How You Can Look After Yourself When Your Job Is To Look After Others?

Guest writer, Gail Donnan author of The Gateway: A journey to reclaim your power from stress and anxiety, writes about how you can look after yourself, when your job is to look after others.

When you look up empathy in the dictionary it reads “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”. Therapists can fall into an exhausting trap of  feeling for another rather than feeling with them. As a therapist myself, I have experienced times with clients that has brought my excessive emotional empathy out in droves and it is easy to feel yourself starting to become emotionally invested and drained.  

Empathy actually requires complex skills but we have a choice when to use those skills. Empathy has a filter, it is not fixed and should contract and expand with life events. Sympathy, kindness, altruism and prosocial behaviour are all welcomed life skills, but we don’t need to reconstruct the thoughts and feeling of another individual and our job as therapists is not to hold that kind of power.  

I work in integrative health and psychotherapy, once my client leaves I do not mull over what we have discussed until the time comes to prepare their notes for their next session so my empathy must have a filter and can obviously be controlled. 

Two hundred and fifty years ago, Adam Smith famously described the way observers might feel watching a tight rope walker. Even while standing on solid ground, our palms sweat and our hearts race. In essence, we experience the tight rope walker’s state as our own. This captures the scientific model of empathy and how our mirror neurons help you understand the intentions and actions of clients. 

There are different types of empathy: 

• Cognitive 
• Emotional 
• Compassionate 

Cognitive empathy is being able to put yourself into someone else’s shoes and see their perspective without engaging with their emotions, leading by thought rather than by feeling. Emotional empathy is when you can literally feel the other person’s emotions alongside them which causes us personal distress and anxiety. As therapists, we need to be careful investing emotionally in an outcome where we have little or no control. It is possible to become overwhelmed by emotions (empathy overload) and we may need to work on our self-regulation and self-control to manage our emotions because we can’t see where our life starts and the other person’s ends. We may feel our co-workers or managers don’t feel the same or are uncaring– this results from over-protection from empathy overload or excessive empathy. 

Compassionate empathy is feeling someone else’s pain and taking action to help. Like sympathy, compassion is about feeling concern for someone but with some action to help and is the type of empathy that is usually most appropriate. As a general rule, clients who want or need your empathy don’t need you to understand, or to feel their pain, become anxious or worse burst into tears alongside them. They need you to understand and sympathise with what they are going through and help them to take appropriate action.  For me this means being a caring, professional person who respects their own personal boundaries and I am very transparent about this with clients that unintentionally push those boundaries. 

Cause and effect of excessive empathy 

Excessive empathy or hyper empathy is having a higher amount of empathy than average and is generally found in sensitive, emotionally reactive people. Many people who have a caring role have slightly longer antenna than others and pick up on every emotion vibrating in the atmosphere! There are many reasons for excessive empathy, sometimes we learn to become hypervigilant as a child and we learn to read body language and sense atmospheres quickly for a safer life, we may not have been shown compassion or may have lower levels of cognitive empathy and self-esteem and have poor personal boundaries. 

Tips to lessen the effects of excessive empathy: 

• Set better personal boundaries, perhaps buddy up with a colleague to work on this together 
• Try to avoid gaining your self-worth from caring or pleasing others – work on your own self-esteem 
• Deep breathing exercises 
• Metaphorically ‘zip up’ before and ‘discharge’ after every client (Reiki practitioners are taught to do this) 
• Use Mindfulness Self-Compassion (co-founded by Kristen Neff) 
• It is ok to say no 
• Use meditation to relax and detach from work 

The above lessons are especially relevant for those welcoming cancer patients to their salon and spa. It can be useful to review this advice, alongside the information received in theory training, when you signed up for your postgraduate diploma in oncology touch. Remember that you became certified on an accredited course where it is possible to welcome cancer patients and be insured to do so. You have received the training required and a tutor has assessed you as skilled in this area.

Meditation 

When I need to clear my head after a session with a client, my go to would be meditation. It is free, it can done anywhere even in between clients or on a quick loo break. “Meditation, is not the throwing of a switch and catapulting yourself anywhere, nor is it entertaining certain thoughts and getting rid of others. Nor is it making your mind blank or willing yourself to be peaceful or relaxed. It is really an inward gesture that inclines the heart and mind (seen as one seamless whole) toward a full-spectrum awareness of the present moment just as it is, accepting whatever is happening simply because it is already happening.  Meditation is not about trying to get anywhere” (Kabat Zinn 2006). 

The therapeutic benefits of essential oils can help both your clients and yourself to unwind and relax. When you enrol this month on the Balanced Body and Mind course, you learn to enhance the wellbeing of your clients and receive £432 worth of free skincare with uplifting, soothing properties.

If you would like to listen to a selection of free meditations please visit my website - www.gaildonnan.com 

Copyright 2021 

References 

Brown, B. On Empathy 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw&list=PLbiVpU59JkVaxox70z7TUv9eyriJ0galL&index=6 

Kabat Zinn, J. Meditation it’s not what you think 

https://palousemindfulness.com/docs/JKZ_thinking.pdf