The Anxiety-to-Burnout-to-Chronic Illness Pipeline Nobody’s Talking About
You’ve probably tried a lot of things.
Therapy, maybe for years. Coaching. Books you’ve read cover to cover, highlighted, and returned to. Energy healing. Mindset. Maybe you’ve trained in one or more of these modalities yourself. You know the theory, you can guide others through it, and you still can’t quite get it to work for you in the ways that seem to come more easily to other people.
You understand yourself. You really do. You can trace your patterns back to their origins, name what’s happening in your nervous system while it’s happening, explain polyvagal theory at a dinner party. And somehow, you’re still exhausted. Still waking up at 3am. Still pushing past your limits and then crashing, over and over, wondering what you’re missing.
Maybe you’ve started to wonder if this is just how it is for you. If there’s something stubbornly, uniquely wrong with you that makes the things that work for everyone else not quite work.
There isn’t. I want you to know that before anything else.
I created Sacred Creatrix because I spent years being that person. The one who knew everything, tried everything, and still couldn’t land the results I was watching other people get. And I eventually figured out why. This is the story of how that happened, and what I built from it.
I’ve been coaching in some form for over a decade. I started in health and wellness (nutrition, fitness) and then moved into creativity and transformational coaching, working mostly with professional creators and moms. I trained in mindfulness, EFT, NLP. Eventually I trained as a high performance coach, which felt like the natural next step in a career that kept building toward something I couldn’t quite name yet.
What I didn’t know then, and wouldn’t understand for years, was that I was AuDHD. Highly sensitive. That the clients I kept attracting (smart, self-aware, doing all the “right” things, still stuck) were mostly neurodivergent too. I was adapting everything I learned for them intuitively, finding softer approaches, slower entry points, different angles, because the standard versions of things weren’t quite landing. I thought I was just being thorough. I didn’t realize I was already doing nervous system work.
And while I was carefully adjusting everything for the people I worked with, I was still treating myself the way I’d always been taught to. Push harder. Be more disciplined. Do everything the experts say perfectly and if it doesn’t work, you didn’t do it well enough.
I finished my high performance coach training, and my body just…stopped.
Looking back, the collapse makes complete sense. At the time, it felt like a betrayal.
For years, I had been trying to build the life I was supposed to have. The right marriage, the right body, the right way of being a mom. The appearance of having it all together. And underneath all of it, something in me had been very clearly, consistently trying to get my attention. My inner knowing kept surfacing, quietly at first and then louder, telling me that my marriage was over. That the life I was holding together through sheer force of will wasn’t actually meant to be my life.
The only way to stay in the life I had worked so hard to build, was to stop listening and push harder.
I disconnected from what my body was telling me. From my own needs. From any signal that pointed toward the truth I wasn’t ready to face. The amount of energy it takes to do that, to maintain a life that isn’t a good fit while pretending it is (to yourself and everyone around you) is extraordinary. I was burning through everything I had just to stay in place. And I had spent so many years ignoring and deprioritizing my body’s other communications (pain, hunger, exhaustion, what it actually needed) that those signals had gotten quieter too. Or I’d gotten better at not hearing them. Probably both.
Eventually, my body stopped asking and started demanding.
After the crash, I was bedridden for close to two years with severe burnout, ME/CFS and POTS. At my worst, I couldn’t sit upright for more than a few seconds. I wouldn’t have been physically able to stand if my five-year-old had been in danger and screaming for me. I’d spent so much of my life overriding what my body was telling me that it took me more than six months to even acknowledge how serious it was. Pushing through had been so ingrained, so automatic, (and my lived experiences had been so invalidated and gaslit) that I genuinely didn’t register that what was happening was out of the ordinary. I just kept looking for a way to still show up. Still do the things.
The medical system was largely unhelpful. A doctor who had never heard of the diagnosis I was sent to them for. Gaslighting. My symptoms being attributed to depression despite evidence to the contrary. My being openly Autistic received as a behavioral problem rather than useful clinical information and getting labelled evasive when I couldn’t understand the question I was asked. My primary care doctor, who actually believed me, handed me a two-page document that said, essentially: drink more water, join a grief support group. There isn’t really treatment for this.
About a year in, I had one of the lowest moments of my life. Lying in bed, exhausted and in pain, unable to get up even if I needed to. Staring at what felt like an unlivable future. And in that moment, not a dramatic one, just a very quiet one, something shifted. Not my determination, which had already proved it wasn’t enough on its own. This was different. Steadier. My inner knowing surfacing again, the same one I’d spent years learning to ignore, telling me clearly: you’re going to figure this out. You’re going to get through this. And you’re going to help other people.
