What is Compassion and How to Actually Combat Empathy Fatigue.
At times it can be challenging to figure out why you are struggling with anxiety. It is important to learn skills that lead in order to improve your happiness and your relationship with yourself and others. Empathy is the ability to feel what another person is feeling. Compassion is the ability to respond to the feelings of others with kindness and concern. They can be broken down into three different skills behavioral, cognitive, and emotional. Both a lack of compassion and a lack of empathy can lead to you being less responsive to yourself and others. This lack of responsiveness can lead to you feeling uncertain and led to your feeling anxious. Without realizing it, you may be suffering from empathy fatigue.
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What is Empathy and Compassion
Empathy and compassion are two closely related words with slightly different meanings. Empathy can be defined as the ability to feel what another person is feeling when they are suffering. It is important to recognize that the emotions you are experiencing are initiated by another person. The emotions are not yours but the experience of another person.
Empathy fatigue occurs when you have difficulty separating yourself from another person. You being to experience the distress of others as your own.(Klimecki & Singer, 2012). This can lead to you feeling overwhelmed and stressed. You may also find yourself withdrawing from social situations as a way to protect yourself from emotional overload.
Compassion per Kristin Neff involves the recognition and clearly seeing the suffering of others. Compassion is the ability to respond to the feelings of others with kindness and concern. It is the desire to relieve the suffering of others. You can begin to lack compassion when you are not able to take a step back and see things from a different perspective. This can lead to feeling overwhelmed and stressed as you feel rejected and not connected to others.
What are fatigue/symptoms?
Oxford dictionary defines fatigue as extreme tiredness resulting from mental or physical exertion.
What is challenging to recognize about fatigue is that it may not impact your ability to do your daily task. It may only impact the fever with which you do it. You do not need to have empathy or compassion for a person to serve them. You learn to do the physical task. You know how to be polite and follow the rules of your job or society. None of this requires you to understand or acknowledge the pain another is suffering.
Between the emotion and the task is hope. If you experience has caused you to lose hope, tiredness will begin to set in. Tiredness leads to you being less engaged. Your focus of attention changes from connecting with others and experiencing joy to protecting yourself, motivating yourself, and keeping your energy high enough to complete the task.
Empathy fatigue can look like boredom. When you lack hope it begin to affect your purpose. Your purpose is a magical driving force. When both of these are lost you begin to question your worth and value. You may be questioning if the task you are doing to correct, good, or even worth it. This leads to avoidance, numbness, and apathy. Unfortunately, this downward spiral can led to depression. Depression is encompassed by negative thoughts and a lack of joyful activities.
When you are filled with depression, anxiety is knocking on the back door. Negative thoughts lead to fear. This fear is hard to shake and begins to fill your mind with worst-case scenarios. This can lead to persistent arousal and a state of constant defense and self-preservation. Which looks like irritability and difficulty sleeping.
What is even more disheartening is that the mental challenges of this cycle begin to affect your physical health. While the mental spiral can be more challenging to acknowledge it is happening. There are many objective measures of change in physical health. These include increased blood pressure, weight gain, cardiac disease, diabetes. Some less measurable but still impactful changes are fatigue, stiff neck, decreased immune function, and gastrointestinal problems.
Compassion fatigue vs Empathy fatigue
Oxford dictionary defines burnout as the loss of fuel. Fatigue is defined by Oxford Dictionary as extreme tiredness resulting from mental exertion. In humans, our fuel is our motivation which is based upon our purpose. Each person sets and determines their purpose. Purpose can be influenced and determined by many things. Your purpose can be very clear or unknown.
Purpose changes over time. It is first influenced by a person’s personal desire and that of those they surround themselves with. Think about a child wanting a toy. Their parent can bring shame to them if they think the toy is stupid, a waste of money, or they despise the toy. The people you are surrounded by, the groups you interact with will have certain views. Over time you will begin incorporating those views into your purpose. You are influenced by what you watch and listen to, my parents, family, community, co-workers. You are also influenced by things you love, admire, loath, envy, and that which scares you.
Purpose is complex. The loss of purpose leads to burnout.
Compassion Fatigue
Compassion means being able to recognize that another person is suffering. This is a multistep process that is learned over time. It involves the recognition of patterns. What does a person who is suffering say or do? What are they feeling? What thoughts may they be having?
