Empathic Distress

"I am pulling away to self-protect."

Welcome to the next installment of my series of newsletters on what might not be burnout in our people. I want to tell you about this next potential issue, often seen at leadership or managerial levels, but not exclusively so. Anyone can experience it, but it is at the leadership level that we can see the effect it can have on morale.

Empathic distress is a psychological strain experienced when one is exposed to the suffering or emotional pain of others in roles requiring high emotional intelligence.

Unlike compassion fatigue, which stems from the emotional toll of caregiving, empathic distress arises from the emotional challenge with one’s own suffering. It can manifest as feelings of overwhelm, sadness, or even physical symptoms like fatigue.

Addressing empathic distress requires emotional regulation strategies and often professional support, distinguishing it from other workplace mental health issues like burnout, which may have different underlying causes and solutions. Radical self-care is the first step. Radical team-care comes a close second.

One major source of mental health problems in health professionals are personally demanding encounters at work. Empathic training can be an effective means to foster emotional and interpersonal skills and to prevent empathic distress and social stressors at work in individuals working in socio emotionally challenging settings (Wacker, R., &Dziobeck, I. 2018).

For leaders experiencing this emotional imbalance, we can sometimes see them react poorly with another member of the team, usually after they have had some kind of an emotional outburst themselves. The effect that this can have on team morale, safety, trust and belonging is very apparent. Offended team members may be slow to forgive and forget when a leader turns on them.

The importance of emotional regulation and emotional intelligence in leaders cannot be overestimated. Indeed, resilience skillsets are also of paramount importance.

Empathic concern and personal distress are influenced by situational factors. This study could provide insights into how empathic distress might manifest in different workplace situations (Fabi, S., & Weber L.A., 2019).

I can help with that. As a Clinical Director, I have developed and delivered programs tackling extreme levels of burnout and mental ill-health in individuals and groups for over a decade.

If this information is important enough for your to read this far, then please share it with anyone you know that needs to read it as well.