I decided to trust it. However long it took.
It took years.
What I gradually pieced together changed everything I thought I understood about healing and change.
None of the techniques I’d trained in had landed for me because I had never felt safe enough in my body for them to work. Most of my life had been spent in my head, not my body, because my body didn’t feel like a safe place to be. As a highly sensitive AuDHD woman with a childhood full of abuse and neglect, too much had happened there. Too much was being held there. And without that basic foundation of safety in my body, nothing else could get through. You can know exactly why you do something and still be completely unable to change it, because your nervous system is operating from a different set of instructions than your intellect.
Healing my nervous system was also going to require both internal and external shifts, working together. The food, the sleep, the physical support, the ways my body needed care that didn’t necessarily line up with mainstream coaching recommendations. All of that mattered. And it had to be paired with the trauma healing, the somatic awareness, the slow and careful work of expanding my nervous system’s capacity to feel safe and the tolerance for being present in the body. Neither side alone was going to do it. I had to stop treating my body and my inner world as separate problems. Everything was connected through the nervous system.
There was almost no awareness about this at the time of my recovery. It was pieced together through over 1000 hours of research into these different topics, and using my pattern recognition to find the overlaps and connections that no one had made yet. There were no resources I could find that put all of this together specifically for someone like me. A neurodivergent, chronically ill, highly sensitive woman who needed a path that didn’t assume she was starting from the same place as everyone else. So I built it for myself. And it worked.
When I was well enough to go back to work, I took a job as an executive functioning coach. I needed stability while I rebuilt, and it seemed like a natural fit given everything I’d learned about neurodivergence and working with my own brain and body.
Within months, something became obvious.
Nine out of ten clients who came to me for executive functioning support didn’t have an executive functioning problem at their core. They had a nervous system problem. The memory issues, the brain fog, the difficulty with transitions, the inability to plan, prioritize, or initiate: these weren’t just neurodivergent traits. They were symptoms of chronic dysregulation. What happens when a nervous system has been in survival mode for so long that there’s genuinely no bandwidth left for anything else.
The women I was seeing were intelligent and deeply self-aware, and had already tried so much. Therapy, coaching, energy healing. Many of them were trained practitioners themselves (therapists, coaches, nurses, shamans) who knew how to support other people through exactly these challenges and couldn’t get the same techniques to work in their own lives. They’d had small moments of relief, things that helped a little, but nothing that created the kind of fundamental shift they’d been working toward for years. And many of them had quietly absorbed the belief that they were the problem.
That is not what was happening.
What I kept seeing was a progression: anxiety, then burnout, then chronic illness. And I could watch it in real time. These were women who looked incredibly functional from the outside. The responsible ones, the caregivers, the ones who held careers and families and often the emotional weight of entire households while quietly falling apart inside. High-masking, neurodivergent, mostly undiagnosed or recently diagnosed, carrying the cumulative weight of decades spent trying to be acceptable in a world that was not built for their nervous systems.
The worse their dysregulation became, the worse their executive functioning became. Not because those skills had disappeared, but because their nervous system was spending every available resource just trying to keep them alive.
When we’d shift our focus toward nervous system regulation, toward actual safety rather than better planning systems, I’d watch things change. Memory would improve. Tolerance would expand. Skills they thought they’d permanently lost would start coming back. The body, given enough safety and support, knows how to come back toward itself.
I recognized the pattern. I’d lived it. And I recognized that the path through it was something I now knew how to offer.
That’s when Sacred Creatrix became clear.
There are three things I see neurodivergent women carrying most often, and they’re deeply connected to each other.
The first is exhaustion that doesn’t lift. Not tiredness, but the kind of depletion that sleep doesn’t touch. Where a good day still costs you. Where your body feels like it’s running on fumes even when nothing obviously demanding is happening. Or a boom and bust cycle that feels like your energy is all the way on or all the way off. And you can’t really predict which it’s going to be. That’s what chronic dysregulation feels like from the inside. Your nervous system is working so hard just to keep you upright that there’s nothing left for anything else.
The second is the gap between understanding and changing. You know why you do what you do. You can trace the pattern, name it in real time, explain it to someone else. And ten minutes later you’re back in it. No amount of awareness or effort was ever going to bridge that gap. The nervous system operates from its own set of instructions, and until there’s enough safety for those to shift, understanding alone can’t create lasting change.
The third is not feeling like yourself. Or never quite having felt like yourself, and only recently starting to grieve that. There’s usually a version of you that you can sense sometimes (relaxed, present, confident, fully there). She doesn’t have to manage every interaction. She’s not exhausted by the effort of existing around other people. She shows up in glimpses, in the right environments, with the right people, on the right days. She’s real. She’s been waiting, for a long time, for enough safety to become the default.