Compassion is a multistep process. It is not possible to have compassion fatigue. You stop taking the time and effort to see the suffering of others. You stop taking the time to understand why it is happening.
Empathy fatigue
Empathy is the ability to feel the suffering another person is experiencing.
Empathy has a distinct set of neurological processes in the brain. Empathy activates the anterior medial cingulate cortex and anterior insula of the brain. It also involves mirror neurons. Both parts of the brain and the cells in the brain allow a person to feel the same negative emotions another person does.
Unfortunately, this process can go awry in many ways.
First, it can become burdensome to feel another's pain. It can lead to you feeling tired and overwhelmed.
Secondly, it can at times become difficult to hold another person's pain separate from your own emotions. This can lead to fatigue.
Third, it can be used to manipulate you if you are not able to recognize that another person’s pain is separate from you.
Due to the biological nature of empathy. You can develop empathy fatigue.
To compare the burnout, empathy, and compassion to exercise. Let's say you developed an exercise routine. Every morning before work you woke up and exercised for 30 minutes. Burnout is getting tired of doing the same set of exercises every day. You no longer find joy or purpose in your routine. So you stop exercising. You want something new and challenging. Compassion is one morning you wake up and you decide you would rather sleep that day instead. For little reason, you simply stop exercising. You stop going through the steps of going to bed early, waking up early, and exercising. Empathy is like having sore muscles. You wake up one day and due to your muscles being sore you stop working out.
How it develops
A person who is also able to feel the suffering of another can feel overwhelmed by the suffering of others. Feeling others' negative emotions can lead to you protecting yourself from others' pain. There are two main ways to defend yourself. One is through your thoughts and the other is through your behaviors.
There are two different skills that make up empathy and compassion. The first skill is behavioral and the second is cognitive.
Behaviorally
Growing up you may have been taught to be kind to others. Acts of kindness are socially acceptable and expected. They are easy to identify and acknowledge. What is challenging about acts of kindness is that they can become shallow when they are not coming from a point of empathy or compassion from the giver.
This can be confusing. When you force a child to share a toy, share a snack they are being kind. But they are not being compassionate or empathic. They do not recognize that another child is sad. All they see is that something is being taken from them. Their kind deed leads to their own sadness, anger. The child may suffer from the act of kindness.
Children do have the ability to be compassionate and empathic. They can see the simpler signs of suffering. Such as sadness, crying, injuries, and they at times will do kind acts to help others. Have you ever witnessed an adult stub their toe and a young child approach them and ask does it hurt and rub the injury?
As adults, you have a greater ability to recognize the pain of another. You can see their physical pain and emotional pain. At times it can become challenging to express acts of kindness due to your own personal experiences which lead to you feeling sad and angry. You may have had negative experiences that lead to you developing despair. These negative experiences and emotions lead to you wanting to protect yourself. You do this by lacking compassion and empathy for others.
Behaviorally to protect yourself you may begin to avoid being around people or places where suffering exists. You may also use language to distance yourself from others. There are two verbal ways of doing this. One is being cold and the other is using anger.
When you are emotionally cold toward a person you do not pay them much attention. You may be distracted by something you're doing or by your own thoughts. When you speak with them you may cut them off, you may give pleasantries, you keep the conversation superficial and do not ask questions to understand their emotions or deep thoughts
You can also use anger to keep a person distant from you. Making negative comments, being sarcastic, being short with a person are all ways of pushing a person away.
Compassion and empathy are both important in developing relationships with others and yourself. If you can’t identify, care, and protect yourself it becomes challenging to be compassionate or empathic. The goal is to learn how to understand the thoughts and emotions of yourself and another person.
Cognitively
Cognitive is a fancy word that is referring to your thoughts. You may also avoid experiencing the suffering of others by denying their pain exists or by minimizing their suffering. Both of these are ways of distancing yourself from others.
You may also use cognitive distancing by intellectualizing the experience. This means that you are looking at the situation in a clinical way or from a distance. You are not emotionally connected to what you are witnessing. You are viewing it as an outsider.
When you deny the pain of others or minimize their suffering it allows you to stay in a state of disconnection. You can continue with your day-to-day life without feeling overwhelmed by the emotions of others.
