Loneliness, restoration, connection, and supporting the supporters. Care providers can spend so much time being needed that they rarely stop to ask whether they also feel known. Explore loneliness in care work, the difference between isolation and burnout, and practical ways providers can build relationships, restoration, and meaningful connection.
OVERVIEW
Care providers spend much of their time creating places where other people can bring pain, grief, uncertainty, and experiences they may not be able to share anywhere else. But the people doing that work can experience a quieter kind of isolation themselves.
In this webinar, Kylee Heap, Executive Director of Support After Abortion, explores the difference between being needed and being known, the ways professional and personal loneliness can show up even when someone is functioning well, and why provider isolation is not simply another name for burnout. She also considers how healing itself can change relationships, why feeling understood is not always the same as being connected, and what restoration might look like for people who are accustomed to being the ones others depend on.
Providers are invited to consider who knows the person underneath their role, where they can find relationships that call them forward, and how professional community can make the unique isolation of abortion healing work a little less lonely.
THE CAREGIVER’S ISLAND
Kylee opened with a reflection on Dolly Parton’s recent passing and the way caregiving can quietly consume a caregiver’s attention.
Parton had spoken publicly about becoming so focused on caring for her husband, Carl, during his decline that she allowed her own health to fall away. Kylee recognized a version of that pattern in care work: we can become so attentive to the people we serve that we gradually stop paying attention to ourselves.
She also reflected on Parton’s song “Down from Dover,” which tells the story of a young woman facing pregnancy, abandonment, and rejection. Parton had explained that she wrote it after seeing similar experiences among girls growing up in the Appalachian mountains. She took an experience people were reluctant to look at and made them confront the isolation inside it. “In many ways,” Kylee told providers, “that’s what you do every day.”
It reminded her of something a provider shared early in Kylee’s time at Support After Abortion:
“I was on an island, isolated from anyone doing this work until I met Support After Abortion.”
That image became the starting point for the conversation: What creates that island for the people doing the caring, and what might make it possible to stop standing there alone?
NEEDED VS. KNOWN
The providers in the room represented substantial differences in belief, professional training, background, lived experience, and even their understanding of abortion itself. Yet everyone had chosen, in some way, to become a place where another person’s pain could land.
People bring providers difficult things to carry, and providers help carry them.
Kylee suggested that the isolation of care work does not always begin with one dramatic event. Sometimes it grows from quieter experiences:
Unseen. No one sees what you are carrying, perhaps because you have become very good at carrying it without showing anyone.
Alone. People around you may care deeply and still not entirely understand what you hold because they have never held something similar themselves.
Unspoken. Some experiences are not yours to disclose. Others are difficult to describe. And sometimes you are simply the person everyone expects to be okay.
Kylee illustrated this with an ordinary example from her own life. Before joining Support After Abortion, she worked in pharmaceutical research. When someone casually asked what she did for work, it was an easy piece of small talk.
Now, when she tells someone that she leads a nonprofit helping people struggling after abortion, the conversation can change immediately. Voices lower. People pause. And occasionally, someone she met only moments earlier shares something they have never told anyone before.
Kylee might have walked into a grocery store simply to shop, but suddenly she is holding something enormous with someone in aisle seven. She emphasized that she is grateful when people trust her in those moments. The difficulty is not that they share. It is that care work does not always remain neatly inside the spaces designed to contain it.
Over time, that can create a gap between what a provider is carrying and the ordinary world they are moving through.
Kylee offered language for that gap:
Being needed and being known are not the same thing.
Being needed means someone knows what you can do for them.
Being known means someone understands something about what it costs you to keep doing it.
Care providers have enormous opportunities to be needed. They may have far fewer opportunities to be known.
And sometimes, the very thing that makes someone especially valuable can also make them feel especially alone. Support After Abortion, for example, has one man on its team. His perspective contributes something his colleagues cannot replicate, making that difference deeply valuable. But he is also the only person carrying that particular perspective every day.
The same thing can happen around belief, culture, race, professional background, lived experience, age, leadership, or countless other differences. Someone may be the only clinician among ministry leaders, the only person with an experience no one else knows about, the youngest member of a team, the person with decades more experience than everyone around them, or the leader holding information they cannot share with the people they lead.
