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Compassion Fatigue Is No Joke
Changing our approach to animal rescue can save both animals and humans
Compassion can be painful.
The more compassionate you are, the more likely you are to be affected by compassion fatigue, also known as emotional exhaustion, vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress or secondary victimization.
This often misunderstood and trivialized affliction is also referred to as secondary-traumatic stress disorder (STSD) and is actually a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. It affects caretakers of all kinds but this article focuses on the animal rescue aspect.
While I don’t speak for every single person in animal rescue, I do know, from personal experience as well as accounts from many of my fellow rescuers and advocates, that the profession as a whole is extremely stressful already.
And those who work in Socially Conscious Shelters tend to fare a lot worse.
HSPs (Highly Sensitive People) and empaths can— through their natural ability to identify with and feel the pain of others (and quite literally take it on) — be more susceptible to this kind of torment. At the same time, they are very likely to be drawn to the role of caregiver, and many end up in some kind of animal-related profession.
