For decades health professionals have understood the term 'compassion fatigue' to mean the emotional exhaustion that comes from doing the job of caring. It has become an almost expected and unavoidable part of the job, and can lead to distress, burnout, or leaving a beloved profession for good.

Thankfully, new research (including functional MRI studies) is emerging that challenges and changes what we thought we knew about 'compassion fatigue' - namely, that compassion isn't actually the problem, empathy is. We now know that having blurred boundaries between the self and others, coupled with a lack of emotional regulation, can cause empathic distress, and empathic distress fatigue, not 'compassion fatigue'. Ok, so what's the good news here? Well, it's the fact that research has shown that the solution to empathic distress is, in fact, compassion! Learning how to be compassionate to yourself, your clients and others is how empathy fatigue can be combated, and 'compassion training' is the way to do it.

This workshop will expand upon the social neuroscience of compassion fatigue and empathic distress and present relevant research. Participants will be able to discuss and share their own accounts of work related fatigue, and how they managed it. They will then have the opportunity to learn evidence based ways of looking after themselves and their colleagues, using evidence based compassion and real self care techniques.

Bibliography

Anne Hofmeyer, Kate Kennedy, Ruth Taylor,
Contesting the term ‘compassion fatigue’: Integrating findings from social neuroscience and self-care research, Collegian, Volume 27, Issue 2, 2020, Pages 232-237, ISSN 1322-7696,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.colegn.2019.07.001.