to provide “gentle and benevolent” support for the return of a burnout.
