Is Compassion Fatigue Real?
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- Опубликовано: 9 июн 2024
- At the end of a long day, or week, sometimes we are just over it. But what is compassion fatigue and can you combat it? Watch this video to learn practical tips to help with compassion fatigue.
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00:00 Compassion fatigue
02:00 Empathic distress
05:00 Compassion vs empathy
07:00 Compassion is where you take action
09:00 Matching
#compassionfatigue #mendedlight #jonathandecker
4:58 I really appreciate this note that having no empathy is a sign of being too stuck in empathy for too long.
My mom is a covert narcissist and had left me with massive empathy fatigue. For 10 years (and still a bit, presently) I couldn't get myself to be patient with others' issues because I listened to my parent vent to me for almost 20 years. My kids have helped me restore some patience, but adults still overwhelm me rather easily.
I feel like this video explains a lot of what I've been experiencing lately. Several people in my close family are suffering from poor mental and physical health, which every day affects our home environment negatively in different ways. For years, I've tried to accept everything they do or say without complaining because I know they already feel bad and can't help it. But recently, I've just been feeling so tired of always keeping quiet about my own feelings, always having to be compassionate and accepting, no matter what, and then feel guilty if I fail. Not to mention the frustration I feel for their sake when they're not getting the help they need and I feel completely powerless to give it to them myself.
I understand how you feel. For me, I am starting to feel like "everyone has issues, including me. So why does it feel at times that only I have to consider their issues and mine go ignored?"
I try to remind myself not to get so focused inward and look outwardly at the good I am doing by continuing to endure and show love to others. Sometimes I need to be "a little selfish" and remind myself of how my actions are helping others and how they may not be the same people without me, (highlighting my importance in a way). Some self-love, if you want to call it that, especially if I feel sometimes the ones I help don't appear to realize my contribution to their lives.
Not sure if that will help you in your situation, but just know, as highlighted in this video, many feel the way you do. You are not alone.
My best friend and I developed this real quickly, when she tells me something awful, I ask beforehand: "Do you need there, there or do you need help?" She knows, what I mean, tells me and then I know, how to listen.
As someone whose had to take care of everyone else for a long time, I can say with 100% certainity that Compassion Fatigue real. 😪😩
Edit: "Compassion Fatigue" or "Empathetic Distress", all the same to me!
Same. Compassion is definitely something you can burn out on.
In my experience, compassion fatigue is a very real thing. Just like any other kind of fatigue. When you are constantly caring for others, you’ll get tired.. perhaps sooner if you also feel empathy.
Great video. ("Know what's needed in a given situation")
Matthieu Ricard explained the difference between empathy and compassion. He did undergo fMRI scans and was asked to feel empathy and then compassion and his brain was examined. Real compassion is not tiring - oxytocin gets released and we want to get closer to a person.
People often use the term "compassion fatigue" but actually it's usually empathy fatigue. The difficulty in learning how we can move from empathy to compassion.
ML needs to comment on this, i feel like
This video addresses an important thing for anyone in a caring role to remember, but compassion fatigue is a real thing, too. I work in crisis, and have had people reject compassionate gestures repeatedly, slapping away that blanket and hot tea but still hoping you'll do some magical... something? Yeah, that's also tiring.
This makes so much sense why I'm great at emergencies. I'm bad at empathy but I have an immense amount of compassion.
I have a friend who is like that, and he SAVED MY LIFE when I was suicidal. I couldn't tell anyone else because then THEY'd be sad and horrified and shocked and I had to comfort them or got shoved deeper into a feeling I just tried to crawl out of. He quietly organised behind the scene that I wasn't alone for too great a time and somehow made sure that I knew who to call, if things got really dark - so quietly in fact, that I realized that this was his doing months after the crisis had passed.
I have both in large amounts and try to reduce my empathy :P
@@i.b.640 Thank you for sharing. I am so glad you had a friend who understood your needs and was able to help you. I hope you got all the help you needed and are doing better now.
@@lilaluna8922 I am actually great now, that was years ago, thank you :) I am just one of the few people in my world, who are not unquestioning fans of Empathy because I've seen so many people priding themselves on their Empathy, being all about what another's tragedy means to themselves only. And so many people being scolded for not having much Empathy being ACTUALLY helpful. I gladly sing the praises of your kind :D
@@i.b.640 There is actually a difference between empathy and being egocentric with your emotions. And I'd rather not like to see them mixed up. Aka as an empath, I assure you, there is a MASSIVE difference between me having empathy with you, meaning it WILL be all about you and I will only eventually fail to notice the signs of me getting tired and attending to that timely. While people using your situation in order to vent and ruminate over their own emotions and emotion vomit, is absolutely NOT it.
