From Empathy to Compassion

The Science of Self-Care and Well-Being in Health & Human Services

The experience of compassion involves recognizing the suffering of someone else coupled with a desire and commitment to alleviate that suffering. It is fundamental to human development and has lied at the heart of practices designed to cultivate the qualities of generosity, selflessness, and mutual aid for thousands of years.  Deep-rooted in our physiology, compassion is woven throughout the quilt of the human experience; we come wired for it. Nonetheless, it has been described as an experience that leads to emotional and physical distress, apathy, disengagement, and secondary trauma.  However, insights from modern neuroscience and mind-body research uncover a different story, indicating the phenomenon of compassion fatigue does not exist.  This interactive workshop explores recent discoveries that reveal compassion cultivates resilience and promotes psychological and physical well-being.  Findings that illuminate the effects of compassion on the autonomic and central nervous system will be shared, as well as research on the experience of empathetic distress fatigue, for which compassion seems to be the antidote. 

Participants will learn skills for shifting from empathy to compassion to decrease the risk for fatigue, burnout, and vicarious trauma, as well as strategies for maintaining a healing presence and staying in service when witnessing human suffering. Participants will also have the opportunity to assess their levels of self-compassion for greater awareness of self-care needs.

Learning Objectives

  1. Describe the human stress response- how we are wired and move through the world
  2. Define empathy and compassion from a neurobiological perspective
  3. Illustrate the difference between compassion fatigue vs. empathetic distress fatigue
  4. Assess levels of self-compassion to improve intrapersonal safeness
  5. Apply mindfulness, stress resilience, and compassion skills training
Skills

Posted on

October 2, 2023