Empathy is a Full Contact Sport!

First, a quick note on what’s coming up:

Compassion Fatigue Strategies, Plus, my online CEU course at UFL starts on October 21st! 

I’ll be there for 8 weeks helping you and your staff or volunteers reduce the impact of burnout, moral distress, and empathic strain aka compassion fatigue, and supporting you through discussion boards, live practice sessions, and self-paced modules. 

You can save $$ by enrolling now:

• Early bird individual rate: $299 per person, a $50 saving

• Early bird group rate, save an additional 10%: $269 per person (in a group of 10+)

Interested? You can learn more here 

Today I wanted to talk with you about empathy and our well-being. 

People who work with animals are typically highly empathetic humans. It’s our superpower. 

But this strength is also a vulnerability. 

When we experience empathy’s positive side, we feel connected, strong, intuitive, purposeful, energized, and fulfilled. 

And that translates into us doing our best work for animals and people. It’s the source of connection, joy, and healing.

Empathy is a gift and a critical part of our work.

Annnnd it’s also true that empathy can be a prime source of our exhaustion and pain.

When we’re overwhelmed by empathy, we can feel disconnected, brittle, depleted, agitated, cynical, immobilized, judgmental, helpless, and empty.

Many of us struggle with two empathetic extremes: feeling EVERYTHING or feeling NOTHING. 

Both can feel out of our control and they’re often connected: We feel deeply, it hurts and exhausts us, so we numb out to protect ourselves. 

Since no one teaches us how to use our superpower skillfully (where’s our Godolkin University?), I think we need to take a closer look at empathy.

Empathy isn’t just a feeling it can also be a full-body experience. 

Our hearts, minds, and bodies are all involved. 

Like people playing full-contact sports, we're going to need protective gear to stay safe.

Empathy jock straps, if you will. 

With the right protection aka skills and support we can tap into our empathy strategically. 

Instead of getting knocked out by feeling what others feel, we can learn to find our sweet spot of empathy so that we can do our work well, without harming ourselves. 

As you can probably imagine, it takes energy to use our empathy strategically in various contexts. So, like all roads to Wellville, this conversation takes us back to boundaries. 

We’re gonna need boundaries in two main areas:

1. Outside of work: These boundaries protect our energy so we can engage with our empathy consciously at work. 

Because of the nature of our jobs, we use a ton of energy and empathy each day. We need regular time to recover or we won’t have the fuel to choose our empathetic responses skillfully.

One area to pay attention to: How much are we choosing to help and rescue outside work (in our personal relationships, hobbies, volunteering, etc.)? 

Being in helper/rescuer/fix-it mode constantly can quickly wear us out.

If we don’t set boundaries so we can care for ourselves, we’ll struggle to use empathy skillfully. 

2. At work: These are boundaries that protect ourselves from getting stuck in empathic distress, so we’re not in constant pain (which is massively exhausting aka compassion fatigue). 

For example, embodied boundaries help us to be with suffering without taking on others’ suffering as our own. 

In other words, when bearing witness to suffering in real life or online, we can learn to be aware of and stay connected to our bodies, so we’re not lost in others’ pain or checked out. 

With these boundaries, we begin to titrate our empathy. More on that coming soon.

Bottom line: Our empathy is a gift. Even if it feels like a burden some days.

And like anything valuable, we need to take good care of our super power, so it can continue to be a source of connection, healing, and energy for us and the world. 

In the next blog, we’ll look at the difference between compassion and empathy. Then, we’ll learn embodied boundary practices you can use when you’re with a suffering person or animal or looking at traumatic images or videos.

QUOTE

“Sometimes creating healthier boundaries requires sitting with the discomfort of “non-doing” and learning to hold the impulse to rescue or appease.”
- Jane Clapp