What makes all of this harder is that we exist in a culture that still reads masking as health, pushing through as strength, and chronic illness as a personal failing. The neurodivergent experience, especially for women who were diagnosed late or not at all, has historically been met with disbelief. Even the therapeutic and healing spaces designed to help often rely on approaches that weren’t developed with neurodivergent nervous systems in mind, and can feel useless, or sometimes do actual harm, when they don’t fit. When the goal is to be more productive, functional, or neurotypical passing, it reinforces the coping mechanisms and beliefs that have been driving nervous system dysregulation all along.
But when a woman finally has enough safety to process, heal, and be fully present in their body and life, when she can start to hear what her body has been trying to tell her and trust her own inner knowing, what becomes possible is revolutionary.
“My mind was so noisy and it was like my energy was attached to all those worries and to-dos. And now my mind is so quiet and peaceful. All that urgency is gone.” — Ary T.
“I am a new person: I am brave, my anxiety is gone, I’m a very fun person again, and every day of my life is an adventure.” — Amy S., Author
“Working with Elizabeth has been life-changing in a way I honestly didn’t think was possible. I struggled with dissociation for years. It felt like I was constantly drowning or trying to stay awake, and it was completely debilitating. Since doing this work, that’s just… not a thing anymore.” — Tia S., Therapist
That’s what becomes available when the nervous system has enough safety to finally exhale.
Sacred Creatrix is a long-term 1:1 coaching container (twelve + months) built entirely around what your nervous system can actually handle, not a predetermined pace. Each week we meet for a 55-minute session. Between sessions, you can text me with the things that can’t wait seven days. You have tools, resources, and techniques customized to where you are right now, not a generic protocol, and access to self-study and group content that supports the work we’re doing together.
What I bring to this is a particular combination I haven’t found assembled anywhere else. Over a decade of coaching training across nutrition, mindset, EFT, NLP, high performance, executive functioning, trauma-informed somatic work, and yoga, all of it filtered through the lived experience of recovering from ME/CFS and POTS using the same nervous system principles I now teach. I’m AuDHD and highly sensitive, and I use both of those things actively in my coaching. I notice quickly. I see patterns before they’re fully articulated. I know when something isn’t landing and how to find a different way in. The women I work with often have significant training in healing modalities themselves, and still needed someone who could meet them exactly where they were, without requiring them to fit a method that wasn’t built for them.
I also work from the CAPACITY Method, the framework I developed through my own recovery and years of working with clients.
Co-Regulation and Safety
Awareness
Physical Regulation
Alignment
Creation and Expression
Integration
Tolerance Expansion
Yin Energy
It’s the map I needed when I was bedridden trying to figure out how to get myself back, and it’s what guides Sacred Creatrix from beginning to end.
This is not a quick-fix program. The women who get the most from this work are usually the ones who have already tried the quicker things, who are ready for something that goes deeper and slower and is willing to stay. Ready to stop pushing and start listening. Ready to trust the pace set by their nervous system. Ready for a completely different way of moving through their world.
“I got so much more than what I thought it would be. I had really reasonable expectations and thought it could be awesome, but it was way way more awesome than I hoped.” — J.G., Musician
“My gut response is that this is something that doesn’t exist in our community.” — G.W.
Right now, I’m the only person I know of doing this work in this particular way: blending somatic and trauma-informed approaches with nervous system rehabilitation, practical and practical skill building specifically tailored for high-masking neurodivergent women. That won’t always be the case, and I hope it won’t. My vision is that every neurodivergent woman eventually has access to the understanding that what she’s experiencing is not her fault, is not something she just has to live with, and is not evidence of something uniquely, stubbornly wrong with her. That this kind of support becomes one of the first things offered when someone receives a diagnosis, not something they find years later after exhausting every other option.
Because I’ve seen what becomes possible on the other side. A woman who knows herself, trusts herself, and stops shrinking so other people are more comfortable is not a small thing. The ripple effects reach her family, her relationships, the work she’s here to do. That’s what I’m working toward, one container at a time.
If something in this post vibrates with your soul, that recognition is worth slowing down for. Hearing and honoring that message from your Inner Knowing is a big step towards embodying your most authentic self.
The next step is a Sacred Creatrix discovery call. We’ll talk about where you are, what you’ve already tried, and whether this is the right fit and the right time. There’s no pressure in that conversation. We’ll figure it out together.
Book your Sacred Creatrix discovery call
— Elizabeth LeForest