Question
What is the Compassion Trap?
Answer
The compassion trap is the inability to let go of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that are useful in helping another, long after they are useful. What that means is oftentimes our brains have to work through and process these experiences of what people have been through; these often inhumane, awful, terrible experiences that they have been through. Your brain has tried to make sense of how to process this information. So, it continues to work in that realm of thinking about how to impact that.
Although, you have to have a way to be able to debrief and let go for that to happen. And that may happen in different ways. It’s actually very helpful to process the experience, just like we tell our clients to do. We tell them to process the experience, to talk about it, and to discuss it. Your brain is going to do that just that. However, when your brain can't shut that off and you keep thinking about it and obsessing about it and having those thoughts over and over, that is when it's not as useful.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Compassion Fatigue: When the Helping Well Runs Dry, presented by Kim Anderson, PhD, MSSW, LCSW.