A person can be valued for what makes them different and still feel alone inside that difference.
That loneliness can exist even among people who appear to have something significant in common.
A community may form around one shared word—abortion, grief, caregiving, healing—while the people within it still have profoundly different experiences. Someone can be surrounded by people who have “been through the same thing” and still feel that no one has been through their thing.
Kylee also named another form of isolation that receives even less attention: healing itself can be lonely.
Healing may require someone to set new boundaries, release old ways of coping, reconsider relationships, or become different from the person others have always known.
At exactly the time someone most needs connection, they may have the least emotional reserve to reach for it.
Other people may withdraw too—not because they do not care, but because they do not know what to say or because another person’s pain brings them close to something difficult in themselves.
Meanwhile, growth can change relationships. The people around someone knew how to relate to who they were before, but they do not automatically learn how to relate to who that person is becoming. Sometimes healing even reveals that a relationship cannot continue. In those seasons, a person may find that their world becomes smaller before it becomes bigger.
Technology has introduced another complication.
When people feel alone, they can immediately reach for their phones. They can search, scroll, find a quote or post that perfectly describes what they are feeling, or ask AI to help put language around an experience. That recognition can matter. For a moment, there may be a profound sense of, Someone gets it. But Kylee drew an important distinction: recognition is not necessarily connection.
A stranger who wrote a meaningful post does not know who read it. An algorithm does not know the person it served content to. AI may respond compassionately and help someone identify what they are feeling, but it cannot replace being personally known by another human being.
Today, people have more opportunities than ever to feel understood without actually being connected. That may be one reason loneliness can be difficult to recognize. It does not always look empty. Sometimes, from the outside, it looks remarkably like connection.
WHAT MAKES YOU LESS ALONE?
Kylee offered a question providers could begin asking themselves:
What makes me feel understood for a moment, and what makes me feel less alone?
Rather than asking attendees to publicly disclose what resonated, Kylee launched a private poll. The conversation had touched on being unseen, being the only one, feeling different within a group, loneliness during healing, and recognition without connection. Some experiences, she acknowledged, are particularly difficult to say aloud in a professional community.
She did not share the poll numbers. Instead, she offered one reassurance:
“Whatever you picked, you are not the only person in this room who picked it too.”
Providers already understand the terrain of loneliness from the other side of the table. They know what isolation can do to someone. They see what changes when a person finally feels seen. But skill in recognizing loneliness in another person does not guarantee that someone will recognize it in themselves. Providers are not exempt from the very experiences they help other people navigate.
And the gap between being needed and being known does not necessarily announce itself as burnout. It can be much quieter. Someone may begin pulling back. Or they may give even more because being useful is a role they understand. They may simply become extraordinarily competent at carrying things alone. Everyone around them may think they are fine. They may, in fact, be fine. That is part of what makes the experience easy to miss.
Kylee suggested that the most useful question may not be, “Can I keep doing this work?” Most providers can. The better question may be: “What happens to me while I’m doing it?”
There is no simple five-step solution to being needed without being known. Provider care cannot be reduced to another assignment on a calendar, and meaningful connection cannot simply become another task to complete by Friday.
Still, naming what is happening matters. Having language for an experience does not solve it, but it creates something a person can begin to notice, discuss, and eventually make different choices around.
Kylee suggested that restoration may begin there: not by becoming less needed or caring less, but by ensuring that the person underneath the caregiving has somewhere to exist too.
A PERSONAL BOARD OF DIRECTORS
One practical direction came from advice Kylee once received from a colleague: everyone should have a personal board of directors. This is not a formal program or organizational expense. It is a small group of relationships with people who know the person underneath the role—people who do not only come to them because they are useful, capable, knowledgeable, or needed.
Kylee added another quality she has come to value: some of those people should carry something a person hopes to develop more fully themselves. That might be wisdom, courage, a stronger marriage, deeper faith, better judgment, greater peace, or something entirely different.
The people closest to us do more than know us. Over time, they shape us.
