Generation Corporate Betrayal.
A survival guide for high performers who got it right and were punished for it. Sixteen chapters on moral injury in civilian life, especially the way it shows up for neurodivergent adults and unusually competent people. Not a self-help book. More like a field guide for getting yourself back.
What the book is actually about.
Most of what gets called burnout in high performers is something older. The proper name for it is moral injury. There’s a clinical literature on it, there are ways to work with it, and there’s a history, and almost none of that has made it into the conversation people are having about why their best staff keep quietly leaving.
This book is for the ones who did the work, raised the issue, and got punished for being right. For the ones whose careers slowly expected them to become a smaller, more agreeable version of themselves, and who have just started to notice what that has cost. For the gifted, the neurodivergent, the idealistic, and the capable, who have been hit harder than most because they could see too much of what was going on.
It’s not a book about how terrible companies are. It’s a book about what to do with yourself when you’ve been inside one, and how to get your life back on ground that’s actually yours.
Sixteen chapters, three parts.
What we call burnout, and what it actually is.
A client came to me in the winter of her forty-first year. She had been at the same company for eleven years, a small hospital system on the finance side. She was the person who quietly fixed the things other people missed, and she’d done it well enough for long enough that the people above her had stopped noticing she was doing it. She’d taken six months off on her doctor’s advice, and she’d come back a little different: a little less available, a little slower to answer. Not in a way her manager could name in a review, but in a way her manager had started to notice anyway.
She said she was burned out. She had been told this by a GP, a coach, her HR department, her sister, and the owner of the coffee place on her street. I asked her what the word meant to her. She said it meant she was tired. I asked her what the tiredness was about. She stopped for a long moment. Then she said something I’ve heard many times since, in different words, from different people.
She said: It is not that I am tired. It is that I do not want to keep being the person I have to be, in order to stay there.
That wasn’t burnout. It was a different kind of wound, and it has a clinical name: moral injury. The version this book is about is the shape it takes when a capable, perceptive, often neurodivergent adult ends up inside a system that slowly expects them to go around their own values, just to stay in the system at all.
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I’ll send one email when the book is available, and maybe one or two more along the way with excerpts or research notes if something worth sharing comes up. No marketing cadence, no filler, and your email is never shared with anyone.
The book I needed, ten years ago.
I spent fourteen years in global strategy and innovation roles before returning to psychology full-time. Part of what shaped this book is what I saw happen to capable people inside systems that weren’t designed for them, and part of it is my own version of the same story. I didn’t have a name for what was happening, and I didn’t have a psychologist who did either. So this is partly the book I needed at the time, and partly the book my clients keep telling me they needed and never found.
The book is not out yet, but the work is.
If what you just read sounds close to what you have been carrying, a first conversation is free.