Emotions: feeling, witnessing and managing
If you are a healthcare professional you may (rightly) spend your time focussing physical care of patients and preserving life. In the event that a baby or child dies, this is challenging in so many ways and you are unable to reverse it. Sometimes people try not to become emotionally invested in order to protect themselves, but in these extreme circumstances, this isn’t possible. So how can you engage emotionally in a way which is healthy for you and useful for bereaved parents?
Compassion is described by leading emotions researcher, Brene Brown as, “the ability and willingness to empathise without judgment and face pain.” So compassion involves human connection, it is about sitting in the darkness without feeling the need to silverline, to minimise or attempt to distract from pain.
Brown describes empathy as, “feeling WITH people.” This doesn’t mean you must walk in their shoes, it doesn’t mean you take on their pain as your own, it means you recognise their emotions. Your role is not to fix their emotional pain, it is not to find a solution or to understand it as if it were your own – it is to witness it.
You may never (and hopefully will never) have felt anything as painful as the death of a child but you may have felt – lost, confused, despair, hopelessness, anguish, sadness, loss, anger, shock before and if you witness these emotions in bereaved parents your role is to validate and to use your experiences to connect.
The death of a child, at any age and of any cause is rightly badged as the worst thing that can happen to a person. It is therefore important to treat it as such. It is ok to show some emotion, that is part of feeling WITH people – you can cry because it is sad. When you are in a supportive role, it is important that your words, actions and emotions are focussed on supporting the person or people in pain, not on your own comfort. If you find yourself in uncontrollable tears, it may be more appropriate to take some time and handover to a colleague – the risks here are that the parents end up making YOU feel better.
Research indicates that compassion and empathy use different parts of the brain and that engaging in compassion can alleviate the distress caused by empathising excessively with someone in pain1. The literature suggests that training compassion may reduce the risks of burnout and strengthen resilience in this way. This is why some organisations are exploring compassionate leadership and provide spaces for reflective group supervision. As an individual, asking for support from your organisation is a strength, not a weakness, it shows self-awareness and reflects that you have been feeling WITH people and getting the support you need allows you to continue in your role effectively.
- Klimecki, O. M., Leiberg, S., Ricard, M., & Singer, T. (2014). Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 9(6), 873-879. ↩︎