There’s No Such Thing As Compassion Fatigue — Burnout is the Result of Empathic Distress
When you work in the helping professions, you hear a lot about compassion fatigue and how to avoid it, but in reality, there’s no such thing.
What we refer to as compassion fatigue is more accurately described as empathic fatigue or empathic distress.
Compassion is limitless and must start with self-compassion. The more you practice it, the more it grows, and you feel it equally for every living thing — even those people or things that disgust you (like Hitler or spiders). Boundaries are an essential component of compassion. Confusing boundaries with barriers keeps most people trapped in cognitive dissonance.
Boundaries protect and support authentic connection.
Barriers drive disconnection and traumatize both sides in a conflict.
Boundaries require humility and courage and take a lot of practice.
Barriers are cowardly. Barriers prolong conflict and worsen the suffering of everyone involved.
Empathy, on the other hand, is not limitless and can be incredibly damaging if it is not moderated with a strong dose of self-compassion, including consistent boundaries. Whereas compassion is appropriately focused first on the Self, empathy is all about feeling with and for others. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and imagine what it feels like to be them.
As Brené Brown so eloquently explains in this wonderful video clip, empathy is very different from sympathy (or pity) — which is equivialent to feeling sorry for someone else. Sympathy does not require insight or courage and drives disconnection. Empathy demands insight and courage and fosters authentic connection — but sometimes at a high cost.
Empathy without fierce self-compassion (healthy narcissism) is a recipe for disaster and is what leads to burnout.
Healthy narcissism is putting on our own oxygen mask first.
The concept is equivalent to fierce self-compassion — the providing, protecting, motivating side of compassion. Healthy narcissism is all about empowerment — for ourselves and others — it encompasses the concepts of self-compassion, self-confidence, assertiveness, self-protection, healthy ego, healthy sense of self, autonomy, agency, humility and pride.
When we feel for others and absorb their emotions into our own psyches (what empaths tend to do), we experience the weight of the entire world on our shoulders. We feel responsible not only for our own emotions and behaviors, but for the behaviors and perceived emotions of everyone else.
Empaths without self-compassion are the ones who turn away from stories about starving children, abused psychiatric patients, police brutality, and the elderly dying alone in nursing homes. It’s too painful to witness the suffering while feeling helpless to do anything about it. Paradoxically, our fear makes us complacent towards the suffering, and our complacency makes us complicit in it. A feeling of powerlessness is what leads to empathic distress.
“I can’t make a difference so I might as well not even try.”
“Speaking up is a waste of time. Nobody cares what I think.”
“I’m going to fly under the radar and hope I don’t get caught up in the toxicity.”
“It’s not worth the hassle.”
“It’s not my problem.”
The dilemma for empaths is that most of us can’t speak up for others or ourselves because we have been conditioned to believe that our voices don’t matter.
Bullies (people with high levels of toxic narcissism) lack empathy. Bullies have been conditioned to believe that their voice (world view) is the only one that matters. When bullies refuse to take responsibility for their role in conflict, empaths must make a difficult choice — internalize the shame that the bullies project at us, or set a firm boundary.
Boundaries are the courageous choice. We risk losing the relationship, but we get to keep our dignity and self-worth.
“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”
― Prentis Hemphill
Boundaries are essential to practicing compassion.
Compassion is love in the face of suffering.
Whereas empathy is feeling with others, compassion is being with others in our mutual suffering.
Pema Chödrön describes compassion beautifully in her book, When Things Fall Apart:
“Without justifying or condemning ourselves, we do the courageous work of opening to suffering. This can be the pain that comes when we put up barriers or the pain of opening our heart to our own sorrow or that of another being. We learn as much about doing this from our failures as we do from our successes. In cultivating compassion we draw from the wholeness of our experience — our suffering, our empathy, as well as our cruelty and terror. It has to be this way. Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”
Empathy does not require that we understand ourselves, compassion does. Compassion takes more work than empathy does, but the pay off is so much greater.
When an empath without compassion gaslights (invalidates) themselves or others, it is a clear sign that they are suffering from empathic distress (burnout).
People incapable of empathy tend to invalidate (gaslight) others without experiencing distress. Too often we perceive the calm, confident demeanor of covert bullies in the face of suffering as strength, but gaslighiting is a subtle toxically narcissistic behavior that we should all be aware of. Projective identification (gaslighting) is the indication of a weak ego.
The antidote to bullying (toxic narcissism) is practicing healthy narcissism.
Healthy narcissism (fierce self-compassion) is also the antidote to burnout (empathic fatigue).
Pay attention to your wants and needs. Just as you can’t meet anyone else’s needs before your own are met, you can’t have compassion for others until you have it for yourself.
