Compassion doesn’t come for free
“As with any job, even a good nurse can have a bad day. Influenced by what is going in her personal life, but also by external and political pressures. It is hard to be kind when you are undervalued by society, by your employers and by the media. It is hard to always be kind when you are exhausted and working continuously in an unsafe environment.” (Christie Watson, The Language of Kindness: A Nurse’s Story)
Last year I wrapped up over 15 months’ work with a wonderful client on a very difficult topic: Problematic and Harmful Sexual Behaviour (PHSB) in children. We worked with experienced therapists, social workers and other subject matter experts to research and design some resources to support clinicians in some of the toughest conversations they can have. You can see what we produced here.
After the project and for the first time in my research career, I was offered a confidential ‘debrief’ session with a therapist. If you’re a clinician in the field, this is not unusual - counsellors and social workers hear and experience difficult things on a daily basis, and are supported by other therapeutic specialists as part of their process. But even though I have spent much of my professional life listening to people talk, the chance to ‘debrief’ challenging conversations is still rare - even more so when you work as a freelancer. I accepted the session, and I won’t share what we talked about, obviously. It was an excellent experience, and really did help me reflect on the work I was immersed in, and how I can continue to process its meaning without being overwhelmed by it.
I’m aware how lucky I was, and how rarely most of us ‘debrief’ our experiences in this way, outside the therapeutic context. Do we really need to? If you’re a human living in the world today, I’d say yes, you do.
Fragments of trauma
“The nurse repeatedly swallows a fragment of the trauma - like a nurse who is looking after an infectious patient, putting herself at risk of infection. Caring for negative emotions puts her at risk of feeling them, too. And taking in even a small part of tragedy and grief, and loneliness and sadness, on a daily basis over a career is dangerous and it is exhausting.” (Christie Watson)
In her memoir 'A Language of Kindness’, former nurse Christie Watson describes the daily, relentless challenges of healthcare and its impacts on the nurses we take for granted in our homes and hospitals. I would never compare my own research or teaching work to such a physically and emotionally demanding vocation, but as student experience becomes more complex and diverse, so too do the students we see in education settings, and the stories they bring with them.
In one project, a student disclosed to me just minutes into an interview that she was a repeat survivor of domestic violence and has a sibling with severe and violent mental health episodes; in the same project, another student told me a friend’s death by suicide was the catalyst for her dropping out of school. Yet another revealed she had run away from home, been a drug addict for 2 years and left a toxic relationship after giving birth to her daughter. These topics were not in the project brief or expected outcomes of the research, but there they were - fragments of trauma, embedded in the student experience.
So who counsels the counsellors?
If your work brings you into regular contact with a broad range of people across society, there’s a good chance you might feel just a little of the emotional exhaustion Watson describes in her book. Student support, counselling and teaching roles often respond to undiagnosed issues, brought to light only when a student is failing or losing motivation; if you’re lucky, you may have a team around you to discuss with, sharing the load and suggesting solutions. Not all do, however, or are afforded the time and resources for proper self-care and reflection. The teacher may be the first port of call for a student who needs more than academic support, but teacher training tends not to offer much guidance on responding to issues outside the curriculum.
We have come to expect that staff in these roles can absorb the emotional load, and many do this work guided only by their own intuition, without reward or recognition. Over time, however, if there is nowhere for these ‘fragments of trauma’ to go, they can slowly accumulate - and that’s when ‘compassion fatigue’ can kick in.
When you just can’t care any more
Compassion fatigue is a term more commonly used in medicine and social work than in education, but it applies just as readily. It’s not the same as burnout, which tends to come from the grind: too much work, too little time, not enough resource. Compassion fatigue, on the other hand, creeps in through the act of caring: the cumulative cost of absorbing other people's stuff, again and again, until your capacity to empathise starts to wear thin.
We used to talk more about this kind of emotional weariness during the long months of COVID lockdowns, but since the return to ‘normal’, the ongoing impacts on frontline and support staff in higher education contexts are rarely mentioned. When you don’t name things, you don’t plan or budget for them, and they don’t get prioritised in the rooms where important decisions are being made. What remains is an unspoken agreement that the people who are good at holding space for others will simply keep doing so, indefinitely.
Learning to share the load
“Even now I’m afraid when I push open the door to Accident and Emergency. So let us go in together. I take a deep breath. If you come with me, then anything is bearable. Take my hand. Hold my hand tightly. Let us fling open the door and find whatever we find, face all the horror and beauty of life. Let us really live. Together, our hands will not shake” (Christie Watson)
I love Watson’s final words in her book - a rallying reminder that there will always be difficult things, but we can tackle them together and still support those who need it most. So what would it look like to take this seriously in higher education, as something built into how we work?
Start debriefing, not just reporting. Safeguarding and support processes may ask staff to report what a student disclosed, but are less likely to include checks on how the member of staff is doing afterwards. Can we also build in a separate stage, even 15 minutes, for staff to process the emotional weight of a difficult conversation, not just log the facts of it?
Bring in peer supervision, borrowed from the therapeutic professions. These might be small, regular groups where staff can talk through what they're experiencing, in confidence, with people who understand the context. It doesn't need to be run by a clinician, but it does need to be run consistently, and protected from being the first thing that gets cancelled when term gets busy.
Train leaders to ask better questions. "How are you?" sounds nice, but invites a shallow, automated answer. "Tell me about your day/ week?" can lead to a more extended conversation that could be well overdue. Even better, leaders who model honesty about their own challenges give others permission to do the same. No one needs an untouchable hero figure when it feels like your life is falling apart.
Protect and normalise access to support. Many institutions have counselling or EAP services available to staff, but staff don't regularly use them, perhaps because asking feels like admitting they can't cope. Leaders repeatedly and openly talking about and endorsing these services, and not just during times of crisis, can make them feel more like part of the systemic structure.
Don’t wait for an emergency. Reflective practice shouldn't only happen after something goes badly. Regular, low-stakes space to process emotions and experiences, even when nothing has gone wrong, can help ease the build-up before it becomes too much.
None of this fixes the wider pressures Watson writes about, and won’t resolve the underfunding, the exhausting nature of the work, or the sense of being undervalued by the systems we work in. But it does stop us pretending that compassion is free. It asks institutions to treat the people doing this work as valuable individuals, and to create structures that share the emotional burden, rather than leaving it to accumulate, fragment by fragment, until another person leaves and the cycle begins again.
We ask so much of the people who hold space for others, so the least we can do is make sure someone is holding space for them, too. In the meantime, if you need to talk please drop me a message - I may not be able to fix the system, but apparently I’m quite good at listening…