Someone who is routinely the leader, expert, caregiver, or person others turn to may spend much of their life surrounded by people who need something from them. That is different from having relationships with people who can call something forward in them.
For Kylee, that meant intentionally seeking relationships with people further along spiritually. She encouraged providers to translate the idea into whatever framework fits their own lives:
Who has something you are still becoming?
Do they know you well enough to help you get there?
Attendees received a worksheet with prompts to continue reflecting on those questions after the webinar.
The goal is not simply to add more relationships. It is to consider whether there are people who know you, not only people who need you, and whether some of those people can help call you forward.
Kylee also made an important distinction: professional community cannot replace deeply personal relationships, nor should it try to. But it can address a different kind of loneliness—the isolation that comes from doing unusual work without enough people around you who understand the work itself.
Kylee returned to the provider who had once described herself as being “on an island.” That provider eventually told her something else: “Now I feel like someone has my back.” Support After Abortion had not removed everything difficult about her work or given her people who understood every part of her experience. But someone knew she was there. She was no longer standing on the island entirely by herself.
Kylee suggested that this may be part of restoration: not necessarily making the hard thing disappear, but changing the conditions under which someone has to carry it.
That led Support After Abortion to a practical question:
What if people doing this work had more opportunities to find someone who understands something about what they carry?
A professional community cannot guarantee that someone feels completely known. But it can make the professional island smaller. It can create opportunities to meet others who understand something about the work because they are carrying something like it too.
A FIRST LOOK AT A NEW PROVIDER COMMUNITY
At this point in the live webinar, Support After Abortion gave attendees an early look at a new online community created specifically for abortion healing providers and invited them to participate in its beta test.
The Support After Abortion team has repeatedly seen meaningful connections happen when providers meet at conferences, trainings, and other shared events. The beta test is an opportunity to explore whether moments like that can happen in an ongoing professional space that creates more opportunities for providers to find one another, share what they are carrying, and make professional isolation a little less common.
Angel Penniman, Relationship Development Specialist, and Margaret Cogswell, Creative Marketing Specialist, spent the next portion of the webinar introducing the platform and walking attendees step-by-step through how to access and join the community.
This early-access beta is intentionally beginning with a smaller group. Over the coming months, Support After Abortion will be listening closely to participating providers, responding to feedback, working through any friction points, and learning what actually makes the space most useful for the people it was created to serve.
The goal is not simply to launch another platform. It is to shape a community around the real experiences and needs of abortion healing providers before opening the doors more broadly.
Webinar attendees are among the first providers invited to help shape what that community becomes. Once the beta period allows Support After Abortion to learn, adjust, and strengthen the experience, we expect to expand access to additional providers in the coming months.
Webinar registrants will receive the step-by-step community walkthrough separately.
Q&A
Q: WHAT IF MY ORGANIZATION DOESN’T HAVE BUDGET OR TIME FOR A BOARD OF DIRECTORS FOR ME PERSONALLY?
A: Kylee clarified that a “personal board of directors” is not a formal program, organizational initiative, or budget item. It may simply begin with one meaningful relationship.
Rather than thinking about creating an official group, providers can consider who already exists in their lives—or perhaps at the edges of their lives—who could become someone they trust, learn from, and allow to know them beyond their professional role.
The worksheet shared after the webinar is designed to help providers reflect on who those people might be and who could help call them forward.
Q: ISN’T THIS JUST BURNOUT PREVENTION WITH A NEW NAME?
A: Kylee distinguished burnout from the loneliness created by the gap between being needed and being known.
Burnout is primarily about how much someone is carrying. Loneliness is about whether anyone knows what they are carrying.
A provider could have strong personal relationships, a therapist, close friends, and people who know them deeply and still become burned out because the sheer volume of work is unsustainable.
The reverse is also possible. Someone can be rested, effective, functioning well, and nowhere near burnout while still feeling profoundly alone in a particular experience.
The two can certainly coexist, but they are not interchangeable.
Q: HOW DO I BRING THIS UP TO MY TEAM WITHOUT IT SOUNDING LIKE AN ACCUSATION?
