A seemingly quiet night, with every chance of full rest and recovery of energy, is suddenly interrupted by a nightmare. A nightmare involving people, feelings and situations from years ago, which should have stayed in the past, returns with such force that sleep is gone.

Having talked about those people a few days before probably activated areas of my brain and made those memories invade such a precious moment, my sacred sleep. Anyone who knows me knows I love to sleep and that a good night’s sleep is essential for my day to flow.

I spent the day thinking about it. How can something that happened so long ago still haunt me with such power? It was a truly impactful life experience: a burnout.

According to Brazil’s Ministry of Health, “Burnout syndrome, or professional exhaustion syndrome, is an emotional disorder with symptoms of extreme exhaustion, stress and physical depletion resulting from draining work situations that demand a great deal of competitiveness or responsibility. The main cause of the disease is precisely excessive work” (our translation).

I was in an environment that was toxic for me. I lived in relationships in which I had no room to be myself. I had reached a professional level at which I was being recognized for having claimed my space, for having seized opportunities and for all the personal development I had invested in for years. That caused discomfort in several people and, in fact, I did not know how to handle all of it assertively. That discomfort turned into competition, on every side, including in my own attitudes.

I felt so threatened that, at every moment, I was competing for attention and space and wanting to please everyone. Pleasing everyone was impossible, and little by little all of it was killing me inside.

At that time, I had a miscarriage, and it is impossible not to link it to what I was going through; perhaps I was, in fact, dying little by little. I went home crying every day, tried to distract myself with solitary activities so I would not have to interact with people, lunchtime was a real inner chaos, and I always looked for people with whom I felt safe (and they were not always available).

I am sure that the account of the other people who were part of those events would be completely different from mine. That is why I stress: it was a toxic environment for me.

Woken by a nightmare that hurled me back to that time, in those days I relived many emotions that were hard to feel. I realize I am not yet ready to work through all these emotions and feelings and that I will need to respect my own time. I still feel hurt when I remember it all, even knowing that part of what happened said more about the other people than about me. But if it touched me, if it hurt, part of it belongs to me.

I shared with you a personal experience of professional exhaustion, of how much I did not know how to set boundaries at that time and of how much it still has the power to hurt. My intention here is, in some way, to contribute to my own life learning.

A toxic environment will not necessarily be seen as such by everyone. Each person reacts to toxic relationships differently. But if I keep allowing it to affect me, the responsibility is mine, not the other person’s.

That is why, from my point of view, it is so important to devote time and attention to relationships in the workplace. It is possible to build cooperative relationships and light environments, which will let people spend more time giving their best, using their full potential, instead of using that time to resolve relationship issues.

Perhaps we cannot handle all this alone and need help (I needed it and went after it), perhaps we do not need to stay in environments that hurt us, but we need to understand what makes us act the way we do and why certain attitudes hurt the way they do. Only then will we be able to change environments without taking these difficulties and pains with us. At the time, I managed to change environments and to learn from the other relational challenges that came my way, but surely something from that time still hurts. I am convinced that, at some point, I will resolve part of these wounds within me, but becoming aware of all this helps me sleep again, without the nightmare disturbing my sacred time.