© unbekannt
When some empathic caregivers are exposed to others' suffering day after day, their continuous partaking in this suffering might become overwhelming and can lead to burnout. Other caregivers may react by shutting down their empathic feeling and drawing an emotional curtain between themselves and their patients. Both these reactions are far from optimal.
Could mind training and meditation on altruistic love and compassion serve as an antidote to burnout? An example of this is the caregiver who naturally displays overflowing kindness and warmth toward his patients and does not experience any burnout.
Experienced Buddhist meditators have reported that when they focused for some time on what they called "stand-alone empathy" (visualizing intense suffering affecting someone else and resonating empathically with that suffering) without allowing compassion and altruistic love to grow in their minds, they soon experienced burnout.
However, when they added a powerful feeling of unconditional love and compassion, the negative, distressing aspects of empathy disappeared and were replaced by compassionate courage and a resolve to do whatever they could to soothe others' suffering. It would therefore seems that there is no such thing as "compassion fatigue," as burnout is often called, but only an "empathy fatigue" that can be remedied by cultivating compassion.
Neuroscientist Tania Singer, in collaboration with such meditators, is planning to train caregivers in cultivating loving-kindness in a secular way based on Buddhist techniques. This would to allow caregivers, nurses, and doctors to continue to offer altruistic services to those in pain without themselves suffering from empathic distress.
... that care givers are not allowed to become aware of all the resources they have to support their work, outside of the narrow confines of medicine and conventional psychology.
I am sure the method mentioned in the comment above would work wonders for many such people. But remember where a lot of these people are at. They are in a very real way being selfless. They are there to help people who are suffering. When they first got involved with that work, they possible did not realize that their empathy could lead them to internalize the suffering of others (in an attempt to "take it away" from them) and thus experience it themselves. But many of them continue to work anyway. The admiration they get from their patients is a very valuable commodity.
The ideal thing to do to help a care giver would simply be to give him or her more ways to help patients and to proactively do something that could lead to reduced suffering and a renewed sense of vitality. And such ways exist. They are called "assists." You can learn them from a $5 booklet that you could probably find a free copy of if you worked at it, or you can take a free course at the Volunteer Ministers website.
I highly recommend this technology to care givers.