Aka empathy actually cares about your feelings fully. It's not bad emotional coping in which people dis-regulate alongside you X'D
In the example Jono used:
Compassion: emergency staff is caring and concentrated on helping you.
Empathy: emergency staff may make a face and maybe shed a tear and throw up for a bit, but they'll pull themselves together and get to helping you as quickly as possible. SOME ppl with feel, but NOT emote. They'll "shelf" their empathy and they'll take time to break down after you're safely admitted to hospital.
In both scenarios, you're getting help. But one may be a tad less efficient AND by all means exhaust the helper a lot more.
Insufficient regulation: emergency staffs are distressed and a mess and constantly drop stuff and ask nonsense questions, sometimes twice. They fall out of routine.
Full dysregulation: emergency staffs bawl above your body and nothing gets done
Bad coping via suppression/lack of emotional attendance: staff is cold and hurts you while admitting care and they may even appear resentful for having to admit care to your "careless" butt.
Narcissistic behaviour: emergency staff tells you not to be so whiny and tell you how others have it worse and proceed to tell you their story of how THEY suffered way more than you.
It sounds like your suspected the majority of friends to be bad at emotional regulation. Aka having empathy and compassion but being bad at actually managing having it. These are different steps. LOL. Aka, you can have a leg. .... You may not know how to walk with it. You may know how to walk with it, but you may not know how to dance with it without stomping on your dance partner's feet. You may be able to dance with it but may not be able to walk a marathon with it.
Aka having emotions and managing emotions are two very different pairs of shoes. And there's many levels of proficiency and many application areas. Feeling done with life, requires a super high set of emotional regulation skills, that are actually mostly considered trained professional level skill sets. With the extra bonus of starting off enough distance to help them stay in compassion mode. It is actually very rare luck to find a personally involved non-professional, capable of handling that. :3 You were incredibly lucky. Glad things improved.
As a thinker/closer, I really like this -- it's going to be very helpful for self-compassion.
Oof. This coming up AS I'm realizing that my depression and anxiety are a result of me hitting my empathetic wall. Throwing my love and compassion at someone, only for them to continuously hold me at arms legth. But they give me JUST enough kindness and hope to keep me trailing behind them.
This differentiation makes so much sense. This is a fantastic video!
I'm rather empathetic. I'm a healer that gets stuck in feelings my own and others. I have had an abusive childhood. The way I have learned to deal with this is avoidance....distract and numb. I also know there's also a healthy dose of codependency. Its helpful to understand the difference in the roles of compassion and empathy. I stay in my feelings and pain. I know it comes down to the idea of what I think I deserve. I'm at a very low point right now and I don't really know how to give myself kindness and compassion. I know how to do it for others. What a learning curve.
I studied it for my undergrad research and how much social workers experience it! Definitely real!
Dealing with severe compassion fatigue towards a friend who has said many times before that “everyone always leaves me eventually because I’m too much…” They’ve been through some legitimately hard things in life, especially in the past year, but I’ve (multiple times now) put my life on hold and missed opportunities for my own growth to help them. In all honesty I don’t want to be around them anymore because I don’t like the person I am with them.
i’m so very much older than your kids, and i’m apparently still learning to walk up stairs sometimes
… and yet again, we find that life is about being in balance… which, seriously is what’s going on with our walking… if not in an inner ear sort of way, in a (re)focusing on the task at hand… or foot
Could you do a video on the issues empaths and HSP face, and how to stop carrying other people’s emotional baggage?🤗
Thank you for the insightful video as always!
People have a hard time 'reading' people who tend to better express compassion than empathy, which I think might be common with certain nero-divergancies, I am routinely described by friends as 'cold' because my first inclination in emotionally tense situations is to shut down my 'empathy' and handle the more physical things. Had an ex show up on the doorstep in tears because a close friend had passed, while my then husband held her I called her out of work, brushed out and rebraided her floor length hair, found her clean cloths and the like, all the things a distressed person is unlikely to think of. There have been times when other people are freaking out over emergencies in my life, while I'm working the problem calmly ,I'll do my freaking out later I get it from my mother I think, when her father passed it was a full year later (the anniversary) before the emotional fact of his passing hit, before that she was to busy with all the paperwork and bureaucracy to really understand it.
I love that y’all talk about times you made mistakes cause from an outside view it often feels like therapists are perfect and seeing you use stories of lessons y’all learned is refreshing and gives me faith in humanity
Watching you hold your breath while explaining these, clearly the empathy examples are very impactful on you, Jonathan.
Please make a video about the TV show Grimm.
I wish that social services cared more to care of this aspect of their employees' health. If you don't get a naiive young worker who barely knows how to help you, you get a worker who treats you less than human because they don't have enough left in their hearts to try to actually help properly, due to this concept.
