Caring for other people can be deeply meaningful. It can also affect us.
Sometimes that looks like ordinary exhaustion. Sometimes we become more irritable, detached, anxious, or overwhelmed. We may find ourselves thinking about someone else’s story long after the conversation is over, becoming more pessimistic about people or the world, or simply realizing that we have less patience and emotional space than we used to.
For people whose work involves caring for others, there are a number of terms used to describe these experiences: burnout, compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress, and vicarious trauma. They overlap, and the research has not always defined them consistently. But the distinctions can still be useful, because different kinds of strain may have different causes—and may call for different responses.
This series is about understanding those experiences, noticing them earlier, and figuring out what helps.
It is written for therapists and therapists-in-training, but also for nurses, teachers, social workers, caregivers, parents, and anyone who spends a lot of time supporting other people.
What happens when caring for other people begins to take more from you than you realized?
This introductory article looks at the emotional cost of caring, some of the early signs that you may be wearing thin, and why paying attention to your own experience can help you continue to care for other people without disappearing from the equation yourself.
An introduction to what can happen when we spend a great deal of emotional energy caring for other people.
We’ll look at why caring can sometimes become exhausting, how that strain can begin to show up in everyday life, and why taking your own experience seriously does not mean caring less about somebody else.
Empathy is often treated as an uncomplicated good. It allows us to understand another person more deeply and can help someone feel less alone.
But there may be an important difference between being emotionally present with another person’s suffering and beginning to experience that suffering almost as though it were our own. This article looks at empathy, compassion and empathic distress—and considers whether helping someone really requires feeling what they are feeling.
[Coming soon]
Your early warning signs may not look like someone else’s.
They might show up first in your sleep, patience, relationships, hobbies, mood, self-care, work, or even the way you are beginning to see yourself and the world. You may not immediately think of any of these changes as signs that you are overwhelmed.
This article will help you think about the changes that tend to happen in you when you are carrying too much—and how identifying those patterns earlier can give you more options for responding.
[Coming soon]
It is much easier to decide what you will do when you are struggling before you are already exhausted.
A burnout plan is not just a list of relaxing things to do. It means knowing what your early warning signs look like, what protects you when life becomes difficult, who you can lean on, what boundaries matter, and what you will do if the things that normally keep you well stop being enough.
This article will help you begin building that plan before you need to use it.
[Coming soon]
These terms are often used interchangeably, even though they describe somewhat different experiences.
Burnout may have more to do with chronic workload, difficult working conditions and feeling unable to do your job effectively. Secondary traumatic stress can arise through exposure to another person’s trauma. Vicarious trauma may gradually affect the way we understand ourselves, other people and the world. Compassion fatigue overlaps with several of these experiences and has itself been defined in different ways.
This article will look at where these concepts overlap, where they differ, and why even the professional literature can become confusing.
[Coming soon]
Therapists are not the only people whose work requires sustained emotional attention.
Nurses, teachers, social workers, physicians, support workers, doulas and many other professionals can spend much of the day attending to other people’s needs, distress and vulnerability. The work may be meaningful and rewarding while also requiring the professional to repeatedly make room for somebody else’s fear, pain, grief or frustration.
This article looks at what prolonged caring can ask of the person doing the caring, what happens when that emotional load begins to accumulate, and what can help make caring work more sustainable.
[Coming soon]
Vicarious trauma is not simply feeling tired after a difficult day.
Repeated exposure to other people’s trauma, cruelty, loss or suffering can sometimes begin to affect a helper’s beliefs and assumptions about people and the world around them. Someone may become more fearful, cynical, hopeless or mistrustful without immediately connecting those changes to the work they have been doing.
This article looks more closely at what vicarious trauma is, how it differs from ordinary occupational burnout, and the kinds of changes that may be worth noticing.
[Coming soon]
Practicum comes with a particular combination of pressures: concurrent academic work, sometimes other full or part-time employment, wanting experience, needing hours, learning how to work with real clients, trying to become competent quickly, and often feeling reluctant to admit that something is becoming too much.
It is also much easier to think clearly about your own limits before you are sitting in the middle of a full caseload.
This article looks at what is worth considering before practicum gets busy: your own warning signs, expectations about workload, how you will use supervision, how you will know when you need additional support, and what you want to do if the pressure to accumulate hours begins competing with your ability to practise well.
[Coming soon]
Therapist wellbeing is not only a personal issue.
Therapists inevitably bring themselves into the therapy room. Our attention, emotional regulation, judgement, reactions, boundaries and ability to remain present all become part of the work.
When exhaustion, detachment, irritability, hopelessness or other signs of distress begin affecting a therapist’s functioning, they can also begin affecting the therapeutic relationship and the quality of care being provided.
This article looks at why self-awareness is part of practising safely and effectively—not simply something therapists are supposed to do for themselves after work.
[Coming soon]
Supervision works best when it is not reserved for discussing technique.
It is also one of the places therapists can notice what is happening in themselves: the clients they keep thinking about, the sessions they dread, the places where they become unusually reactive, the work that touches something tender, or the point at which their caseload has simply become too much.
This article will look at conversations worth having early: how to bring up difficult client work, countertransference, capacity, workload, time off, emerging burnout, the pressure to accumulate practicum hours, and what to do when the supervision relationship itself becomes difficult.
[Coming soon]
As this series develops, I’ll also be releasing a practical workbook to accompany it.
The workbook will help therapists identify their own early warning signs, think about the areas of life that tend to change first when they are stretched too thin, identify the people and resources they can lean on, and create both a preventative plan and a plan for what to do if they realize they are already struggling.
It will be designed to be something you can return to—not simply something you fill out once when everything is already going badly.
The Cost of Caring Workbook — coming soon for therapist subscribers.
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Sometimes recognizing what is happening is enough to make changes. Sometimes it also becomes clear that you could use somewhere to put down some of what you have been carrying.
Find a Student Therapist connects people across Canada with student therapists offering affordable therapy. Many therapists listed on the directory work with concerns such as burnout, caregiver stress, anxiety, boundaries, workplace stress, perfectionism, trauma and overwhelm.
[ROTATING FAST THERAPIST PROFILES GO HERE]
The Cost of Caring grew out of work I originally completed during my psychotherapy training on compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress, vicarious trauma, burnout and safe and effective use of self.
That work included both a research paper and a practical workbook for therapists preparing to enter practicum. I’ve wanted to return to the material for some time—not simply to reproduce it, but to make the ideas more accessible and useful for people who care for others, both professionally and personally.
One of the ideas that has stayed with me is that prevention does not begin with finding the perfect self-care routine. It begins with noticing.
What changes in me when I am doing well? What changes when I am carrying too much? What do the people around me notice? What helps? What am I tempted to stop doing when I most need it? And at what point do I need support rather than another strategy?
The work was organized around a simple progression: understanding what these experiences are, developing greater self-awareness, and then making a realistic plan for both prevention and response.
That is what this series will do too.
Disclaimer: Posts by therapy students and third parties do not belong to Find a Student Therapist, and the information is not verified and may not be accurate or correct. Find a Student Therapist does not endorse or support the content. The content on the Find a Student Therapist website is psycho-educational, the sole opinions of their respective authors, and is not psychotherapy. Do not rely on any information on this website as a substitute for medical orpsychotherapeutic advice. Use of the content on this website does not create a therapist-client relationship. Each person’s mental health needs are unique; consult a qualified professional for personalized support. Use this content at your own risk. Find a Student Therapist will not be held liable for this content.
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