The Dark Side of Compassion

Hey, it's Chris again, and today's video. I've wanted to do this one for a real long time, actually. It's been something I've been mulling over for quite a bit, wanting to work out what kind of handle to get on it, how I wanted to approach it. And this is what I call the dark side of compassion. How compassion can actually lead to negative outcomes, both for you, but also for your patients. Because being compassionate is something. It's a virtue that's often talked about as if it's an untrammeled good, that compassionate is only a good thing. We should only ever try and be compassionate, and the more compassionate, the better. And personally, I think there's some real flaws with that and there's other people and some research on this as well. Because it's three things that I see mainly as problems with compassion that I'm going to share today and ways that we can tackle that and ways that we can prevent it. The biggest one is that compassion in excess with our patients can lead to burnout, sometimes called compassion fatigue. If you are constantly taking on other people's problems and emotions as your own, it's not a limitless resource. Your glass will get filled up, and that's what leads to people numbing out and not caring and actually having no compassion or burning out and having a collapse and having to potentially leave and do something else, actually change their career. This does happen, and that's because if we take on too much, we just get full up and we can't deal with our own personal problems and emotions, everyone else's. The best way to prevent this is to practice what's often called self compassion. Self compassion basically means you imagine that you go to see yourself as a practitioner. What advice would you give to you if you were a patient? Imagine you're a patient. What would you be saying to yourself? How would you be suggesting you get through this? You know, maybe you need to take a break. Maybe. Maybe you need to take a little bit of time off. Maybe you just need to do something that's going to be something that you enjoy. You know, many of us, we go into chiropractic school with hobbies, and then we focus for four years. We drop all those hobbies, and we never pick them back up when we get back out in the real world. And if you're one of your patients, you'd probably say it's important to do some things that you enjoy. So practicing something like that, certain times it can be things that make you feel grounded or Present, you know, yoga, meditation. They get a lot of different attention for that. And if that's for you, great. But if it's not, don't. Because you can actually end up getting more frustrated at yourself by trying to do these things if they're not for you. One thing to look for is anything that helps you get in that state of flow. Flow states are where you're completely immersed in something and you don't notice time going by. You could spend hours doing it and go, oh, my gosh, look at the time. Felt like I've been doing this for a few minutes. For me personally, reading a really good fiction book can do that. During COVID for the first lockdown, I got into puzzles, and I actually found big puzzles. I could lose myself for ages in that. And flow states are a really good way to actually recharge because you're just focused on a problem that you can solve. It's just about yourself for your own enjoyment. You're not worrying about everyone else's problems as well. So finding some way of recharging and actually prioritizing yourself is a really key part. Because if you burn out from taking on everyone else's problems, then you're done. You can't help anymore. There's no more people you can help. It's really important to make sure your own battery is charged before you try to help other people. So compassion fatigue is probably the biggest one. Burnout. The other thing, though, and this can go hand in hand sometimes, it often happens around the same time. But being too compassionate can actually, over time, lead to the opposite. It can lead to resentment and selfishness. And it's very, very subtle because you won't notice it because you'll see yourself as this compassionate person. But what can happen is you can start to feel resentful if you're being very compassionate and you're not met with compassion by the people you know. Very compassionate practitioners are the ones I see who talk quite resentfully about patients who took advantage or who didn't respect them. And it's very, very subtle, because what you start to do is write those people off and go, well, they're just bad people. They're not like me. I'm really compassionate. This is the reason why everybody in mental health has what's called supervision. Counselors, psychiatrists, psychotherapists. Supervision is basically where they go and see another colleague and they talk about what's been going on for them. It's not their own personal counseling. The supervisor is there to keep their patients safe. To make sure that they're not bringing some of their own baggage. Anything that's in what Jung called their shadow, in their blind spots, in their subconscious, not allowing that to actually influence the way they treat their patients. And personally, I think this would be a great benefit in all of health, Kobe, to have