Compassion Fatigue: Caring for Ourselves while Caring for Others

Dr Maté will be presenting at the National Survivor Gathering (Breaking The Colonial Mindset) in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on August 30, 2023.

Based on the book When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress (U.S. subtitle: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection).

Though compassion fatigue is an oft-used phrase, how accurate is it? Does one truly become fatigued by feeling, expressing, or manifesting compassion? This workshop will explore the deeper source of the well-known phenomenon of burnout, when people engaged in caring for others experience a depletion of their energies, a psychic and physical lassitude. That deeper source, it will be demonstrated, is to be found the personal history of the individual and his or her relationship to the work, not merely in the nature of the work itself. Practices will be taught to prevent what is known as compassion fatigue, and to restore our energies if we have been affected by it.