Frontline work can carry emotional weight, working with people who have been through high levels of trauma or distress. But for many teams right now, that weight is becoming harder to hold.
Between 40% and 85% (Mathieu, 2012) of helping professionals can experience compassion fatigue and for some, it contributes to leaving the profession altogether.
Across frontline services, people are supporting others through:
- Trauma and distress
- Mental health challenges
- Crisis situations and safeguarding concerns
- Poverty, homelessness, and uncertainty
- Grief, loss, and isolation
- Substance use and complex support needs
- Systems that can feel stretched, under-resourced, or difficult to navigate
Often, while managing increasing pressure, emotional demands, and limited time or resources themselves.
Sarah Brown. Platfform Associate Psychologist explains:
“When the work is heavy and when we are working alongside trauma, injustice and complexity a lot of the time, that inevitably has an impact on us.”
Over time, carrying that much distress without enough space to process it has an impact and can lead to compassion fatigue and eventually burnout.
What exactly is compassion fatigue?
Compassion fatigue is the emotional and physical exhaustion that happens when someone is repeatedly affected by the traumatic experiences of others, often through hearing or witnessing detailed first-hand accounts as part of their work.
Over time, the stories shared by clients or members of the public can begin to affect us emotionally. Even though we have not experienced the trauma ourselves, the images, feelings, and details can stay with us, impacting how we think, feel, and respond.
This can make it difficult to switch off from work or to shake off the emotional weight of what we have heard or seen, particularly for those working in caring, supportive, or frontline roles.
It’s sometimes called secondary traumatic stress or vicarious trauma.
Put simply, you don’t have to experience trauma directly to be affected by it.
In many frontline roles, people spend their days listening to difficult experiences before moving quickly onto the next task, visit, meeting, or crisis.
But people aren’t machines. Difficult conversations, distress, and trauma don’t simply disappear because the working day ends.
Our Associate Trainer, Osian Leader, describes compassion fatigue as a gradual movement away from empathy and connection, both with others and ourselves.
Compassion Fatigue is a path taken away from empathy but also from ourselves leaving us exhausted.
Empathy is being able to stand in somebody else’s story and witness the world as they have always experienced it. This requires effort since our own lived experiences are likely to differ or even have no reference points or relevance to what we are bearing witness too. Therefore, empathy is about connection and the energy and effort we put into it.
When we give of ourselves in this way it’s important to somehow restore through rest and self-care. If we don’t, we can reach a point where the red light of the empty tank begins to blink. As the tank nears empty empathy becomes problematic and we slip into sympathy.
Sympathy is ‘sitting with’, as in empathy, but we lack the ability to sit in their story. We begin to view everything through the lens of own experiences rather theirs. There’s a connection but it’s based an exchange of experiences rather than one trying to understand the other. Once we are are on the path of sympathy, apathy isn’t very far away.
Apathy is a disconnection leading to a state of indifference. In compassion fatigue this also includes things like irritability, frustration, distress and exhaustion. Therefore, compassion fatigue could be defined as a place of psychological, emotional and physical exhaustion where we have given of ourselves to a point where we lose ourselves.
This understanding is important because compassion fatigue isn’t simply about being tired. It’s about the impact that prolonged emotional giving can have when there isn’t enough opportunity for restoration, reflection, and support.
Why can compassion fatigue happen within housing and frontline work?
Compassion fatigue can affect anyone in caring roles such as nurses, social workers, emergency services. Recently, Platform has been working with many Welsh housing teams and we hear first hand about the pressures and environments people are working in.
Housing officers can be in a person’s life during some of their most difficult moments. They support people experiencing homelessness, severe mental health challenges, substance use, and the impact of trauma and unmet needs while taking the time to build trust.
And they do this while navigating systems that can feel stretched, under-resourced, and difficult to move through.
“I feel like the shock absorber between the system and people’s lives. I go home replaying conversations.” Housing officer, Wales
Add to that the current context: over 100,000 people on social housing waiting lists in Wales. Rising complexity of need. Limited housing options. Budget pressures. And a policy direction that rightly asks teams to do prevention-focused, trauma-informed, relational work, while the conditions make that harder every year.
When people are constantly holding crisis without enough opportunity to pause, reflect, or reset, eventually something has to give.
Signs of compassion fatigue, in yourself and your team
It can impact people differently within an organisation but here are some signs to look out for:
- Feeling that nothing you do makes a difference for people they support
- Difficulty switching off at the end of the day
- Struggling to feel joy, even doing activities they usually like
- Intrusive thoughts or replaying difficult conversations
- Feeling overwhelmed and exhausted
- Emotional numbness or going through the motions
- Disrupted sleep, headaches, or physical tension
- Withdrawing from colleagues or becoming isolated
Compassion fatigue often affects people who care deeply for a long time without time to process the emotional impact of their work.
What do people need?
The answer isn’t simply telling people to be more resilient or practise more self-care. Compassion fatigue is often shaped by the conditions people are working within, which means support needs to exist at both an individual and organisational level.
As Sarah Brown explains:
“Wellbeing isn’t optional, it’s absolutely necessary because we are the tools.”
Caring makes us feel emotionally vulnerable, but we are emotionally vulnerable when we care. And that’s a that’s a good thing. We don’t want our protective parts to shut that down and to harden. We want to stick with our empathy. Like our empathy is about our shared humanity and we can’t risk losing that. So we do have to look after ourselves.
It’s about thinking about what conditions do we need to manage when we are hearing really difficult things everyday.
