Five Ways Fighting Animal Cruelty Taught Me To Combat Empathetic Distress
This post was originally published in Forbes Magazine on August 22, 2019. You can read the post on Forbes website here. Laura Maloney is a member of the Forbes Coaches Council.
The struggle to achieve work-life balance and avoid burnout is becoming more serious and widespread every day. Workplace stress is believed to perpetuate over 120,000 American deaths and cost between $125 and $190 billion annually. There are many ways work can negatively affect our physical and mental health. Some stressors, such as long hours and lack of sleep, are inherently physically taxing. Emotional pressures can fuel unhealthy coping mechanisms, such as substance abuse and poor dietary habits, which compound these negative health effects.
All workers are susceptible to career-related stress and burnout, but fields that involve exposure to high levels of suffering – healthcare, child and animal welfare, social services and many nonprofit sectors – are especially conducive to secondary or acquired trauma, also known as empathetic distress or more commonly thought of as compassion fatigue. As a leadership coach for people driving humanitarian change throughout the world – and as someone who’s spent decades fighting animal cruelty – I’ve seen countless people walk away from careers they love because they cannot endure another day.
Sudden breaking points are often preceded by protracted physical and mental deterioration. People on the path to empathetic distress may not eat well. They may not exercise. They may become so emotionally calloused that they’re numb to friends and family, or they may become so consumed by world suffering that they lose their ability to experience joy.
Leaders and organizations have not just an ethical responsibility but a vested interest in implementing policies that protect workers from secondary trauma. In the absence of these policies, those working in high-risk fields should monitor themselves and others for signs of empathetic distress while taking preventative measures.
With this in mind, here are five strategies I use myself and with clients to mitigate the harmful effects of acquired trauma.
Assess your individual risk.
People with more empathetic personalities are naturally drawn to service work. They are acutely aware that there’s great suffering in the world and feel compelled to help those in need. But not managing your empathetic response can be harmful; when workers overextend themselves, they actually weaken their capacity to affect change.
Tests like the Empathy Quotient (EQ) were designed to assess people on the autism spectrum (who may exhibit less empathy), but they can also be used to flag higher than average empathy in people predisposed to compassion fatigue. Having an awareness of your individual EQ can help you determine your susceptibility to secondary trauma and put the appropriate preventative measures in place.
Make peace with powerlessness.
Perfectionism is also a large contributor to burnout and empathetic distress. People who have a strong drive to excel or demonstrate perfectionistic tendencies expect themselves to perform at 100%, 100% of the time. Even if they realize that there is no such thing as perfection, they believe striving for perfection will help them achieve the best results possible. But perfectionism can easily become paralyzing and even crippling.
People used to ask me all the time how I coped with animal rescue work. My answer is that even a traumatic animal rescue operation will result in being the best day of an animal’s life. That animal is on its way to a better life from that point forward. However, there are plenty of people and animals who cannot be saved. Even if it were possible to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it still would not be possible to save every life. Focusing on your work’s positive real-life impact instead of hypothetical “could have, should have” scenarios helps prevent perfectionism from becoming unhealthy and maladaptive.
Invest in yourself as an instrument of change.
You can’t do your best work if you’re compromised. It is important to invest in yourself as an instrument of change. Taking appropriate work breaks to eat a decent meal is necessary to maintain the optimal health needed to handle crisis situations. Of course, emergency workers will inevitably have to make exceptions to this rule, “exceptions” being the key word.
The same principle applies to setting aside time to spend with dear friends and family, and building exercise into your routine. Your physical fitness is directly tied to your health, and the healthier you are, the better you’ll be able to promote the well-being of others. A good way to maintain your health is to set wellness benchmarks. For instance, if you feel your best when you take three exercise classes a week, you know you need to examine your work-life balance whenever work begins to regularly interfere with your ability to meet those fundamental self-care needs.
Manage exposure.
A lot of people, including myself, watch the news every night, because they feel it is their duty to stay abreast of everything that’s happening in the country and throughout the world. But overexposure to bad news might negatively impact your capacity to make a difference if it leaves you feeling depressed and anxious. It can be far more productive to acquire the necessary facts without torturing yourself over every detail.
Likewise, it’s important to set work boundaries between occupational hazards that are necessary and those that are not. For instance, while overseeing animal cruelty investigations for three organizations, I recognized that I needn’t routinely watch footage collected by undercover units that documented the abuse. If I could obtain the information necessary to do my job from strictly reading the reports, I made a conscious decision not to view the footage. This helped me manage the acute and cumulative impact of my job, so I could ultimately do my best work.
It may not be possible for field workers in the thick of things – nurses, shelter workers, grief counselors, etc. – to reduce their exposure to suffering. Depending on your role, creating rituals or habits may help you find a healthy way to process and manage repeated exposure.
Establish meaningful habits or rituals.
If you routinely experience loss or grief at work, it can be helpful to find a way of acknowledging tragedy and releasing the pain at the end of each day. These little rituals do not have to be religious or elaborate. Many empathetic people try to match the enormity of their grief with their actions, but you can’t run a marathon to memorialize someone when you’re memorializing people every day. Instead, consider a practice that will help you honor what has happened throughout the day and release it while in the comfort of your home or office. It can be as small as writing a short sentiment or sending waves of well wishes from your heart to the situation.
Once you’ve done so, it’s important that you let the tragedy go and refocus your energy on the small pleasures of everyday life. Take a moment to savor a cup of coffee, a small special treat you enjoy, or whatever reconnects you with the here and now and the relationships you treasure.