Unmasking the driven expat: Martina Gastaldello's road from expat burnout to alignment
- Patricia Abarte
- Jun 7
- 6 min read
Some stories stop you in your tracks.
Martina Gastaldello's is one of them.
When she first reached out to me, she could barely get off the couch. She was calling in from Amman, Jordan, on what was supposed to be a holiday from her post in Iraq — and she was in the kind of exhaustion that goes bone-deep. The kind that medication, rest, and willpower alone can't touch. Her husband had found me on LinkedIn, read one of my posts about alignment, and told her, "I think she can help you."
That was the beginning of one of the most profound coaching journeys I've had the privilege of witnessing.
Martina is an international human rights expert who has spent a decade working across four continents — Africa, the Middle East, South America, Moldova. She has followed humanitarian crises from country to country, always showing up, always delivering, always holding herself and everyone around her to an impossibly high standard. And for years, it worked. Until it didn't.
Listen to the episode here:
Timestamps:
00:00 – Introduction — Meet Martina Gastaldello
01:48 – Where in the world is Martina calling from?
02:41 – Her decade-long career across four continents
04:10 – What brought her to reach out for coaching
07:25 – The real cause of her expat burnout (it wasn't the crisis)
09:10 – Googling "traits of a toxic manager" — about herself
13:14 – The moment she realized she was causing her own burnout
15:12 – The constellation exercise that uncovered misplaced emotions
17:38 – Learning to pause, feel, and stop reacting on impulse
21:01 – The Bus Exercise, Valentina, and reclaiming her true self
The Making of an Expat Burnout
What makes Martina's story so important — and so relatable — is that her expat burnout didn't come from a war zone or a natural disaster. It came from within.
She was living in Chișinău, Moldova, working for the UN on the Ukraine refugee crisis. By most measures, it was a good life. A beautiful city. Meaningful work. And yet she was opening her laptop before breakfast, skipping meals, leaving dishes in the sink for days, eating out constantly, and sending emails to her team at all hours of the night and weekend. She had become, in her own words, obsessed — with delivering, with achieving, with being seen as the high performer.
The first crack appeared when she started Googling "traits of a toxic manager" — not because of her own manager, but because she suspected she might be one herself. She was micromanaging her team, holding them to the same brutal standard she held herself, and causing anxiety in the people around her without fully realizing it.
When she finally left Moldova in July 2024, she thought the hardest part was over. But you bring yourself wherever you go. And the moment the pressure came off, everything she had been holding together came flooding out. By the time she arrived in Erbil to join her husband, she had blurred vision, a ringing in her ears, no energy, and neurological symptoms that sent her to a specialist. The diagnosis: severe anxiety, sliding into depression.
That's when she found me.
Learning to Feel Again
Our first session, she was on the couch. She was crying. And she told me all the bad things about herself first — because that was all she could see.
One of the earliest things we did together was a constellation exercise. I asked her to choose objects to represent the people and dynamics in her work life, and what she discovered surprised even her. What she had been calling anger toward a colleague turned out, when she sat with it properly, to be sadness. She had been so locked in her rational, high-functioning mind that she had lost the ability to accurately name what she was feeling — let alone make space for it.
This is something I see so often in high-achieving expat women. We operate from the neck up. We build entire careers, move countries, manage teams, and navigate crises — all from our heads. The body becomes a vehicle we forget to check in with. The emotions become noise we don't have time to process.
So that became our work. Not just unpacking what had gone wrong at work, but teaching Martina to pause before she reacted. To notice the physical sensation of a trigger rising in her body. To sit with what was actually there instead of immediately reaching for a response.
It was slow. It was uncomfortable for someone who had always operated at full speed. But it worked.
The Bus, the Judge, and Valentina
One of the tools that resonated most deeply with Martina was what I call the Bus Exercise — a way of mapping the different sub-personalities that live inside all of us and seeing which ones are driving our behavior.
For Martina, the Judge and the Teacher had been sitting in the front seat for years. Demanding. Unforgiving. Setting impossible standards for herself and projecting them onto everyone around her. She had been running her professional life — and her inner life — from a place of relentless self-criticism dressed up as excellence.
We gave her reactive, triggered self a name: Valentina. And something shifted when she could say, "That's Valentina taking the wheel right now" instead of, "This is who I am." It created just enough distance to pause. To choose differently. To let someone else drive.
Slowly, session by session, Valentina started moving toward the back of the bus. And a softer energy began to emerge — one that had always been there but had been crowded out. The nurturing, warm, caring woman who remembers everyone's birthdays, who shows up for her friends, who had always poured that energy into her work because she didn't know where else to put it.
From Burnout to Alignment — and a Baby
By the time we were a year into our work together, Martina wasn't bringing me work problems anymore. The difficult conversations, the team dynamics, the need to prove herself — they had faded in importance because her priorities had genuinely shifted.
She was cooking again. She was taking care of her home. She was waking up without opening her laptop until 9am. She was choosing which battles were worth fighting and letting the rest go — not out of apathy, but out of a new, hard-won sense of what actually mattered.
And then she told me she had been feeling a deep desire to become a mother. So she started acting like one, even before it happened. Preparing meals as if a child were coming. Creating a home she was proud of. Embodying the energy she wanted to call in.
At the start of this year, she found out she was pregnant.
I don't think that's a coincidence. When we finally stop performing and start living — when we align who we are with how we show up every single day — life tends to meet us there.
What She Wants You to Know
Martina's message to her colleagues in the humanitarian sector — and honestly, to any expat woman who has been running on empty — is simple and honest:
The job is not everything.
If you have reached your boiling point, you are allowed to stop. You can take a break. You will find another job. But you cannot undo what severe burnout does to your body and your mind if you wait too long.
Start as early as you can. Get help before you hit the wall. Learn to recognize the signs — not just the big dramatic ones, but the quiet ones. The dishes in the sink. The meals you skip. The emails you send at midnight. The anger that is actually sadness.
You cannot save the world if you have stopped saving yourself.
This is what I dive into in episode #108 of This Expat Life.
Listen here:
If any of these notes resonated with you, and you would like to explore more of yourself, my programs are the right containers for you to accelerate your growth or your next chapter:
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