Catholic · Emmaus course
The Cost of Caring: Recognizing and Preventing Compassion Fatigue in Helping Professionals
The capacity that makes you good at this work is the one that wears down. In this one-hour lesson, clinical psychologist Dr. Benjamin Keyes and a Divine Mercy University panel explain what compassion fatigue is, how it forms, and how to build resilience so you can keep caring.
NBCC CE · 1 clock hour · Helping Relationships (HR)
With Dr. Benjamin Keyes, Father Charles Sikorski, Judith Boyle, DNP, RN and Donna Garrett, RN
- Length
- 1 hr
- Lessons
- 1
- Level
- Beginner
- Version
- Catholic
- Price
- Free
I am tired in a way that sleep does not fix, and I am starting to bring it home to the people I love.
About this course
If you counsel, direct, nurse, or minister, you already know the feeling the panel describes. You listen to one story, then another, then a hundred, and something in you starts to run low. Your shoulders creep up. You are shorter with the people at home than you mean to be. Small things bite that never used to.
Dr. Benjamin Keyes names it without drama: compassion fatigue is the emotional and physical exhaustion that settles into helping professionals over time. It is not weakness, and it is not a sign you chose the wrong work. It is the predictable cost of staying close to human pain, and Keyes places it on the same continuum as post-traumatic stress: the vigilance, the intrusive stories, the pulling away.
The good news is the second half of the hour. Nursing professor Judith Boyle walks through Dr. Eric Gentry’s five resilience factors and the plain physical basics that go first when we are depleted. Donna Garrett names the particular trap of believing a good Christian must give without limit. Fr. Charles Sikorski adds the practice that steadies everything, prayer.
The lesson pairs the panel’s experience with serious scholarship: Craig Titus and Paul Vitz on strengthening the clinician’s self-care and resilience, the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, and the virtue of fortitude that lets a person stay present to suffering without being destroyed by it. It closes with two further-reading sections, one psychological and one spiritual, so you leave with both the clinical picture and the deeper hope underneath it.
One focused hour. 1.0 NBCC clock hour in Helping Relationships. A certificate on completion.
Who this course is for
Licensed and graduate-level counselors
Licensed and graduate-level counselors who need NBCC hours and want them to be genuinely useful.
Also for Spiritual directors; Clergy; Nurses; Ministry leaders.
From the course syllabus
The people who spend their days listening to other people’s pain carry something home that no one else sees. Counselors, spiritual directors, nurses, and clergy are drawn to the work by a real capacity for compassion, and it is that same capacity that quietly wears down. This course names what is happening and gives the helper a way through it. Built on a panel discussion from Divine Mercy University’s SDC 600 series, led by clinical psychologist Dr. Benjamin Keyes with nursing professor Judith Boyle, RN Donna Garrett, and Fr. Charles Sikorski, it explains what compassion fatigue is, how it forms, why it behaves like a milder form of PTSD, and how it slides into burnout when it is left unattended.
In one focused hour the lesson moves from recognition to resilience. It traces the mechanism Dr. Keyes describes (empathic engagement, the strain of detachment, the search for job satisfaction, and the residual stress that builds), then turns to what actually helps: Dr. Eric Gentry’s five resilience factors, the plain physical “big four” of eating, sleeping, exercising, and hydrating, and the distinctly Christian recognition that endless self-giving is a distortion rather than a virtue. The approach is grounded in the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, which holds that the caregiver is a whole person (body, mind, relationships, and spirit) whose care of others depends on being genuinely replenished.
Curriculum
-
Module 1
The Cost of Caring: Recognizing and Preventing Compassion Fatigue in Helping Professionals
- 1.From Empathy to Exhaustion: How Compassion Fatigue Forms and How to Build Resilience Against It
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