Do jobs in health and social care make you less sympathetic in your personal life?

[AnotherDayAnotherDoller]

Social workers, carers, support workers nurses, police and any i have missed?

I find myself often with generaly low tolerance or head space for friends and families woes! It's horrible sometimes but I just can't muster the energy.

I work with a particularly complex population who's life's have been and continue to be traumatic and chaotic. Generally my friends and family thankfully have no idea how horrific life can be for some.

I think I am so occupied in my work life with such heavy mental load that it leaves me pretty desensitised of the type of anxiety, stress and depression that most of us will experience at different stages in life.

I never used to feel like this, actually the opposite- which is what drove me into my career. I'm good at my job, I love it infact....but it leaves me pretty short on the space to be there for people in my personal life and I wonder do we all feel this?

One problem with that though is that the health professional can get so dismissive of their families' health that they fail to see when they are properly suffering or need to act quickly. I know someone very much dismissed by their health-care working spouse and have paid a high price for this, the spouse is now very sorry but they were so used to dismissing pain and discomfort as trivial, they failed to see when in fact it was not.

Going against the grain here but no, I don’t think it has made me less tolerant of people. But I do think it has made me more protective of my own time and energy or else I would just burn out.

Definitely have compassion fatigue.

Im a nurse manager and it’s not just all the 18 patients I’m there for, it’s 20+ staff who I provide supervision to most months and it is relentless. By the time I get home, it’s all ‘pull yourself together and get on with it’. I feel like I need to lie down in a dark room and not move!

I’m an RMN so it’s not great when you struggle to have compassion for friends and family but I’m good in a real crisis, just don’t have much compassion for the minor dramas.

I used to be, but now I have gone the other way and am finding it hard to deal with much smaller issues friends and familiy have and worry about them and feel anxious for them, I am worn down and my resiliance has gone. I can still do it inside work as that is my professional responsibility but that takes effort so I am moving away from front line work into a policy role.

Yes unfortunately; especially how people recently talk about trauma or “triggers” I end up thinking you don’t know what real trauma is. Same when people say they had a bad childhood. I don’t voice this though as I do understand that people’s experiences are their own and what they think of them and how they effect them is valid within itself.
On the positive side though it has made me understand people in my life a lot more and be more understanding of why they are the way they are

Yep. Chuck in a load of personal trauma and I cannot be doing with low level personal wibbles.
Weirdly, I find I'm more 'motherly' with my team, but probably because I know about burnout and some of them have also been through terrible things whilst dealing with a very draining day job.

My DH knows that my stock phrase is "unless it's spurting blood, changing colour or hanging off, you know where the painkillers are".

DH is a police officer and I'm an A&E doctor - I definitely thinks it limits the amount of tolerance you have for people making mountains out of molehills (looking at both DM and MIL here 🧐), and I do think compassion fatigue is absolutely a real thing. Not so much that stop caring about people's problems, but that your criteria for what constitutes an actual problem creep up and up (both for others and for yourself), and I sometimes need to remind myself that being upset or bothered by something relatively trivial is allowed! For me and for other people.

I do allow myself to be convinced about the occasional spurious day off school though - mostly because I think even if the 'sore tummy/ sore throat' is not an actual illness the fact they're feeling the need to manufacture or magnify it means they probably need a day of TLC. Would obviously have to change that if it became a regular thing but it seems to average about once a school year per child and I feel like we can all live with that.

I think it's made me much more pragmatic.

Whilst I'm empathetic, I am easily frustrated if people just want to constantly wallow and go over and over and over the same problem without doing anything to sort it out. I expect people at some point to sort their shit out and not expect others to do it for them.

Before the MN nutters come for me, every situation is different but we all know people who take the piss.

My brother is a GP in a deprived area. I find he is still very compassionate and has time for wibbles and wobbles. Maybe that is why he is doing the job he does.

I OTOH chose to be a lawyer. I am stone cold 😂

I’m also as cool as a cucumber in a crisis. I go into work mode and focus totally on the problem. My DH, headless chicken approach.
DH had a stroke a couple of years ago, I was dialling 999 and directing my DS to help DH into the living room as the early symptoms started. More room to get him on the floor for CPR and for the paramedics to work on him, at this point he was still able to walk. Had they given me a time of more than 15 mins id have carried DH into the car and driven him down to A&E.
I calmly asked the dispatcher to dispatch the ambulance before going through the lengthy assessment. I knew what I was looking at and made sure she knew I was HCP. She was great and accepted this, dispatched the ambulance then did the tick boxing.
The paramedics arrived in 15mins and were obviously intrigued how calm DS and I were. It was at this point that I realised that DS was also a none panicker.

