Compassion Fatigue
Compassion fatigue is a specific type of burnout that comes from essentially caring too much all the time. There are a lot of jobs that require compassion and empathy (two separate things). It’s not always in the job duties description, but this applies to most helping professions. If you work in healthcare, mental healthcare, veterinary medicine, social services, emergency services, a food pantry, childcare, or any other profession where the people you encounter are usually struggling, you may have experienced this professionally. You may also experience it socially, or you might be encountering it via social media.
Empathy actually comes in three parts. Knowing how someone feels from their non-verbal cues, body language, and facial expressions is empathy. Understanding how someone is likely to feel based on their circumstances is empathy. Feeling an emotion that someone else feels because you know they are experiencing it is empathy. Compassion is wanting good things to happen to a person and doing the things in your power to make those things happen. Compassion is sometimes related to empathy but doesn’t always require empathy, and empathy doesn’t always result in compassion. Everyone is different and different people have varying levels of success with each of these four functions. Compassion Fatigue happens because we are doing too much of one or all of these, and tends to result in failure of one– it becomes harder to care about and connect to people.
This might look like a charity employee feeling suspicious that a recipient is lying about their needs. This might look like a nurse getting annoyed with friends for complaining about their problems, because it doesn’t feel like a “real problem” compared to something he saw at work this week. This might look like reading the 20th post you’ve seen today about world events and realizing it doesn’t feel like anything. This might look like feeling resentment towards a client going through a crisis for making you feel another negative emotion. It might just be a pervasive numbness that won’t go away.
Most of the people experiencing Compassion Fatigue are very caring, very empathetic, very compassionate people, who used that tool too much for too long. People spend that much time feeling for and worrying about other people because that’s an important part of how they interact with the world. Which is why compassion fatigue can be really debilitating especially when it’s part of your job.
Compassion fatigue is your brain trying to adapt to difficult circumstances. If you are feeling bad all of the time, your body will stop producing the things that make you feel things, because it can be safer to feel nothing at all.
How do we recover from compassion fatigue?
You need a break. It might not have to be a big one, but there are hormones, chemicals, and biological processes that allow you to feel things and your brain and body need time to produce more of them. They also need to feel safe in order to produce more of them. If we are experiencing compassion fatigue, a break means engaging in something that lets us focus on our own needs and feelings and not anybody else’s. That might be exercise, that might be binge watching a (lighthearted) TV show, it might be journaling, it might be listening to the radio alone in your car, it might be cooking a meal for yourself, it might be a bubble bath. It also does not have to be solitary, it can be social, it can be game night or lunch with friends, but if it turns into helping those friends with their problems, then it won’t be restorative.
Long term this also might be a trauma response or an indication of work life balance problems. It’s okay to need a change and it’s okay to stand up for yourself when you do. We don’t always get to choose our jobs but we can do our best to set boundaries where we can, be honest with ourselves about what we’re going through, and try to be kind to ourselves the same way we do with others.