High Performer Burnout and Identity Beneath the Surface: What the Empty Underground Garage Reveals

By Meagan Yarmey, PhD, MSW, RSW

You know the feeling even if you’ve never named it.

You’re functioning at a high level. Meetings attended, decisions made, expectations met. From the outside, everything looks intact. But somewhere beneath the performance, there’s a quality of stillness that doesn’t feel like peace. It feels like being parked underground, in a structure built for movement, with the engine running and nowhere to go.

That image the empty underground garage keeps appearing in my clinical work. Not as a dream. As a description. High-performing professionals, often in their late thirties to mid-fifties, reach for it instinctively when they’re trying to articulate something that doesn’t fit the usual vocabulary of high performer burnout or stress.

It’s subtler than that. And more disorienting.

A lone sports car parked in an empty underground garage, illuminated by a single overhead light.

The Psychology of the Liminal State

In psychology, we use the term liminal to describe the threshold between one state of being and another. It comes from the Latin limen, meaning boundary, or doorstep. Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep first described it in the context of ritual transitions: the in-between space after one identity has been left behind and before the next has been claimed.

High achievers spend a great deal of time in this state without recognizing it as such. They interpret the disorientation as a performance problem, a failure of focus, discipline, or gratitude. They increase effort. They optimize harder. They stay later in the garage, convinced that what’s needed is more horsepower, when what’s actually happening is a developmental signal that the identity organizing their effort is no longer sufficient for where they are.

Kurt Lewin’s field theory offers a useful frame here. Lewin described human behavior as a function of the person and their psychological environment, their life space, which includes not just external circumstances but the internal forces of motivation, meaning, and unresolved tension (Lewin, 1951). When high performers describe feeling stuck, what they’re often describing is a field of competing forces with no clear direction of movement. The approach-avoidance conflict isn’t between two external options. It’s between the self they’ve built and the self that’s trying to emerge.

The garage isn’t a failure of the person. It is the field made visible.

What Gets Buried in the Name of Competence

Erik Erikson’s model of adult development describes midlife as the critical tension between generativity and stagnation, between the sense that your work and presence are contributing something meaningful beyond yourself, and the quiet dread that effort has become disconnected from purpose (Erikson, 1950).

What I observe clinically is that high performers often reach this developmental threshold with significant external success and a significant internal deficit. Not because they’ve failed but because the psychological needs that don’t appear on performance reviews have been systematically deprioritized.

Self-determination theory identifies three fundamental psychological needs whose satisfaction is essential for sustained wellbeing: autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Deci & Ryan, 2000). High achievers tend to have built robust structures around competence. Autonomy is often present, at least formally. But relatedness, the experience of being genuinely known and connected, not networked, not managed, but known is frequently the missing variable.

The garage is often where people arrive when relatedness has been deferred for long enough that they’ve stopped noticing the absence.

What has been buried is not ambition, or capability, or resilience. It is the self that exists beneath the performance, the one that has needs, doubts, and a developmental hunger for meaning that exceeds the next milestone.

The Invisible Labor of High Functioning

Early clinical research by Clance and Imes on the impostor phenomenon identified a recurring pattern among high achieving individuals in which success is attributed to external factors while competence is internally discounted, despite objective evidence to the contrary (Clance and Imes, 1978). This dynamic often produces cycles of intense over preparation, achievement, and renewed self doubt, all of which remain largely invisible to those observing the outcomes. What is interpreted externally as confidence or capability is experienced internally as sustained vigilance and concealment.

Over time, this pattern compounds in clinically significant ways. Research on allostatic load demonstrates that chronic activation of the stress response, even at subclinical levels and even in individuals who appear to be functioning well, produces cumulative physiological wear. This wear narrows cognitive range, reduces emotional flexibility, and generates a pervasive sense of depletion that rest alone does not resolve (McEwen, 1998). This state is distinct from acute burnout and is frequently overlooked precisely because performance remains intact.

The high performer in the garage is often not someone who has broken down. More commonly, their system is operating on an increasingly narrow bandwidth, maintaining surface function while internal resources quietly deplete.

This is not a motivation problem. It is a recalibration problem, and it requires a fundamentally different intervention than increased effort or self optimization.

Three Questions the Garage Is Asking

In mythology, descents into the underworld are never the end of the story. They are always the precondition for transformation. The figure who emerges is not the same as the one who descended and that’s not incidental. It’s the point.

What I’ve found clinically is that this liminal state tends to surface three questions, whether or not the person has language for them yet:

Who am I outside of what I produce? This is an identity question, and for high achievers whose professional identity has been the organizing structure of their selfhood for decades, it can feel destabilizing to take seriously. It is not a sign of crisis. It is a sign of developmental readiness.

What have I been pretending doesn’t matter? High performance requires a degree of subordination of needs, of doubts, of grief, of roads not taken. The garage is often where those subordinated things begin to press for acknowledgment. That pressure is not pathological. It is the psyche doing its necessary work.

What would I protect if output stopped being the measure? This question tends to reveal what actually carries value, relationships, creative life, physical presence, the quality of attention we bring to the people we love. For many, answering it honestly is both clarifying and quietly destabilizing, because it makes visible how much has been exchanged for the performance.

These are not questions to answer in a single sitting. They are questions to live with carefully and, for most people navigating this terrain, to work through with skilled clinical support.

Emergence Is Not the Same as Recovery

The frame of recovery implies that the goal is to return to a previous state, to restore the system to its pre-depletion baseline and resume at full capacity.

But the professionals I work with who navigate this territory most effectively don’t return. They emerge, into a different relationship with their capability, their limits, their need for genuine connection, and the meaning organizing their work.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy’s concept of psychological flexibility is useful here: the capacity to remain in contact with the present moment, including its discomfort, while moving in the direction of values rather than away from threat (Hayes, Strosahl & Wilson, 2011). This is not a rebranding of resilience. It is a different goal entirely. The aim is not to tolerate the garage more effectively. It is to understand what brought you there and to surface with a clearer, more integrated sense of who you are and what you are for.

That work takes time. It takes honesty. And for many high-functioning professionals, it requires finally allowing someone else to see what is actually happening beneath the performance, which is, for many, the hardest part of all.

A Note on This Work

The experience described here, the functional exterior, the internal stillness, the growing gap between achievement and meaning, is not unusual among the professionals I work with. It is also not fixed.

It responds well to careful, evidence-based clinical work that takes seriously both the complexity of high-performance psychology and the real demands of the environments these individuals inhabit. If this resonates with where you are, I would be glad to hear from you.

I offer complimentary 20-minute consultations. You can reach me at meaganyarmey.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn.

References

Clance, P. R., and Imes, S. A. (1978). The impostor phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 15(3), 241–247.

Deci, E. L., and Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self determination of behaviour. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.

Erikson, E. H. (1950). Childhood and society. New York, NY: Norton.

Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., and Wilson, K. G. (2011). Acceptance and commitment therapy: The process and practice of mindful change. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Lewin, K. (1951). Field theory in social science. New York, NY: Harper and Row.

McEwen, B. S. (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. The New England Journal of Medicine, 338(3), 171–179.

van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

© 2026 by Meagan Yarmey

​All Rights Reserved.

No reproduction without written permission