Caring for the caregiver

Caring, assisting, accompanying, treating….. all professions that involve individual and close treatment where the work is based on the relationship with others can lead to emotional and physical exhaustion, which is also known as “burn out”.

In all jobs that involve direct attention to people, a close relationship is created, which can be brief or even last for years, depending on the field. When the daily work is to take care of others, we may have to sustain complicated and even violent situations, we may have to deal with the projections that people may make towards us and our own projections on them, we may have to manage the needs and the energetic state with which the person comes to us.

When the weight of all this overwhelms us we enter into what is known as burn out. This can go hand in hand with periods of anxiety and stress that will have a negative impact on important aspects of health such as rest, food and relationships. Periods of adrenal fatigue can also be experienced, leading to almost apathetic states, where tiredness is such that there is not much energy left to devote to the things that we really enjoy and nourish us.

The attention to people is one of the most transversal areas at the work level: the educational and social sector, the health sector, the therapeutic field, the ngo sector, security forces, people who work with different energetic and corporal techniques, facilitators of transformation spaces and a long etcetera.

And the difficult situation that we have been living for a year has only aggravated it: we can see how the levels of emotional and physical  stress in many professionals are skyrocketing.

Being at service of others, caring, attending, treating, is a precious and very valuable job. That is why it is worthwhile to take care of those who care.