When the life you built stops holding you.

You are good at your job. You might be very good at it. You have built systems, shipped products, managed teams, navigated reorgs, performed well in a culture that rewards performance above all else. And somewhere along the way, something started to break. Not dramatically. Quietly. The Sunday-night dread. The numbness that sets in during the standup. The sense that you are building someone else’s future while yours slips away.

You may have already tried the obvious interventions: a new role, a sabbatical, a career coach, a meditation app, a side project that was supposed to feel meaningful. Some of them helped for a while. None of them touched the thing underneath.

If that is where you are, you do not need another coping strategy. You need a therapist who understands what tech burnout actually is, where it comes from, and why it does not respond to the usual fixes.

Why tech burnout is not just about work

The tech industry selects for a particular kind of person: high-achieving, competent, self-reliant, able to perform under pressure, able to suppress emotional needs in service of output. These are not just professional skills. They are survival strategies, often developed in childhood in response to environments where being needed was safer than having needs.

When the burnout arrives, it is not just the job breaking down. It is the entire survival system, the one that has been running since you were small, reaching its limit. The job is the most visible place where it shows, but the exhaustion lives deeper than the job.

This is why career coaching, while useful, often does not reach the root. A new job inside the same survival system produces the same burnout on a different timeline. The question is not “what should I do next?” The question is “what has the exhaustion been trying to tell me?”

Why a tech burnout therapist who has been inside the industry matters

Before I became a therapist, I spent years as a senior technical product manager building enterprise data platforms at major technology companies. I know what sprint velocity means. I know what it feels like to have your performance calibrated against your peers. I know the particular loneliness of being competent at something that does not feed you.

I did not leave tech because I failed at it. I left because I could not ignore what the exhaustion was asking me. That experience is part of why I can sit with high-achieving clients without being impressed by the achievements, and without mistaking the symptoms for the story.

Most therapists who advertise as working with tech professionals have never worked in tech. They understand stress. They may understand burnout. But they do not understand PIP anxiety, or what it feels like when your skip-level asks you to justify your role’s existence, or the way a reorg can dissolve your professional identity overnight, or the particular numbness of shipping a product you do not believe in. I do. You will not have to explain your world to me before we can explore what it is doing to you.

What makes this different from other tech burnout therapy in Seattle

Most burnout therapy focuses on stress management: boundaries, mindfulness, work-life balance, coping skills. These are not wrong, but they are incomplete. They treat the burnout as the problem. I treat the burnout as a message.

I practice depth psychotherapy, which means I am interested in what lives underneath the burnout. The compulsive competence. The inability to rest. The sense that your worth is your output. The fear of what you would find if you stopped. These patterns did not start at your current job. They usually started much earlier, in a family system that rewarded performance and had no room for need.

I also practice from a liberatory, intersectional feminist lens, which means I will not pretend that your burnout is purely personal. If the workplace is exploitative, if the industry is structured to extract from you, if the systems around you were never built to hold someone like you, we will name that together. Your suffering is not all in your head. Some of it is in the system.

What if the burnout is not a problem to solve but a threshold to cross?

What tech burnout therapy looks like, session by session

This is not career counseling. I will not help you optimize your LinkedIn or negotiate a severance package. What I will do is help you understand the deeper structures that drove you into a life that looks right and feels wrong.

In the beginning, we talk about what brought you here, what you are hoping for, and what has and has not worked before. We explore your goals, not as a checklist but as a way of understanding what “better” might actually mean for you.

As the work deepens, we start to meet what lives underneath the burnout. Often it is not what you expected. The thing you came in calling “work stress” starts to reveal older patterns: how you learned to earn love through performance, how rest became unsafe, how your competence became a cage you built from the inside.

For some clients, the work leads to leaving tech. For others, it leads to staying but relating to the work differently. For many, it opens into territory that has nothing to do with career at all: grief, relationships, the mother wound, the self that was never allowed to exist because the performing self took up all the room.

Some of the shapes tech burnout takes

• Sunday-night dread that starts earlier each week
• Emotional numbness during meetings, standups, or one-on-ones
• The sense that you are building someone else’s future while yours slips away
• Difficulty resting even on vacation, even on sabbatical, even when nothing is being asked of you
• Irritability that spills into your relationships and surprises you
• The feeling that your competence has become a cage
• A growing suspicion that the exhaustion is not about this particular job
• The question you keep pushing away: is this it?

If rest does not restore you, it is likely burnout, not tiredness. And if the burnout keeps returning no matter what you change externally, the work that needs to happen is internal.

Frequently asked questions about tech burnout therapy

What makes tech burnout different from regular burnout?

Tech burnout is shaped by industry-specific pressures: on-call culture, performance calibration, constant reorgs, the expectation of always-on availability, and a culture that rewards suppressing emotional needs in service of output. It is often intertwined with deeper patterns of compulsive competence that predate your career.

Do I need a therapist who understands the tech industry?

It helps significantly. A therapist who has worked inside tech understands sprint velocity, perf reviews, PIP anxiety, and the particular loneliness of being competent at something that does not feed you. You do not have to explain your world before you can explore what it is doing to you.

What does tech burnout therapy actually look like?

This is not career coaching or stress management. It is depth psychotherapy that explores the underlying structures driving the burnout: the compulsive competence, the inability to rest, the sense that your worth is your output. Some clients leave tech. Others stay but relate to the work differently. Many discover the burnout was a doorway into deeper territory.

Can therapy help if I am thinking about leaving tech?

Yes. But not by helping you make a pro-con list. Depth therapy helps you understand what the exhaustion is actually about, which is rarely just about the job, before making a major life decision from a clearer, less reactive place.

What are the signs of tech burnout?

Sunday-night dread, emotional numbness during standups, the sense you are building someone else’s future, difficulty resting even on vacation, irritability that spills into relationships, the feeling that your competence has become a cage. If rest does not restore you, it is likely burnout, not tiredness.

How is this different from career coaching?

Career coaching helps you figure out what to do next. Depth psychotherapy helps you understand why you keep ending up in the same place. Both have value. If you have already tried coaching and something still feels unresolved, the work that remains is probably therapeutic, not strategic.

Do you only work with people who are leaving tech?

No. Many of my clients stay in tech. The goal is not to leave. The goal is to understand what the burnout is telling you, and to let that understanding change how you relate to the work, whether you stay or go.

The practical details

Sessions are $150, held on Fridays, 8 AM to 4 PM. I see clients in person in Seattle and via secure telehealth throughout Washington State. I am out-of-network with insurance and can provide superbills for clients with out-of-network benefits. A limited number of reduced-fee slots are available.

The practice is opening in July 2026. I am currently accepting consultation calls and building a waitlist. If something on this page is resonating, I would welcome a conversation.