Who gets fatigued
The bigger question is not who gets fatigued but why some people develop empathy fatigue. There are many reasons why people develop empathy fatigue.
The first reason is that they have a lot of exposure to pain and suffering. They witness it in their personal life, professional life, and/or through the media. The unresolved pain take a lot of energy to contain. The pain can be so great that you n don’t have the energy to deal with it and ends up burying it.
The second reason is that you many have a limited capacity to manage your feelings. When you experience pain and suffering, you may feel an intense emotional response. This emotional response can be so great that it becomes difficult for you to think straight, function, or continue to care for others.
The third reason is that you may have a low level of self-compassion. If you are hard on yourself and lack kindness for yourself are less likely to be kind and compassionate to others.
How to identify fatigue
Research has shown that people who practice compassion live longer, respond better to stress and have greater meaning in their life. It is important to begin to notice the warning signs when you are feeling empathy fatigue. So that you can take the steps to get yourself back to a place of well-being.
One big step that occurs when a person stops practicing compassion is rejection. You may begin to question your worth and if you are accepted by others. This can lead to you feeling rejected by others and lead to seeking confirmation of approval by others. This can lead to strained relationships and hurt feelings when compassion is not received from the others and you struggle for acceptance.
In order to get your needs met, may you set out to do so at the expense of another person. You can demand others value you. This can be hard to recognize because throughout life you were trained not to be a bully and not to be needy. You learned without realizing it to mask these behaviors and intentions. Many times from yourself and others.
You learned to get your needs met without the expressed consent of others. This would appear as you controlling situations and people to keep from bringing your insecurities to light. On the other hand, this could look like you minimizing your abilities so someone else can do them for you. The problem with both of these interaction patterns is that the other person is not always choosing the interaction freely but rather is being manipulated into doing what you want. Both of these interactions involve you playing a game designed not for the other person to be accepted and valued but for you to have your needs met.
The symptoms of compassion fatigue could look like depression and anxiety. This complex interaction pattern may not be recognized as the origin of depression and anxiety.
Behaviorally you may feel fatigued, feel tired, and have decreased motivation. You may also experience irritability and be easily frustrated with others.
What is interesting is if only one of the individuals maintains compassion for themself and the other person they would offer them kindness and support. They would lead to an end to the secret game of control.
How to Prevent Empathy Fatigue
To prevent empathy fatigue from developing it is important to continue to practice compassion. Compassion has three components: to recognize that another is suffering, to develop empathy for their suffering, and to want to relieve their suffering.
It is important to recognize that another person is suffering. But once you recognized what do you do with that knowledge. How you interpret that information is an important first step. Do you believe that the person who is suffering is of value? Do you believe the person who is suffering deserves help? Do you feel they deserve to suffer?
What can get in the way of the first step is coming up with a false narrative to explain why the person is in pain. Many times you may justify why you should not care. It can be based on distorted facts. You are not intentionally trying to deceive yourself, but are misremembering or interpreting past memories or facts. To have empathy for another’s suffering you must first believe that the suffering person does not deserve their suffering.
This important step of preventing empathy fatigue takes time. It involves educating yourself about another's situation to better understand another’ss experience.
What to do it if you struggle with Empathy Fatigue
Do you feel depleted? Where you once a person who would reach out to a stranger who felt sad. When you noticed a person you cared about feeling down you would do almost anything to help them. Are you now left feeling frustrated, exhausted by another's pain? Do you now feel the loss of meaning and purpose in helping others?
When you are suffering what is your response:
Self-compassion: do you become sensitive and forgiving of yourself to your own suffering
Callous: do you become indifferent to your own suffering. You view doing something as too painful and avoid your own pain.
Cruel: do you do things to yourself to punish yourself
You may view your suffering as evidence of you being a flawed human being, a failure. You may use negative terms to describe yourself, “I am stupid.” “I am worthless.” “Nobody likes me.” This view of yourself as flawed is the origin of empathy fatigue. When you become overwhelmed by your own pain it becomes hard to feel the pain of another.
If you are struggling with empathy fatigue the first step is to be kind to yourself and allow yourself to accept your shortcomings.
Empathy Fatigue can affect anyone. It’s important to be able to identify when you are experiencing empathy fatigue and take steps to address it. It is important to develop an awareness of yourself to help you identify your struggles so that you can work through them.
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Citation:
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