A: Rather than beginning with what the team is doing wrong, Kylee suggested simply naming the pattern.
For example, a team member might observe that everyone does an excellent job checking whether projects are complete, deadlines are met, and operations are running smoothly—but perhaps they do not always check on how the people doing that work are actually experiencing it.
Kylee reflected on Support After Abortion’s own weekly operations meetings. A team can carefully “dot every I and cross every T” while still missing the space between tasks where someone might need to hear: How are you doing? How is this work feeling to you?
Creating even a small amount of space for those questions can help people name what they are carrying and feel more seen within their team.
Q: I AM THE ONLY PERSON LIKE ME ON MY TEAM. WHAT DO I ACTUALLY DO WITH THAT?
A: For some providers, the answer may not exist entirely within their organization.
Many abortion healing providers are the only person on their team dedicated specifically to this work. Others may be the only clinician, the only person with a particular background, or the only person bringing a certain perspective.
That difference may be precisely why the organization needs them—and also why they feel alone.
Kylee encouraged providers to look beyond their immediate teams for people who share that vantage point.
Professional networks can create opportunities to meet others who understand the work itself, develop trusted sounding-board relationships, and perhaps eventually identify some of the people who belong on that personal “board of directors.”
Q: THIS ALL SOUNDS GREAT IN THEORY, BUT WHAT DOES IT ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE THIS WEEK?
A: Connection does not always require a major initiative.
Kylee offered a simple example from her own team: spend 10 or 15 minutes during an existing meeting checking in without a task-focused agenda.
Instead of discussing only projects, deadlines, and responsibilities, a team might spend a few minutes asking what people are carrying and how the work is affecting them. The practical first step can be very small.
The goal is simply to create a little more room for the person doing the work to exist alongside the work itself.
Q: TELL US ABOUT THE SECOND EDITION OF UNRAVELED ROOTS FOR WOMEN
Do we need to go through the 2nd Edition if we’ve already been through the 1st Edition as a group leader and facilitator?
A: Michele shared that the second edition of Unraveled Roots for Women was recently published. It has been expanded, reorganized, and updated with more personal stories and reflection questions, updated research, insights, and language. It has expanded guidance in the chapters on addiction, abuse, codependency, and moving forward. It has new prayers, encouragement, and more forward-looking reflections. And it has a clearer organization to support the healing process.
Michele explained that providers who are not currently facilitating groups may still benefit from reading the revised edition because of the additional material and structural changes.
For active facilitators, using the new edition is especially important because it is the version participants will now receive when they order Unraveled Roots for Women.
A new facilitator guide has not yet been released. In the meantime, facilitators can continue using the existing guide as a starting point while noting the differences in the new participant book and adjusting accordingly. Providers with specific questions about facilitating using the new edition can also email Karin Barbito, Healing Support Specialist, who is a seasoned facilitator and is preparing to lead groups using the updated material.
Michele also shared that a second edition of Men’s Unraveled Roots is currently in development and is expected to be released later this year.
FINAL TAKEAWAY
Care providers are often surrounded by people who value them, depend on them, and recognize what they contribute. That does not always mean they feel known. The difference matters.
Loneliness in care work does not necessarily look like burnout, exhaustion, or an inability to continue. Sometimes it looks like competence. It looks like being the person everyone trusts, the person who can handle difficult things, the person who keeps showing up—and realizing that very few people know what all of that asks of you.
Restoration does not require caring less. It may begin by making room for relationships where usefulness is not the price of belonging, where someone knows the person underneath the role, and where providers can spend time with people who understand something about the unusual work they carry.
Professional community cannot meet every relational need, and it should not try to. But it can change one important condition: whether someone has to do this work on an island.
Sometimes connection does not remove what is heavy. It simply means someone else knows you are carrying it—and has your back.
© Support After Abortion
LINKS
Click here to watch the video of this webinar.
Click here for the Personal Board of Directors worksheet.
Click here to register for the next Abortion Healing Provider webinar.
Click here to access Support After Abortion’s Resource Library.
Click here to explore Support After Abortion’s services, resources, and training for Abortion Healing Providers.
© Support After Abortion