Compassion Fatigue: The Cost of Caring

What is Compassion Fatigue?

Have you ever watched a loved one struggle with an illness? Have you ever worked with a child who was the victim of abuse at home? Have you ever had a friend who lost a son or daughter in an accident? Have you ever had nightmares or panic attacks because of all of the tragedy and violence you see in the news?

Caring for other people is part of human nature, but sometimes caring comes at a price. Even if we aren't the victims of direct trauma ourselves, we can experience and internalize it by being repeatedly exposed to the emotional shock and pain of people who are or have been victims.

Often times, we feel overcome with powerful, persistent emotions. Heartache. Sadness. Fear. Guilt. Stress. But sometimes these emotions can have physical, even psychological effects — ones that can leave our bodies, minds, and souls burned out and devastated.

If you've ever felt this way about someone else's grief, trauma, or illness, there's a good chance you're suffering from something known as Compassion Fatigue.

Compassion Fatigue is nothing less than secondary traumatic stress. It's the result of mirroring and absorbing the emotions of people who have suffered or are suffering from illness, addiction, violence, or other tragedies. Left untreated and unmanaged, it can lead to debilitating symptoms such as feeling aloof or disconnected, depression, chronic fatigue, anxiety, and insomnia.

Fight, Flight and Freeze

Compassion Fatigue is experienced as repetitive shocks to the mind and body. The sympathetic nervous system is hyper-activated, secreting large amounts of adrenaline into the bloodstream in preparation for fight or flight. The heart rate increases, breathing becomes short and shallow, blood vessels constrict and muscles tighten. The neo-cortex, the thinking brain begins to shut down in favor of the automatic responses of the more primitive, reactive Limbic system or emotional brain.

In the case of Compassion Fatigue, these repetitive shocks often occur “under the radar” of conscious awareness. When there is no specific mechanism to fight or flee the traumatic stress all the body can do is “freeze”. The freeze response is the psychological mechanism most associated with PTSD and is comparable to gunning your car engine in gear while stomping on the brakes. Repeatedly, over time your body will suffer the same fate as your car – mechanical breakdown and eventually, complete systems failure.

Wired and Tired

The new research on traumatic stress strongly suggests that the cumulative effects of this repeated freeze response is what some experts in the field are calling “energy residue.” Over time, the body becomes habituated to this condition of chronic over-stimulation and simultaneous exhaustion; a state I call “wired and tired”. As a result the body stores this energy residue resulting in greater sensitivity to stress and trauma, causing the release of more adrenaline in a repetitive emotional short-circuit.

Who Does Compassion Fatigue Affect?

Compassion Fatigue has commonly been diagnosed among health-care and medical workers (doctors, nurses, EMTs, and nursing home attendants). But it's beginning to be diagnosed and recognized among anyone who works closely in a caring capacity with people, such as: social workers, judges, lawyers, psychologists, firemen, police officers, soldiers, child custody workers, teachers, and clergy.

Compassion Fatigue also affects family care providers: those who take care of elderly parents, or disabled/sick children and spouses. The rate of Compassion Fatigue found among adults is only expected to increase as the general population continues to age resulting in family members assuming the primary responsibility of caring for their aging parents.

What Can We Do About Compassion Fatigue?

Compassion Fatigue is caused primarily by the body's inability to release stress. Trauma experienced in the mind literally becomes frozen energy in the body. To release this energy, it has to be converted to flow.

Flow is the state of mind we experience when we're in a groove, full of attention, energy, and concentration. For years, people have used techniques such as Tai Chi, Qigong (Tai Chi's early ancestor), or yoga to create flow in their lives. These techniques also work to release frozen trauma or stress in our bodies and get this trapped energy circulating throughout our bodies in the form of flow.