Impact

Compassion Fatigue?

Compassion – to suffer together 

It’s the complexity of emotion, thoughts, and actions prompted by the pain of others. It commonly gives rise to an active desire to alleviate another’s suffering.  Compassion is ranked a great virtue in numerous philosophies and is considered in all the major religious traditions as among the greatest of virtues.

Compassion – to suffer together 

It’s the complexity of emotion, thoughts, and actions prompted by the pain of others. It commonly gives rise to an active desire to alleviate another’s suffering.  Compassion is ranked a great virtue in numerous philosophies and is considered in all the major religious traditions as among the greatest of virtues.

Compassion Fatigue – the suffering associated when suffering together

When helpers/caregivers become emotionally drained because of hearing about all of the pain and trauma of their patients and families.  Simply put, it’s the accumulation of damage, personal and real, or projected.

It has to do with dealing with damaged people and either standing with them through their pain and allowing it to rub off, or becoming the object of their emotion in rejection and anger.  Whether the damage is focused on you or not, it is real, its effects are cumulative and the stress it produces damages the emotions, the body and the spirit of the one standing as the help agent.

The depletion that can occur when caring for traumatized people exhausts your physical, emotional, and spiritual resources.  And it leaves you in deep emotional pain because you experience the trauma of others vicariously.

So… the question I am asking is how to live a life of compassion without living a life of compassion fatigue.   I am thinking that part of the answer might be found in the Dad’s advice in the story A River Runs Through It.

“Help is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly. So it is that we can seldom help anybody.  Either we don’t know what part to give or maybe we don’t like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted.  And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed.  It is like the auto-supply shop over town where they always say, “sorry, we are just out of that part.”