If you are a healthcare professional, my guess is you didn’t go into it for the big bucks or the easy schedule.
You may have chosen some form of healthcare and wellness because you had your own crisis and transformation due to some highly skilled and empathic healers.
Perhaps your own keen perception of others’ issues and struggles just attracted these people to you—and you figured out you had better get some skills to help these folks.
Or maybe empathy and healing just seemed to come out of your pores, making the work of being a healer a natural for you.
However, we all know that healing professions mean dealing with hour after hour of people in pain. There are always more people needing your empathic and technical skills than there is energy in your body and hours in your day.
Then there are the hours making sure you have not only worked with your patients and clients, but that you have dotted the “i’s” and crossed the “t’s” into record-keeping systems that are not patient or user-friendly…walking the tightrope between what genuinely helps the hurting and what the “system’s” preferences and reimbursement policies are.
What I see…Empathic Distress
In my therapy and Somatic Experiencing practice, I see a lot of healthcare practitioners—therapists, doctors, and the range of allied professionals. Highly empathic, caring deeply, and up against systems which do not often foster sustainability for the practitioner.
This leads to the fatigue in oneself and for the work. The official term is “Empathic Distress.” Pretty self-explanatory, eh.
The Challenge
Yes, we all know we should take care of ourselves, put limits on our work, have a “personal life.” And for the driven, the guilt-ridden (but my clients/patients NEED me…I have this special gift and I must use it and use it and use it…and the system doesn’t LET me have that much time off…), the pressures to ignore your own needs are huge!
So I know, as “one of us,” that it IS difficult to draw the lines, set and adhere to some reasonable limits:
- Time off from work.
- Permission to “take off” energetically from responding to the pain you perceive from all of the wounded people.
This is about LIVING clean, clear BOUNDARIES.
To give an honest, integrity-filled “YES,” we HAVE to also exercise an honest “NO.”
I know that if I DON’T ADVOCATE AND DO IT FOR MYSELF, TIME OFF WON’T GET DONE!
So…I think we are not so different, despite any of your protestations.
I’m betting that you, as another empathic healer type, need to up your use of “No,” and allow yourself more room for what your self-care Yes’s are.
Go do it. 
Let me know below how it felt to live out a “No”…and how it feels now.
P.S. An immediate help for the empathic overwhelm is available at Empathic Resilience Meditations .
You will get two brief guided meditations plus a short e-book to help you turn down the stress quickly and easily and use a quick technique to strengthen your resilience.
Also when you get on my mailing list, you will be sure to know when I am launching my course Build Better Boundaries. This is a practical course so that you can build your ability to say “No” and discern what your true “Yes” is. Wouldn’t it be nice to have clean, clear, easy access to your YES and NO?
