Early in my career in mental healthcare, a colleague told me I should not get so emotional when hearing painful stories. I was getting too close, too affected. The message was clear: if you want to last in this field, build a wall.

That comment stayed with me for years. Not because it was cruel, though it stung. Something about it felt fundamentally wrong, and I didn’t yet have the language to explain why.

How to be with someone else’s pain

Looking back now, I can see what the real problem was. It didn’t “feel too much”, it was that I hadn’t yet learned how to be with someone else’s pain in a way that was steady, healthy, and sustainable. There’s a difference between being swept away by suffering and being genuinely present with it. I didn’t know how to do the latter.

Self-compassion would have helped me enormously then. It would have given me somewhere to stand while being present with their pain. A kind of inner ground, without making me less caring or less attuned to what patients were sharing.

Compassion fatigue

Kristin Neff, one of the leading researchers on self-compassion, has found that self-compassion acts as a buffer against burnout, by regulating the emotional intensity that comes with sustained caregiving. What researchers call “compassion fatigue” is less about caring too much and more about the absence of internal resources to process what you carry. Self-compassion builds those resources.

Eventually, after years in direct patient care and after having children, I made a shift. I moved from treating people to training them. Partly because I couldn’t carry the accumulated weight of suffering anymore, partly because I saw something that felt urgent: how little space there is in most professional training programs for the emotional and psychological reality of working in healthcare.

Healthcare professionals are trained to be competent, composed, and efficient. They are rarely trained in how to handle what that work actually does to a person.

Over time, my work became more focused on supporting healthcare professionals through mindfulness and self-compassion training. Because I kept coming back to what I had experienced myself: that the standard advice, “don’t get so emotional,” is not only unhelpful, it’s actively harmful.

Why detachment is not working

Detachment is not a sustainable strategy. It costs people their wellbeing, their sense of meaning, and eventually their ability to stay in the work at all. What self-compassion offers is something different: a way to stay connected to the person in front of you without losing connection with yourself.

Neff describes this as the difference between empathic distress and compassionate presence. One depletes, the other sustains. And the best part: that turns out to be a skill, and like any skill, it can be taught and practiced.

This is why the work I do now feels meaningful to me. And it’s why a retreat for healthcare professionals I’m helping organize carries so much personal weight. We’re trying to create a space where healthcare professionals from different countries and backgrounds can, for once, not perform, not defend, and not pretend. A space where the question isn’t “how do I get through this?” but “how do I actually take care of myself while caring for others?”

That’s a question I wish someone had helped me ask a lot earlier.

Want to know more about the retreat in Costa Rica? 5-Day Mindful Self-Compassion Intensive for Healthcare Professionals

Credits image: Joseph Frank