I’m going to pitch in here. A lot of what’s considered burnout is actually compassion fatigue. Poor understanding of either which affects types of interventions, prevention & support available. Let’s also remember how boys are socialised to be ‘men’.
Depersonalisation: shut down of empathy to cope. Emotional exhaustion: too much empathy & absorbing emotional burden + vicarious trauma thrown in. Both contribute to compassion fatigue-looks like burnout but isn’t.
Burnout is related to untenable/unsustainable work conditions rather than emotional labour. Burnout is the signal that your ideal life doesn’t match your reality & you’re working hard to maintain what you have rather than make choices that move toward ideal. Energy sucking life.
PS Compassion fatigue is a misnomer. Compassion, expressed well, is energising not draining. It’s the inability to access compassion in situations that require it that lead to this notion of fatigue which is more about empathic overload than compassion.
Compassion is often misrepresented. It’s the toughest emotion to master. Like empathy, It’s an emotion, not a cognitive process that’s described in the literature. Until we can witness suffering, pain, distress, peoples darkness & negative behaviour in the same way we experience
positive expressions of humanity, compassion can’t be accessed. Anything else is disgust, pity or sympathy. Not the same. We can’t be ok with others pain & darkness until we can face & be ok with our own. The denial of our pain or the pain we see in others contributes to
the overload resulting in compassion fatigue/empathic overload, not burnout. Interventions need to involve reflective practice, peer support, trauma-informed debriefing, personal development & therapy.
Empathy is the gateway to the spectrum of human emotion experienced in others. It’s a gift & a burden (if not modulated well) and doesn’t contribute burnout. Crappy healthcare cultures do. FIN for now.
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