Running on Fumes: Healing Compassion Fatigue
The Cost of Caring in the Helping Fields
In their work, helping professionals must open their hearts and minds to their clients and patients. But the empathy required of them is exactly what makes helpers vulnerable to emotional pain and even potentially damage from their work. When sustained, this emotional pain can build into compassion fatigue. Let’s examine what it is, how workers experience it, and what can be done.
How compassion fatigue occurs
We’re just beginning to understand how profoundly the helping professions are affected by the work they do. Their work affects them in a multitude of ways, and when sustained, results in emotional distress. This can be experienced through direct exposure to traumatic events, for professionals like paramedics, police officers and emergency doctors or nurses. It can also be through indirect or secondary exposure, such as hearing from clients about trauma experienced such as a social worker, or helping people who were victimized, as a child protection worker might. And finally, it can be anywhere in between, through prolonged exposure to clients who are chronically in despair, unable to improve their hardships in life, or deal with poverty or emotional anguish.
Differences between compassion fatigue, burnout and vicarious trauma
While they’re complementary, these terms refer to different kinds of emotional pain.
Compassion fatigue is the deep emotional and physical decline occurring when helpers can’t refuel and recharge.
Vicarious trauma is a fundamental shift in outlook that helpers undergo when they work closely with clients who experienced trauma. Through repeated exposure to traumatic material, helpers find their core beliefs altered and even damaged.
Lastly, burnout is the physical and emotional exhaustion experienced by workers who feel powerless and overwhelmed at work. Unlike the other two, burnout can be resolved by simply changing jobs.
Unfortunately, changing jobs doesn’t resolve compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma. Helpers can experience both compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma at the same time, and these emotional injuries build with time. So it’s not just a case of being fatigued or overworked: these injuries stem from a conflict between helpers’ core beliefs and the work that they do. This phenomenon is also known as moral distress.
Sgns of compassion fatigue
Research has shown that when helpers are overwhelmed by their work, they begin to exhibit symptoms similar to their traumatized clients. These can be:
extreme emotional exhaustion
feeling detached or overwhelmed
an inability to concentrate
headaches or insomnia
a sense of hopelessness or despair about the world
irritability or impatience with others
cynicism or boundary issues
How to reduce and prevent compassion fatigue
Helping professionals experiencing compassion fatigue can be supported in several ways: through a healthy workplace, a caring and supportive manager, control over the work schedule, reducing time spent working directly with traumatized individuals, and ensuring a good support network at work and at home.
Mindfulness techniques can help alleviate compassion fatigue
Another evidence-based way to mitigate compassion fatigue is the use of mindfulness techniques. A study* showed that healthcare and other professionals who practice mindfulness exhibited improved emotional regulation and resilience. A key finding of the study was that the mindfulness techniques should be tailored to the profession, pointing to the benefit of specialized, expert guidance, as opposed to a generic approach.
When helping professionals need more help
Left unadressed, compassion fatigue can lead to much more serious issues like anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts. If these strategies aren’t enough, talk to your physician and seek out a specialized counsellor for support.
* Compassion fatigue, compassion satisfaction and mindfulness among healthcare professionals: A meta-analysis of correlational studies and randomized controlled trials, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953625000784
