Meet Dr. Juls

I am the expert who got taken down by the very thing I studied. Twice, life asked me to practice what I had spent a career preaching.

I am Julie Merriman, Ph.D., LPC-S, the Nervous System Architect. For three decades I have studied what happens to women who care for everyone but themselves. I did not learn the rest of it from a textbook. I learned it the hard way, in my own body, in my own marriage, at my own kitchen table. At sixty-three, I am living proof that the second half is not a slow fade. It is a return.

BEFORE THE FALL

I did everything right, on paper.

I earned my Ph.D. in Counselor Education and Supervision from Texas Tech. I built a clinical career across psychiatric units, community mental health centers, and adolescent services. I became a professor, then a department head, then an associate dean. I trained thousands of clinicians, educators, and first responders. And of all the things I could have specialized in, I chose this one: compassion fatigue. The occupational hazard of people who care for a living.

I researched it. I wrote my dissertation on it. I presented on it from Philadelphia to Orlando to my own state of Texas, teaching counselor after counselor how to spot the warning signs and protect themselves.

I knew the warning signs better than almost anyone in the country.

I missed every single one of them in myself.

THE JOURNEY THAT CREATED

COMPASSION FATIGUE CURE

Here is the part I am not proud of, and the part that changed everything.

While I was building the life and the clinical practice I had dreamed of, I lost myself inside it. I gave my whole heart to my clients, my students, my family, everyone, until there was nothing left in my own emotional inventory. The exhaustion was not the kind you sleep off. It was deeper than that. My health suffered. My marriage came close to breaking. The life I had worked so hard to build nearly came apart in my hands.

And I want to be honest about how that felt, because the women I work with feel it too. I was ashamed. I was the one who taught this. How could the expert be the one drowning?

But that is exactly the point I had missed. Compassion fatigue does not come for the lazy or the uncommitted. It comes for the ones who care the most. Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between your pain and the pain of the person across from you, so it carries all of it, year after year, until something has to give.

What saved me was not another self-care checklist. It was a complete, science-grounded path back to what I came to call soul joy, the balance of mind, body, and soul that the work had quietly drained out of me. I rebuilt myself week by week. I wrote that path down so no other healer would have to find it alone, and that became my book, In Pursuit of Soul Joy: A 12-Week Guide for Overcoming Burnout and Compassion Fatigue, and my podcast, Compassion Fatigue Cure: From Burnout to Radiance for Women Healers 50+.

That is the work I do now for the woman healer over 50 who is running on empty. Not because I read about it. Because I lived it.

THE JOURNEY THAT CREATED

SEXY AFTER 50

I thought reclaiming my life was the whole story. It was only the first half

Once I was no longer in survival mode, once my nervous system finally felt safe again, I noticed a second silence. One nobody had warned me about and nobody seemed willing to discuss out loud. The desire had gone quiet. My body did not respond the way it used to. And somewhere in the long decades of being responsible for everyone else, I had stopped feeling fully alive in my own skin.

I have been married to my husband, Kelly, for more than thirty years. We built a life and a family together. So this was not about a relationship that had failed. It was about a woman who had disappeared from herself and assumed, the way the culture quietly teaches every woman over 50 to assume, that this was simply what getting older felt like and that wanting more made her ungrateful.

I refused to accept that. And then I did what I have always done. I went looking for the science.

What I found was that desire after 50 is not a willpower problem or a character flaw or an inevitable loss. It is a nervous system question. The same body that ran hot for years to keep me going could not also feel pleasure, because protection and desire cannot live in the same body at the same time. When I understood that, the way back became visible, and I walked it.

I pursued specialized training in sexual health so I could bring the same clinical rigor to this conversation that I had brought to everything else. I wrote the book I wish someone had handed me, Are We Gonna Have Sex or What?, and I started the Sexy After 50: Improve Sex and Intimacy by Healing Your Nervous System podcast so women would finally hear someone say the real thing out loud, without shame and without apology.

That is the work I do now for the woman over 50 who is ready to feel sexy in her own skin again. Once more, not from theory. From my own life

WHO I HELP NOW

So that is why there are two of me, in a sense, two bodies of work under one roof.

There is the woman healer over 50 who has given so much that her own well has run dry. I help her recover from burnout and compassion fatigue and find her way back to soul joy. That is the Compassion Fatigue Cure world.

And there is the woman over 50 who is competent, capable, deeply loved, and quietly grieving the part of herself that stopped feeling alive. I help her reclaim her body, her desire, and her aliveness. That is the Sexy After 50 world.

Two different silences. The same root underneath both: a nervous system that has been in protection mode for far too long. My whole life's work is teaching it that it is finally safe to come back online.

OFF THE CLOCK

I do all of this from a working ranch in Texas, where my husband, Kelly, and I have built our life. Most days you will find me writing in my barn office, supervised by my pet bull, Larry, and surrounded by a menagerie that includes more blue heelers than is strictly reasonable, plus a rotating cast of cows, goats, chickens, and cats. I am a mom to two sons, and I answer to "Boombie" from my grandchildren.

I mention the ranch because it is not a backdrop. It is part of the medicine. Open sky, animals who need you to be present, and honest physical work have taught me as much about regulating a nervous system as any clinical training ever did.

CREDENTIALS

  • Julie Merriman, Ph.D., LPC-S

  • Ph.D., Counselor Education and Supervision, Texas Tech University

  • Licensed Professional Counselor-Supervisor (LPC-S)

  • The Nervous System Architect

  • Professor and Program Director in graduate counseling education

  • Former Associate Dean and Department Head of Counseling, Texas A&M System

  • Three decades of clinical and academic experience across psychiatric, community mental health, and university settings

  • Author of In Pursuit of Soul Joy and Are We Gonna Have Sex or What?

  • Host of the Compassion Fatigue Cure and Sexy After 50 podcasts

  • Featured on national television, radio, podcasts, and in print

If any part of my story sounded like your own, you are in the right place, and you are not as alone as you have felt.


Tell me which silence is yours, and let's begin there.

I care for everyone but myself →
I want to feel alive in my own body again →