Caregivers can benefit by understanding a patient’s pain without feeling it themselves.
Once you open yourself to the suffering of others, it can feel impossible to turn off their pain.
.. Surveys of career helpers find they are more likely to report family histories of abuse or substance dependence than professionals in finance, music, and science.
.. Patients thrive from emotional connection with nurses, social workers, and therapists, but helpers who provide this connection can wilt under its force. The stress of caring can lead to astonishing levels of job turnover. According to one review, 30 to 60 percent of social workers in high-impact sectors, such as child abuse, leave their jobs each year.
.. Many helpers feel that they face a double bind. They can preserve themselves by growing emotional callouses and blunting their responses to those in need. Or they can throw themselves into building connections with their patients and risk being crushed by the weight of caring.
.. New research suggests a third way. Caregivers need to be empathetic, but empathy is not one thing. Both neuroscience and psychology have uncovered an important distinction between two aspects of empathy: Emotion contagion, which is vicariously sharing another person’s feeling, and empathic concern, which entails forming a goal to alleviate that person’s suffering. Whereas contagion involves blurring the boundary between self and other, concern requires retaining or even strengthening such boundaries.
.. Empathy just as often represents a decision not about others, but about ourselves.
.. Helpers consider their distress a badge of honor, in what McCreary calls “a pull toward the romance of suffering.”
.. Helping professionals who did not dehumanize their patients—instead granting them full and rich humanity—were the most likely to burn out.
.. In a classic series of studies done in the late 1980s, psychologist Dan Batson and his colleagues presented undergraduate psychology students with a video of another participant receiving mild electric shocks. Participants reported feeling distressed (related to contagion) when watching the person in pain and also concern for that student (expressed through terms such as “moved” or “sympathetic”).
.. Batson then gave participants the chance to help the other student by trading places with her and “taking” the shocks on her behalf. Crucially, Batson set up the experiment so that some participants could easily avoid helping (for instance, if they chose not to help, they would be able to leave without watching the other student receive more shocks), whereas others could not.
.. In his view, distress points us inward, motivating us to feel better, whether by helping others or by avoiding them. Concern, though, keeps us focused outward.
.. Singer and her colleagues scanned participants’ brain responses to others’ distress before and after the meditation training. Before, people demonstrated physiological signs of contagion—for instance, engaging parts of their brain associated with feeling pain when watching others experience it. After the training, however, they shed this pattern and instead exhibited a pattern of brain activity more commonly associated with motivation and even positive emotion. Singer believes this type of training might allow helpers to “tune” empathy toward concern, working with it but not allowing it to take them over.