Psychological safety in work, connections with our team, our purpose, especially the hard days when you might question why am I doing this”
What we’ve seen in our work with organisations across Wales is that a number of protective factors can make a meaningful difference.
Safe and supportive environments
Osian Leader explains:
“What’s needed to avoid things like burnout, vicarious trauma, and compassion fatigue is a trauma-informed environment. This places an emphasis on safety while identifying the factors that can lead to potential difficulties.
This is something the working environment can provide through training. It’s also about understanding our own boundaries while keeping a manageable work/life balance. Switching off and doing other things that allow us to engage and connect with others in different ways”
Setting boundaries
Boundaries allow us to keep doing the work sustainably. We know our limits and recognise when we are reaching them.
Boundaries aren’t barriers; they aren’t the opposite of being kind. They are the frame that holds the work safely for both the worker and the person receiving support.
Sarah Brown explains:
“Different parts of us will influence the boundary setting. We need to practice self awareness and compassionate curiosity towards all parts of us and of the people we support that struggle with boundaries”
“There’s a part of us that is terrified not to please people, not to help people, not to say no. We really don’t want to let people down. We really don’t want someone to be suffering. Sometimes that might come at our own expense, especially in trauma saturated systems.”
“If I say no, I might feel rejection. My team might think I’m not as caring as them, not as committed to this job. That feels terrible.”
The constant invitations to do a bit more, to erode our boundaries, just to work a bit longer, just to finish that thing at the end of the day, just to come in when it’s not on your day off, just, you know, the constant invitations to just give a little bit more because there’s so much need.”
What could boundary-holding sound like in practice
“I can’t meet you outside of work hours, but let’s make a plan for next time we meet.”
“I can’t do that for you, but I’ll help you find the next step.”
Or perhaps it’s you need a break, you’re not going to work over your hours and instead take the time to go for a walk, see friends or whatever it is that supports your wellbeing.
We can be both kind and firm, compassionate and accountable. These are not opposites.
Reflection and curiosity
Reflection creates space to slow down and make sense of our experiences rather than simply reacting to them.
It can help us:
- Shift from control to curiosity
- Notice which parts of ourselves are reacting
- Explore the “what ifs”
- Understand the wider systems pressures affecting our work
- Make meaning from difficult experiences
- What are the system pressures that can make boundaries hard to hold?
Connection and relationships
Small teams, lone working, and back-to-back visits with little time to decompress can all intensify the emotional impact of the work.
Building genuine peer support into team culture matters enormously. Not simply wellbeing policies on paper, but environments where people feel psychologically safe enough to talk honestly about how they’re doing.
We heal and sustain ourselves through connection and shared opportunities to make sense of what is happening. When we can see it’s not just us and with help from others, there’s room to change the story. When we are struggling with work, what are we telling ourselves? Is it not right for me? Opportunities to see things differently, and what am I not responsible for?
The work becomes possible together, not alone and we recognise the things we can’t change.
Facilitated reflective practice or supervision
Reflective spaces give people permission to pause, think, and process the emotional realities of their work. They create opportunities to explore challenges, celebrate successes, and understand the impact the work is having on them.
People can’t continue holding complexity without spaces to process it.
Phil Richardson, Operations for Platfform values reflective spaces for himself and his team:
“Supervision helps me make sense of my feelings and helps me process stuff um and that’s really really important for me um because I think in my role what I was seeing what I was seeing my role as is being there to to hold others and it was that sense of it.
Sometimes there is a lack of agency and a lack of direction so we we try and build in opportunities for people to have safe spaces to talk”
Managers who can recognise it
Managers cannot remove every pressure their teams face. But they can create cultures where people feel safe enough to talk honestly about how they are doing and seek support when they need it.
One of the biggest protective factors in any team is a manager who understands what compassion fatigue can look like, notices changes early, and creates enough psychological safety for honest conversations.
“Relational and reflective practice protects staff working with complexity. Wellbeing isn’t optional, it’s what makes this work possible.”
Compassion fatigue has real consequences for organisations as well as individuals:
- Increased sickness absence
- Staff turnover
- Reduced quality of resident interactions
- The loss of experienced workers who take years of knowledge and relationships with them.
When people feel supported, connected, and able to process the emotional reality of their work, teams are more sustainable, relationships are stronger, and people are more able to stay in roles
Final thoughts
Compassion fatigue is a human response to sustained emotional labour, ongoing exposure to distress, and systems that are often struggling themselves.
If we treat compassion fatigue as an individual problem, we focus only on personal coping strategies and ask people to keep pushing through.
When we begin to invest in the things that help people stay well: connection, reflection, supervision, supportive leadership, and psychologically safe workplaces, people are less likely to reach emotional exhaustion.
The people working across housing and frontline services are doing incredibly important work in increasingly difficult circumstances.
They are supporting people through crisis, uncertainty, trauma, and loss every day.
The question isn’t whether this work affects people. It does. The question is whether organisations create the conditions that help people process that impact, sustain themselves, and continue doing work that matters.
Interested in vicarious trauma training?
This three-hour session is designed to give a deeper understanding of vicarious trauma, recognising how it can impact people differently and what helps to manage its impact over time. The training aims to help participants to:
- Understand what it is, why it happens and who may be more likely to be affected
- Recognise early signs of vicarious trauma in ourselves and others
- Learn strategies for reducing high risk and looking after your wellbeing
Start a conversation with us to find out more.
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