some sort of supervision, but it doesn't have to be that formal. It could be as simple as just talking to a colleague, finding a trusted friend or a professional, that can work too. But finding somebody that you can talk to. If you notice yourself starting to feel annoyed or resentful, if you're kind of carrying patients home with you that have upset you, it's really important to find an outlet. Otherwise that can start to fester and it can actually lead to the complete opposite of compassion towards those people. So watching for that resentment and making sure you have some sort of outlet is really, really key. And that's actually going to help you to communicate back to people with more boundaries and compassion. The other thing to bear in mind here is that I don't actually aim to practice compassion with my patients. I aim to practice empathy. And there's a very clear difference there because compassion is taking on somebody's emotions as your own. So if I'm being really compassionate with somebody, I'm feeling what they're feeling. And that that is pretty risky. It's very easy for boundaries to get crossed and lines to get blurred. Instead, I aim to practice empathy, which is where I try to understand what it's like to be the other person from their perspective. I'm not imagining that if I was in their shoes, I would feel like this. I'm coming to it with curiosity to find out how they feel in that position. Because something that might make me feel frustrated might make the patient feel anxious or vice versa. So having that curiosity is really key. You don't assume that you know how the other person feels or you don't assume that they're going through the same thing you would go through. And that leads me to the other, Last 1. The third downside to compassion is that excessive compassion infantilizes the patient. It actually disempowers them and it can become quite doctor centered. You know, compassion is something that we've evolved to have mainly for infants, for helpless people. Now, if you've got a six month old, undying compassion is the right thing. You know, they need everything they need there. They need their parents to be totally taken care of. You don't tell off a six month old and have a go at them. And tell them to pick them up with their bootstraps. You just come at them with compassion. But for grown adults, too much compassion actually treats them like a child. Now, in certain situations, we make exceptions. When people are sick, when they're frail, you know, elderly, for example, a bit more compassion is helpful, but you've got to be aware that too much compassion starts to treat them like a child. It disempowers them. It takes away their problems a lot of the time as well. A big tenet in psychotherapy, which is if you solve the other person's problem, you've robbed them of the opportunity to learn how to solve it themselves. It's the teach a man to fish, give a man a fish kind of problem. So the key for that is to practice having a bit more faith. Believe in your patients, believe that they have the power to solve their own problems. By all means, help guide them towards that. This is what coaching is really good for, is helping people work out the best solution to them helping. But rather than just coming in and giving them advice straight away and saying, here's what you need to do, or that must be terrible. If I was like that, I would want to do xyz. Don't immediately come at it with compassion. Respect the other person as an adult. By all means, meet them as an equal to help them. But don't look at it as, oh, this poor person, they're suffering, they're powerless. I need to come in and step in and solve that and take care of them. Because you can actually disempower patients. And we know that disempowerment is really, really bad for their outcomes long term, especially with people in chronic pain. So hopefully that's useful for you. You know, I'm not saying we shouldn't ever feel compassion. Compassion is a bad thing. It's part of human nature. But there's a reason that some people are more compassionate than others. Because in certain times, in certain situations, being more or less compassionate is actually adaptive. It's why we have arranged that all personalities, so have a think about that. Be mindful of burnout and compassion fatigue. That's the really big number 1. Practice some self compassion. Make sure you're recharging your own batteries, you're doing something for yourself. Be mindful, if you are somebody who's naturally very compassionate, of the resentment that can bubble up below the surface. Just be mindful of that. Keep an eye on that. Watch out for it. And if you notice it, find an outlet. Find a colleague or a friend or a professional you can talk to and be aware of the danger of infantilizing your patients and treating them like children, and that you could actually disempower them. So as much as possible, try to help them solve their own problems rather than trying to solve it for them. So hopefully that's helpful for you. As always. Any questions on this, let me know. So I know the video rang on a little bit, but I think it's a really important topic and it's not something talked about enough. So this is just my little addition to Hope that helps and starts a bit of a conversation for us all.