As a result DH was in hospital with an hour and given anti clotting drug with 3.5hrs which prevented massive damage. I think that the ambulance crew thought I was some weird cold fish.
And yes, as the daughter of a nurse we had to be at deaths door to miss school. DS rarely had time off.
We were taught to ask questions to assess whether patients were telling the truth. People over-inflate symptoms which makes diagnosis difficult. We were taught to use open questions, closed questions often cloud the real problem.
I also learned how to entrap using old police methods of interrogation. Very useful when you are interviewing your child when something has gone missing or has been broken.
My poor DS never stood a chance.

Sometimes

i think it’s more about I can only take on so much. It’s take take take at work that’s the nature I love it but o only have so much compassion I can give and that’s for ds and a bit for those close to me

I do not get pulled into other peoples issues like I used to I have to look after myself too

I am very cool in a crises too

GP of 30 years.
I have no time for people who wallow in self pity endlessly without doing anything to change situation.
I am quite compassionate to close friends.

Someone has got to keep their heads whilst others are losing theirs.

Same here. Poor DH gets virtually no sympathy for his many minor ailments. He's always really kind and concerned to me if I'm ill though, which makes me feel bad!

I can't be doing with wallowers, either, and people who are triggered by everyfuckingthing.

It's compassion fatigue, I guess.

Yes empathy fatigue is a known 'thing'.
It's why I'd never have married anyone who has to use emotional intelligence in their work. Luckily for me dh only has to use his brain for work (although I think the company he works for could do with some communication skills training😬).
I think being perimenopausal doesn't help with my empathy tank which seems to be constantly running on low, and sometimes I'd love to do a 'doc Martin', to my pts obviously I never would but gawd at times it's tempting!
I've sometimes had patients say things lalong the lines of 'your husband is a lucky man'...hahahaha little do they know that the lovely, caring HCP in front of them is an absolute baggage at home!
I've found since reducing my hours I'm a bit more sympathetic to my dc and dh, but it's still a case of 'if you're not actively dying, stop making a fuss, if you are actively dying then please do it quietly!'
I do try and carve out time for my teens though, that might be going for a walk and talk or playing chess with ds, or going out for a run followed by a cafe stop with dd.

I do worry about that tbh.

Ah yes, the calm in a crisis person here too. I kicked in the elderly neighbours door about 18months ago when we were all worried for him. Found him dead on his bedroom floor, phoned the police, put the door back together etc. Not my first rodeo.

Same for when a neighbour pushed me in the street a few years back when I was protecting his girlfriend and her dog from him. He was trying to go through me. DH and his friend tried to step in, found me in front of them again and realised I was in control of the situation and stepped back. Police arrived, I pointed out the cars he'd smashed up when the girlfriend declined to make any allegations about his behaviour so at least he got arrested for that much. She left him the next day thank god.

My Dad had a heart attack in my living room about 15 years ago. Extremely cool 999 call, got the downstairs door open (1st floor flat), packed a bag for mum to take with them to the hospital with drinks, chargers, kindles etc (more for her than him!), saw them off in the ambulance, called work to say I'd not be in and drove up to the hospital behind them. One major bonus of spending so much time up there was knowing the security team who let me park in the Police bays so I saved a fortune in parking fees.....

DH says my "work mode" is slightly scary because my eyes change. I call it being completely calm and in control (ex police). Also I have an excellent "don't fuck with me or you'll regret it" face.

Absolutely. For me, though, I think it's less compassion fatigue and more perspective. I'm still kind to people even if I think they're making a mountain out of a molehill, particularly because I can recognise that how we experience our woes is all relative and coloured by our emotions and mental health. However, I do inwardly roll my eyes A LOT and go away from some conversations needing a good rant to another H&SC professional!

You are not alone. I find myself often holding my tongue or trying to word advice (when it is asked!) in a sensitive way to friends and family. For the most part they don’t mind my matter of fact approach and I am usually the one to call in a crisis but like others I am sure that my husband and family would appreciate a little more sympathy when unwell/going through a situation and a softer, less direct response.

but on the flipside - do people find you quite easy to talk about more difficult subjects such as mental health? Are you quite accepting and relaxed about opinions that might be polarising, such as politics? I find often people who work in these fields are, and it is so refreshing when everyone and their aunt seem to want to take ultimate offence at any opinion that doesn’t mirror theirs.

So many good responses on here, it's reassuring to hear this from outside of my work life!

I think a lot of it is surviving the job too!

I'm pretty good at not bringing the scary stuff from work home which I thinks important for my family who are not in touch with the world as I see it. But I hope I don't end up loosing all sympathy outside of work one day!

all the stories of being good in crisis - This definitely must be a symptom of the job! I've always found it easy to be calm - another tick on the psychopathy scale maybe aha.