The part I struggle with is, I’m not usually the one who’s responsible for someone else’s wellbeing. I was the youngest kid, never got into a serious relationship, never had kids. Even my friends, they usually work through their problems on their own or they ask someone else for help or advice. So when I see someone suffering or someone asks me for advice, I usually don’t know what the right thing to do is, and I end up doing or saying exactly the wrong thing. It feels like the only viable thing I can do is completely remove myself from the situation, but even that’s not always an option. Or the right one.
I think it is important to distinguish between compassion and just prolonged stress. I don't get tired of caring about other people, but being in a highly stressed state for prolonged periods literally fatigues the mind and body.
Schindler's List actually doesn't take you realistically into the horrors. I analyzed that with my father a lot. For example, you still see overweight people in the ghettos and concentration camps, when the war has been going on for a while. You might not register it consiously, but part of your brain does and it gives you a tiny smidge of relieve. "There is enough food" - even if you're told, there isn't. The genius of Steven Spielberg is taking you as far as you can go with your mind, then one step further so you FEEL the horror, but not all in because you'd break.
OMG, this was SO needed right now! Thank You! 💖
I think emotional exhaustion is STILL actually a thing. Aka it's literally work to read the signals of other ppl and respond to them. I'm exhausted no matter if it's empathy or compassion, although compassion is definitely less taxing. But really just "attending to things" is exhausting. And frankly as a fellow neurodivergent person, I think this is also quite specific to us. It's a mix of executive function struggle and straight out overwhelm from having to process way more "data".
All our behaviour is governed by emotion, no matter if we notice it or not. Aka us feeling or not feeling the emotion, will not change that emotions drive our behaviour. Aka, although you can no longer feel and no longer emote it, your behaviour is STILL driven my emotion and you're going "There. there!" with your kid, but you are too exhausted to fire up the physical energy it takes to ...
a) feel and
b) emote
Aka your "give a damn" being busted, is not a matter of it being busted. What is busted, is your ability to actively perceive THAT you give a damn and your ability to emote to the other person, that you give a damn.
It's us going onto emergency energy supply and shutting down all non-vital circuits as far down as possible to last till the end of the day. And ofcourse, some people end up shutting down all the way till the emotions don't jump start in the background and they turn apathetic.
Meanwhile others have their emergency resources channelled into "attack" response, as to not just protect the little they have, but also possibly "not give a damn" while they reclaim that energy from any source without regard.
The exhaustion is real. What the study found out is basically, that the energy cost of empathy is higher than that of compassion. But that does not imply, that running on the later will be enough to get you through the day, when your circumstances are really taxing and you're swamped with ppl needing you to feed into them, emotionally. Especially when some people are really like emotional energy buckets with a hole and you'll drain with them until they sufficiently practice to attend to that drainage. Also: neurodivergent ppl by default need to extend significantly more energy in all regards, to navigate a world not build according to our setup of needs.
It is good to be aware that you have regulation choices when it comes to emotional energy. AND you may still suffer emotional exhaustion and need to actually fix that externally (teach self-regulation to others, have more ppl to help, have more breaks, have more efficient breaks etc. etc.)
Oh my gosh this makes so much sense. I'm on short-term disability leave from work because of burnout. I work a job that involves a ton of emotional labour AND I'm helping my dad care for my physically disabled, narcissistic mother who has early-onset dementia (and as the eldest daughter, I've been caring for her emotionally my whole life). I'm experiencing both compassion fatigue AND empathic distress currently, but knowing and understanding the distinction between the two is actually really helpful. Thank you so much for this video. ❤
THIS!! 🙌 ALL OF IT! THANK YOU!! 🎉
Empathic distress - wow I can so relate.
oh it absolutely is. I feel like ive gone through that at least once or twice over the last 2 years. Sometimes its just hard to listen to things all the time. Kinda how things are with my parents, they just talk a lot, but I'm figuring out what's more serious and what might not be.
thats an interesting take and it explains a lot. So, my parents had a lot of empathy, and still have it; they just don't have compassion in any way; so we, the children learned to take care and regulate their emotions and hide our own, because they were just simply unable to help us in any practical way, they just felt and matched our emotional turbulences. Being upset in any way and showing it would only lead to upset parents, dismissing, devalueing / invalidating our experiences just becaus they hadn't had the capacity to go from empathy to compassion.
A fascinating video, thank you both of you!
It's interesting what you're saying about how you can burn out on compassion because of your empathy - I've actually found that recently (for reasons unknown) while I can successfully show compassion I'm struggling to truly feel empathy! Is that something that can happen often? How does one deal with it?
Please make a video about the TV show Fringe.
