Compassion fatigue is what my colleague calls it. He works at a large medical center, providing support for care providers. A healer’s healer. As such, he worries about compassion fatigue—a state that makes care givers less caring. That impacts the hospital’s mission. It’s not that they aren’t doing their jobs efficiently. It’s that they are less able to be empathetic, to provide the human connection that may do as much, perhaps more, to heal the heart and soul and even the body as the drugs and therapies they administer.
They are burned out. They have cared too much, seen too much; so much so that it becomes easier to look past than to look at the next person; the difficult patient in Room 201B, the hypertensive myocardial infarction by the nurses’ station.
Burn out and compassion fatigue are forms of self-preservation, ones not limited to those who work in healthcare. Most of us feel them at some time. Most of us have periods of going through life on automatic, doing by rote what we once did with energy and passion.
What I did not know about burn out that my colleague says it’s caused by a lack of intimacy. Really? Surely not. Surely burn out is caused by caring too much, taking on too much, emotional overload to the point of exhaustion.
But my friend is smart. And insistent. He really means burn out is caused by too little intimacy. But everyone knows intimacy takes time, which is what burned out people don’t have enough of already. His cure sounds like more work, more giving to others with no time for self-care at all.
“Love flowing from you is not the same as love flowing through you,” he says. Love with only ourselves as its source is limited, and it will eventually drain us. Love that taps into a deeper spiritual reservoir—a higher power, a supportive community, a stronger sense of self—is love that is replenished. It fills us and overflows to others. Time spent learning to intimately know ourselves, others and God does not take more from us—it gives more to us. Intimacy is immensely life-giving.
If you were to write yourself a prescription for intimacy, what would it be? How often would you take it? In what form?
Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. — Dr. Howard Thurman, theologian and civil rights leader.
