Earn 1.5 CEUs!
Alicia Johnson is a therapist who specializes in supporting women navigating burnout, anxiety, and trauma. Her work centers feminist and intersectional frameworks that honor the impact of systemic stressors on mental health. She is passionate about dismantling hustle culture, challenging resilience myths, and creating spaces where women can be themselves instead of constantly trying to survive. Alicia runs her own virtual telehealth practice and enjoys working at home with her cat. In addition to clinical work, she coaches, writes, and speaks on burnout to anyone who listens.
Description
Modern culture often glorifies women’s resilience as the ability to endure, persist, and excel despite adversity. While this narrative appears empowering, it frequently masks a harmful dynamic that normalizes overwork, emotional suppression, and chronic burnout. The expectation of constant strength has become a silent standard that disproportionately burdens women, particularly those navigating intersecting systems of oppression. This presentation critically examines the “resilient woman” archetype through a feminist psychological lens, exploring its historical, cultural, and clinical implications. Drawing from narrative therapy, trauma-informed practices, and intersectional feminist theory, this session will analyze how societal structures such as patriarchy, racism, capitalism, and ableism shape both the conditions that lead to burnout and the ways women internalize responsibility for their own suffering. Thus, staying stuck in this endless cycle. The presentation will highlight how resilience, while often celebrated, can become a survival mechanism that obscures the need for rest, support, and collective healing. Participants will learn to identify how the language of resilience may reinforce oppressive systems within clinical, educational, and organizational settings. Through case examples and reflective discussion, attendees will develop skills for reframing resilience as relational, embodied, and contextually informed rather than as individual endurance. Practical strategies will include trauma-informed approaches that center rest, emotional authenticity, and community-based care. By integrating feminist ethics into clinical practice and advocacy, this presentation seeks to transform the concept of resilience from a mandate for self-sacrifice into a framework for liberation. Attendees will leave with tools to support clients and communities in redefining strength not as the capacity to bear more, but as the right to rest, repair, and reconnect.
Objectives:
1. Analyze how systemic factors contribute to the internalization of resilience narratives and the development of burnout among women, using feminist and trauma-informed theoretical frameworks.
2. Evaluate the psychological and ethical implications of resilience-focused language within clinical, educational, and organizational contexts, identifying ways it may reinforce oppression or hinder authentic healing.
3. Apply feminist, narrative, and trauma-informed interventions that reframe resilience as relational and restorative, integrating rest, emotional authenticity, and collective care into clinical practice and advocacy work.
