Whether it is for the helper or the helper, "compassionate exhaustion" is undoubtedly not a good thing.
If we and everyone are empathetic, I am afraid that even the door of the office can not go out, we will be directly killed by the pain of every colleague in the house. Therefore, we will only put the emotions of others in some time, and the rest will be isolated.
The choice of counselors, nurses, and social workers to accept the suffering of others does not mean that they have any special ability to cope with these pains. The serious consequences of their emotions are called secondary traumas—different from common traumas, which are not caused by direct trauma, but after seeing others suffer.
Secondary trauma also has a real impact on people's lives. For example, sleep disorders, stress-related physical illnesses, alcohol or substance abuse. Like other victims of disasters and trauma, it is difficult for professionals to help workers to isolate themselves and the pain they witness. After work, the patient's pain is still plaguing them. For example, Allison once went out to eat with a partner. When she heard the couple in the next room arguing, she remembered the story of her students living with her parents and boyfriend/girlfriend. Then she found that she could not ignore the conversation of the couple. Can't ignore this quarrel.
Unfortunate events everywhere make the helper feel that their efforts are like Jingwei reclamation, they are just useless. This feeling squeezes the meaning of helping others to help others outside of work – how can you still jog when someone around you is suspected of being abused? When someone needs you so much, how can you still go home for dinner?
It’s not just the helper who has this feeling. Empathy fatigue can also be used to accurately describe modern parenting patterns. It's easy for us to erroneously equate good parenting with the exhaustion of our parents and give everything to our children – and it's always a little worse. Studies have also shown that parents may experience physical symptoms that are uncomfortable due to long-term parental stress.
And professional help workers are experiencing such high pressure and painful contact every day, and one day they will be on the verge of collapse.
This is very bad.
Do we have to do this? of course not. In fact, we can avoid this kind of "exhaustion."
Helpers need to be empathetic, but empathy is not just one side. Both neuroscience and psychology research have uncovered the huge differences between the two aspects involved in empathy:
Emotional infection , alternative experience of another person's feelings, such as the perception of the other's pain;
compassionate care , means that the reason we use empathy is to alleviate the suffering of others.
Emotional infections make it easy for you to blur the boundaries between yourself and others. However, compassionate care requires you to maintain and even strengthen the boundaries between yourself and others. The correct posture to avoid exhaustion is to allow yourself to maintain empathy and care without being emotionally infected.
The difference between emotional infection and care is not natural. This requires conscious training.
How to train?
Neuroscientist Tania Singer has done a very good example of adjusting the way of empathy. She organized a compassion meditation. Participants first think about their own pains, and then find ways to warm themselves and care; then, systematically “dilute” this care into the surrounding environment: to friends and family around, to strangers, and finally Caring for humanity.
Scanning the participants' brain responses before and after meditation training will reveal that the participants' brain activity has indeed changed, and the positive emotional brain areas have also been activated.
But in essence, what this kind of meditation does is actually to help those who are often caught in “emotional exhaustion” and care about themselves before caring for others.
So if we want to stay positive and want to help people around us, we may need to remember an old command: love yourself.