Are you exhausted by your job caring for others? Could your compassion for your patients be the cause? By Louise Broda.

My Story

I know from my own experience, how exhausting it can be to work in a caring profession if you're unaware of the effect that being empathetic at work can have on you.

I love people and love finding out about people and what makes them tick. (I think I am nosey at heart!) I guess from a young age I was always very good at listening. I was never taught that my skill in listening, which is so valuable when working with people, could actually make me ill!

I was attracted to physiotherapy as a career after school. It felt like the perfect way to combine my love of biology (and all the sciences) with my love of sport and my unquenchable thirst for finding out about people. I also had a little extra insight as my mum was a physiotherapist too (though if anything, she tried to put me off, as she didn’t want to feel that she had influenced me in any way).

At university, our compassionate and empathic sides were encouraged (and rightly so, as I truly believe that showing you care can be a huge part of the reason why someone gets better). I was never warned that this caring nature of mine could actually damage me as the health professional.

I experienced many different clinical placements as a student (from chest physio in intensive care, to general injuries in outpatient physiotherapy). I vividly remember spending 4 weeks on an oncology ward, where quite a few of the terminally ill patients died. I didn’t understand how I could ever begin to cope with this, but my supervisor's only advice was to ask if I wanted to sit in the office before I got on with the rest of the day. I decided that I wasn't cut out for oncology physio and have never worked in that area again. Because our feelings were not discussed, I ended up feeling that I should have been able to cope, and I learned (wrongly I now know) to keep things to myself.

When I first graduated, I loved being taken seriously as a professional and have always loved to talk to patients about themselves. It has always felt natural to empathise with their injuries or problems and listen to the person underneath the injury. I used to go home and worry about patients and how I could best help them (even then I knew this was not healthy, though I cared so much for them and really wanted to do my absolute best to help them). I remember having a fantastic supervisor who could see herself in me and encouraged me not to think about patients when I went home (although this advice still didn’t change my habits).

I really enjoyed my job and felt lucky to be doing a job I really loved. I started to become ill regularly. (Usually just with a cold every 6 months; though it would often linger, and I would often be left with extreme fatigue for weeks). I loved exercising and being so exhausted just always felt like quite an inconvenience.

Eventually this fatigue would pass and I would throw myself back into working and exercising. I had a fantastic group of friends. I loved my job, and was always looking for further courses (particularly in the sports area) where I could learn more and develop into being an even better physiotherapist. At this stage I had no idea that what I really needed, was to start properly caring for myself and improve my work-life balance.

As I grew more experienced and moved jobs, I began to worry less about patients in the evenings (some would stick in my head overnight, though I had less of the all consuming worry about helping them). Despite this I still had bouts of extreme fatigue and spells where I felt incredibly resentful to patients and their problems, in a particularly uncaring way that was not like me at all. These feelings lead me to question whether I was really meant to be a physiotherapist on more than one occasion.

It was not until I heard about Compassion Fatigue and began researching it, that I felt like someone truly understood what I had been going through. Looking back I can identify with so many of the symptoms and lack of self-care (particularly emotionally) and want to share this with others working in any role with people.

Symptoms of Compassion Fatigue

Here is a list of some common symptoms of compassion fatigue (which is by no means exhaustive):

• Chronically tired/ exhausted (physical or emotional)
• Helpless/ hopeless
• Feeling bad, even cynical about oneself, work, life and even state of the world
• Dulled emotions
• Decreased motivation and drive
• Anger
• Blaming
• Depression
• Frequent headaches
• Gastrointestinal complaints
• High expectations
• Hypertension
• Inability to maintain balance of empathy and objectivity
• Increased irritability
• Less ability to feel joy
• Low self-esteem
• Sleep disturbances
• Workaholism

I have certainly seen quite a few of the symptoms in myself at one time or another! Do you? Having any of these symptoms does not mean that you are uncaring or that you should be doing something different, it may just mean that you are absorbing things from people that you may not even have been aware of and that you need to look after yourself more.

Being caring is something that is expected of us as health professionals, though we are often given little or no advice on the importance of self-care and that caring can affect our own health. It is not something that I was ever taught at university, or since, though in retrospect it is something that has made me ill on more than one occasion and sapped my energy and enthusiasm for my work at a low level for years.

My own experience and frustration with the lack of help and recognition of this problem leads me to where I am today. If we work with people a lot, helping or advising in some capacity, or just being there for them, then we usually are attracted to these jobs because we like people. We are often the sorts of people who put others needs before our own, which is often the killer blow to our own health. Do you need to make some changes?

©2011 Louise Broda. All rights reserved. Published with permission on 25-Jan-12.

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