Ep 679: Running on Empty: Compassion Fatigue and Grief in TNR, with Jen Blough, LPC Licensed Professional Counselor & Author

"It's about knowing your limits, knowing where you are energy-wise, time-wise, resource-wise, and just doing what you can — and knowing that is enough, and that is making a difference."

This episode is sponsored-in-part by Maddie's Fund, OcuTrap, and Neighborhood Cats TNR Certification Workshop.

Jen Blough returns to the podcast after nearly a decade away — she was featured in the show's first fifty episodes — to talk about the work she's built in the years since: helping animal welfare professionals name and navigate the emotional toll of the field. A licensed professional counselor, former shelter worker and animal control officer, and lifelong animal advocate, Jen didn't set out to specialize in compassion fatigue. She backed into it in grad school, when a professor described the symptoms of secondary traumatic stress and she realized he was describing her own life.

Much of the conversation is spent untangling terms that get used interchangeably but aren't the same thing. Jen breaks down compassion fatigue as the combination of burnout (which comes from your environment — under-resourced organizations, systemic failures, day-to-day friction) and secondary traumatic stress (which comes from absorbing someone else's trauma, human or animal). She walks through how moral distress and moral injury fit in — the no-good-options decisions that TNR caregivers and shelter workers face constantly — and why none of these, despite how real they feel, show up in the DSM.

The back half of the conversation turns to grief, and this is where the discussion gets specific to community cat work. Jen introduces two concepts: disenfranchised grief (loss that society doesn't validate, which often includes animal loss) and ambiguous loss (grief without closure — not knowing what happened to a cat who stops showing up at a colony). Stacy and Jen talk through the real tension caregivers face around outdoor cats aging out of a colony, and how organizations can handle transparency with volunteers about euthanasia and loss without either traumatizing them or leaving them in the dark. Jen closes with practical advice on knowing your limits and recognizing that showing up in smaller ways — a donation, a shared post, a bag of food — still counts as meaningful advocacy.

Press Play Now For:

• The real difference between burnout, compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress, moral distress, and moral injury
• Why compassion fatigue isn't a diagnosable condition, and how it can fluctuate day to day
• Disenfranchised grief and why animal loss so often gets dismissed by people outside the field
• Ambiguous loss — the particular grief of not knowing what happened to a cat who never returns to the feeding station
• How organizations can navigate telling (or not telling) volunteers about euthanasia and cat loss
• Jen's advice for recognizing your capacity and letting "not right now" be an acceptable answer
• A first look at Jen's forthcoming book and new certification program for animal welfare professionals

Resources & Links

• Jen Blough's website
• Beyond Compassion Fatigue: Trauma, Resilience, and Recovery in Animal Care and Advocacy — pre-order
• To Save a Starfish: A Compassion Fatigue Workbook for the Animal Welfare Warrior
• Beyond Compassion Fatigue podcast