Compassion
Fatigue
“Compassion
is the emotion one feels in response to the suffering of others that
motivates a desire to help.”
Wikipedia
On
Sunday, the Spirituality Group started off talking about the Winter
Solstice and darkness and light. But, as always, our discussion
turned a corner into an unintended, but far more important, area of
concern. This week it was compassion—what is the nature of
compassion and how is it acted out in our lives.
We
all know the response; a sort of kick in the gut when we see someone
who is hungry, hurt, suffering, abandoned, sick or lost. Our
immediate reaction is revulsion, followed an instant later by a
desire to help. But compassion is a complicated response—it is a
kind of co-suffering, in which we feel what the other person is
feeling, and thus want to relieve both our own suffering and theirs.
It is adaptive in that way. And, while we think of it as human, it is
not ours alone. Animals, especially mammals, feel the same thing.
We
tend to want to do something that will relieve suffering immediately,
because we don't want to feel it for long—and ours is related to
theirs. Sometimes the things we do soothe for a short time, but do
not relieve their difficulties long term. We can feed the
hungry, for instance, but it's a whole other story to take on feeding
them for years. Sooner or later, we get compassion fatigue. We begin
to feel resentment that they haven't risen to the occasion, and
learned to take care of themselves. Our feelings of compassion can
transform into something much darker.
An
example of this happens when any country takes in large numbers of
refugees fleeing from war and strife in their own country. We kick
into action. We set up camps, we feed and clothe them, we arrange for
teachers and social workers and doctors to care for them. But after a long stretch of this, we tire of all the output, all the demand, and we
begin to establish laws to control them. We look for ways of getting
them out of our care. It isn't a good-bad thing, it's just a human
thing.
Sometimes
taking continuous care of people, unless they are truly
incapacitated, is not compassionate. Sometimes, it causes dependency
and delays development. Sometimes it weakens instead of strengthens. It may send the message that they are
simply incapable of helping themselves even though they are
able-bodied. Are we helping, or are we harming? Compassion is always complicated, and often time-limited.
It forces us to assess how much we can do, and for how long, when
another human being, even one we love, is involved. Sometimes, the
compassionate thing to do is to say, “No,” in as loving a way as
possible.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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