Compassion Versus Empathy | Curious Now with Jenny Rudolph

Breaking eight ribs and puncturing a lung after hitting a tree in a downhill biking accident, Jenny got the coffin’s eye view of someone being completely flooded at the scene of an emergency: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Using Name-Claim-Aim as a crisis management strategy in the moment allowed the team to down-regulate their reactions and empathy regarding an injured family member to the point that they could manage the rescue.

There is a useful distinction between empathy and compassion, which are generally used interchangeably. Feeling someone’s emotional distress or physical pain can, very intuitively, add up to total drain on our resources and capacity. However, there’s also literature around the healing power of compassion. So is compassion fatigue a problem, or is compassion a good thing?

Empathy is a ‘feeling with,’ meaning that you are experiencing some version of the same suffering as the person. Compassion, on the other hand is ‘feeling for,’ which is caring without necessarily feeling. Empathy is the detection system so that your brain can identify what it is you should feel compassion and caring for.

Workout of the week: Notice 2-3 times when you feel either empathy or compassion, or the pathway from one to the other, and note “When am I feeling with, and when am I feeling for?”

Leadership Coaching from Jenny Rudolph: https://harvardmedsim.org/personal-leadership-coaching-with-jenny-rudolph/

#HCSimWeek26 #healthcaresimulation #nursing #medicine #debriefing #psychsafety