1.
I recently discovered an academic paper1 that’s super important for people who work in mental health or allied fields (like authentic relating!). So I’m sharing it here.
The paper explores the downsides of empathy including the well-documented connection between empathy and burnout.
“Our capacity to understand others’ feelings through empathy is crucial,” the paper begins. But when we share the suffering of other people, we experience our own pain, and we sometimes shut down emotionally as a result. In those situations we’re barely able to take care of ourselves, never mind caring for others.
It’s especially difficult for professionals who see suffering daily. Doctors, for example, have a high rate of burnout and suicide. The effect is similar for psychologists, coaches, and other allied professionals.
2.
The research team asked: what if people didn’t just train in empathy, but compassion as well? Said another way, what if people had tools to process negative emotions in addition to tools to feel those emotions?
So, in a nutshell, they trained some people in empathy, and other people in both empathy and compassion. They used the compassion training in the classic Sharon Salzberg book Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, which turns out be to well-supported by empirical data.
What they discovered revolutionized my understanding of the work I do.
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They discovered that people trained in compassion (“the feeling of concern for the suffering of others that is associated with the motivation to help”) fosters emotional well being, positive emotions, and prosocial behavior.
Said in a non-geeky way, compassion helps you feel better and do more good, despite exposure to the suffering of other people. They showed—on both subjective and a neurobiological level—that the positive feelings counter acting the pain of empathizing with others’ pain, without reducing our capacity to empathize. What that means is that compassion isn’t just a way to block out bad feelings, but it’s actually a way to process and use those bad feelings to do good work in the world.
In my journey to connect with and understand people more deeply I’ve been focused on how to understand more, feel more deeply, resonate more profoundly, but I’ve never stopped to consider that I could get hurt doing that. I never stopped to consider what I need to do to protect myself.
Bottom line: If you’re in an empathic line of work, or training others to be empathic, you absolutely must also train in compassion, or you risk burning out and shutting down.
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1 The paper is called “Differential pattern of function brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training
” (say that five times fast!), and it was published in a journal called SCAN (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience) in 2013. One of the members of the research team was Dr. Tania Singer who is a particularly prolific neuroscience-based empathy researcher.