#compassionfatigue — Public Fediverse posts

This episode really kicked me in the feels and then left me with a lot to think about.

I worked in animal care as a pet sitter and a vet tech and I'm familiar with compassion fatigue. My first job out of school was at an animal shelter and I walked into a situation where all the veterinary staff was totally burnt out and in the process of quitting. I looked at the outgoing lead tech and knew that would be me in a couple of years if I stayed. But I loved that job. But it really did take as much as you were willing to give it, and then some. A move to New Zealand the following year removed that conundrum for me.

I wonder if this is why I never got a pet while I was in the pet care industry.

I wonder how compassion fatigue interacts with autistic burnout.

I wonder if there's parallels to be made with the kind of burn out parents experience when they don't get the support they need.

Link is to a podcast called Proxy, an episode called "Jane doesn't like her dogs"

CW for the episode: animal death and suicidal ideation (brief mention)

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-proxy-with-yowei-shaw-176350003/episode/jane-doesnt-like-her-dogs-332608182/

#Podcast #CompassionFatigue #Veterinary #Healthcare #CaringProfessions

Hey folks

Very glad that we made an executive decision to step away from fedi for most of the day whilst we were experiencing empathy overload (which some may refer to, or describe, as compassion fatigue).

If we hadn't, we definitely wouldn't have ended up posting stuff that we would have massively regreted 🥺

For those who've never experienced this, you are very fortunate. It's very much not a pleasant experience, especially as your empathy centre starts to slowly boot back up and anxiety, worries, and RSD start to creep back in 😅

For us, it's kind of like when Lt. Commander Data from Star Trek turns off his emotion chip in First Contact. However, unlike Data, we still retain the ability to feel annoyance, irritation, and rage. It's like a pea soup fog, but for emotions.

You'd think we've had learnt to prevent this happening to ourselves after the first time, or at least the second, but apparently we're a very slow learner 😑

It's linked to neurospicy folks (especially, but not exclusively, autistic peeps) and is often seen as a result of someone with hyper-empathy getting entirely overwhelmed.

Given that we're AuDHD and experience near-constant hyper-empathy, it doesn't surprise us in the slightest that our mind has a figurative emergency stop button to prevent a complete meltdown.

Just to clarify here, nobody else is to blame for us experiencing this: we did this to ourselves by trying to offer too many people too much support in too short a period of time.

As much as we don't want to do so, we may need to add some filters to our home feed to hide certain posts entirely, since we seem pathologically unable to stop trying to offer support... literally to the point of overloading part of our mind 🤦‍♀️

We would like to apologise in advance, as this will mean that we will likely not see some of your mental health posts at all 😞

If we're friends (or at least folks who occasionally chat elsewhere), then you probably know other ways to reach out to us if you need us urgently.

That said, despite experiencing hyper-empathy and offering a lot of support, we often can't provide the kind of personable support that many folks need.

Anyways, that's it. We're going to add the new filters to hide posts and head to bed.

Gay nya-ight every-nyan :HeartHands:

#EmpathyOverload #CompassionFatigue #neurospicy #neurodivergent #ActuallyAutistic #AuDHD #HyperEmpathy