Very interesting. Resently I was thinking about this, emotions about consultants and persons... I feel that I have the tools to understand more this.
Is this why my chest always feels like something is sitting on me since the beginning of the genocide happening in Gaza? I haven’t been able to breath right for nearly three months.
I loved being a physio. I left health care because it wasn't sustainable for me. I had two small children, an aweful divorce, and just couldn't listen to patients' distress.
I never heard of this but it explaines a lot!! 😂
I love her attentiveness and active listening. Good demonstration of counseling skills (I took that class in Spring 2023). :)
Also, the way you two look at each other is #relationshipgoals
"Hay limites en nuestra empatía pero no para nuestra compasión" en 4:20 habló del trabajar traumas infantiles .... Y en base a esta definición creo entender mejor la diferencia y del porque se insiste tanto en realizar este trabajo con una tremenda compasión.... porque claro, la empatía por lo que uno experimento en el pasado... No te sacará de ahí...pero de igual la empatía es parte del proceso ...a eso creo que te referías cuando dijo que la empatía es un paso hacia la compasión? Me gustan sus videos ❤ gracias
I love this channel and you two, it’s fantastic stuff and great for the average person to gain some theraputic insights to help themselves
So I say with all respect, I don’t think I can agree with this, that compassion fatigue is actually this empathy distress. I am a youth worker, have been for a few years after being in disability care. I can see the concept of empathy distress being a thing, but it’s not the same as, or something in place of compassion fatigue. You literally run out of the ability to give compassion, to others and yourself, to the point that self care is genuinely ineffective. You cannot see those people you worked with as human beings. It’s heartbreaking to be left with nothing but resentment for putting up with so much abuse but you “know” they are beyond saving. It’s hard feeling that all self care doesn’t recharge you like it did a week ago.
I think this area of the literature needs more review.
I think the problem with empathy distress is what do you do when you _can't_ move towards compassion? To piggyback on your example, sure you don't need paramedics to feel empathetic towards you too long, but that's because they can actually do something to help your situation; but what about a passerby who doesn't have the resources to help other than calling the emergency services? They can hold your hand, but they'll also be distressed to see you bleed out without them being able to do anything about it, should they just... Walk away? Like a person would after watching Schindler's List, knowing it's a movie about an event that happened 80 years ago? Compassion includes action, so what do you do when that's not an option? I would deeply appreciate it if you could expand on that.
Also... Unless your children bump into absolutely everything everywhere all of the time (in which case I would have them checked by a doctor for potential proprioception issues), if it only happens inside your home, then I would point towards issues with the layout of your house and/or furniture. Remember in Friends when Joey and Chandler had this gigantic cabinet that was so big they kept bumping into it every time they left their bedrooms? That's what I'm talking about. And that would be compassion towards them as well, just saying.
Please make a video about the anime Mushoku Sensei.
I’m going to start saying “my give a damn is busted” and see what happens😂😂😂
Your videos are fantastic and your dynamic is great. Thank you for your transparency and insight. You are helping and healing people!
Can you link the article I the show notes? This will help me a lot. I want to read it. Thinker here. :)
yes, cmpassion fatigue is real. I have none left for humans. All that I have left, is for animals.
Well this was timely. 😶
After a holiday week working in customer service, my give a darn needs a recharge.
I’m over it
What you call compassion fatigue is my natural disposition 😂
Commenting for the algorithm because 😃👍
Is it possible to get an explanation on the separation of a person in your life acting out of a sense of pity or out of a sense of compassion?
Ive been distressed/fatigued for so long Ive tired compassion for myself and its worked a little but i feel like ive lost all my empathic skills as if i never had any. Any tips for working on compassion and empathy?
But what do you do if compassion makes them more upset? If someone's doing something unhealthy and illogical, like bringing things up that they don't want to talk about without being asked, what do you do if *not* pushing them to open up makes them upset?
I've noticed that some people seem to think that 'freaking out together' is bonding. If they are too unhealthy, I just stay away from them. I won't have them spreading bad moods to me to make them feel better, when there's no reason to.
U may got hurt and don’t understand why they did what did. But now u know the truth.and deal with it.
"empathic" is almost as overused as "narcissistic"
This man looks like the host from the Texas Country Reporter. I feel like he's gonna tell us to go get a Blizzard at Dairy Queen.
Compassion fatigue is real. My bf’s daughter and daughters mother were un alived by her new husband.
Speaking from my point of views , I was there to comfort him, because of course , I care too.
I think tho it was about two weeks after and the mental aspect of things was starting to wear in me.
But I had to consider myself fortunate that I’ve not experienced that level of grief. It wasn’t indifference I was feeling I think I had just become worn down myself