There’s a kind of spiritual pressure that says: if you’re truly grateful, you shouldn’t feel depleted. If your faith is strong, exhaustion shouldn’t touch you. If you’ve been blessed — and oh, you have been blessed — then tiredness is almost an ingratitude.
Can we sit with how harmful that is for a moment?
Because here’s what we know at Terrini M. Woods Counseling, and here’s what we want you to know too: life is not either/or. You can be deeply, genuinely grateful and bone-tired. You can love God with everything in you and feel like you’re running on empty. You can be strong and need help. These things are not contradictions. They are the both/and of being fully human.
The Trap of Toxic Positivity
Toxic positivity is the belief — often well-intentioned — that we should maintain a positive mindset no matter what. It’s the “everything happens for a reason” said too quickly. It’s the “at least you have your health” when someone is grieving something else. It’s the “just be grateful” response to burnout that leaves people feeling more ashamed of their pain than they did before.
Research from Dr. Susan David, a Harvard Medical School psychologist and author of Emotional Agility, shows that suppressing or denying negative emotions doesn’t make them go away — it makes them louder. When we push down what we’re actually feeling and plaster gratitude over the top, we don’t become more resilient. We become more disconnected from ourselves. And disconnection, over time, looks a lot like burnout.
Authentic emotional processing — actually feeling and naming what you’re experiencing — is what builds true resilience. Not performed positivity. Not spiritual bypass. Honest reckoning.
What the Both/And Actually Looks Like
The both/and framework is something we come back to often at TWC, because it creates space for the fullness of human experience without requiring you to choose between your faith and your honesty.
You can be thankful for your job and be exhausted by it. You can love your family and need space from them. You can trust God’s plan and grieve what the plan has cost you. You can be making progress and still be struggling. You can be faithful and depleted.
The Psalms are some of the most honest writing in all of scripture precisely because they hold both sides. Psalm 22 opens with “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — and by the end, it lands in trust and praise. Both are present. The lament and the faith. The darkness and the light. The exhaustion and the hope.
That’s not weakness. That’s the full range of what it means to be alive and to believe.
Why This Matters for Burnout Recovery
When someone is burned out and they try to recover using toxic positivity — “I’ll just be more grateful, I’ll just count my blessings, I’ll just push through” — it usually doesn’t work. Because gratitude is powerful, but it is not a substitute for rest. And spiritual discipline is meaningful, but it cannot replace addressing the root causes of depletion.
True burnout recovery requires holding both things at once: the acknowledgment that something is genuinely wrong and the hope that healing is possible. The honesty about where you are and the faith in where you’re going. Grief over what you’ve been carrying and grace for the journey ahead.
This is where therapy can be transformative. Not because a therapist will tell you to think positive thoughts, but because a good therapist will sit with you in the both/and. Will hold space for the gratitude and the grief. Will help you feel the full weight of your experience without being crushed by it.
Permission to Be Human
Beautiful soul, you do not have to choose between being faithful and being honest about being tired. You do not have to perform wellness to be worthy of care. You do not have to resolve your feelings into one neat, tidy, spiritually acceptable emotion before you can receive help.
You can come as you are — grateful and exhausted, faithful and depleted, hopeful and hurting — and that is exactly enough to begin.
If you’re ready to explore the both/and of your own experience in a space that is warm, non-judgmental, and faith-informed, we would be honored to walk with you.
Schedule your session with Terrini M. Woods Counseling today.
Peaceful blessings, Terrini M. Woods Counseling
