When the Heart Burns Out: Understanding Burnout, Empathy Fatigue, and Vicarious Trauma

November 12, 2025 — In the previous two posts (here and here), I shared stories from my own experiences with compassion fatigue. More precisely, it was empathy fatigue—the empathic overload that comes from caring deeply for my students’ suffering. I often found myself in empathic distress, overwhelmed by sadness for them, and with little emotional energy left for my family or my own children. Empathy fatigue is a kind of emotional depletion—the feeling that the heart has been wrung out.

The Distinction Between Burnout and Empathy Fatigue

What I didn’t explore previously was the burnout that accompanied that fatigue. Although it intensified my empathy fatigue, burnout was something distinct. By the time I resigned from my position, the public school system where I worked had shifted under new leadership—one prepared to cut programs serving our most vulnerable youth and communities. I still remember sitting in a meeting where a district representative referred to our students as “collateral damage.” I was appalled, offended, and deeply disheartened. These are the moments that plant the seeds of burnout.

Excellent adolescent service providers are, at their core, human service providers. We see and serve our young people from the heart. That’s what makes us effective—and what makes us vulnerable. Working in systems that treat our kids as demographics or statistics is not just discouraging; it’s a direct assault on our purpose.

The Systemic Roots of Burnout

Beyond the dehumanizing narratives within systems, burnout often arises in toxic workplace environments—where chronic stress, poor management, or workplace bullying become the norm. It takes hold through long-term exposure to heavy workloads, unclear expectations, lack of autonomy, and little recognition or support. Unlike compassion fatigue, burnout is not necessarily about others’ suffering—it’s about the systemic imbalances that erode our capacity to keep showing up with our whole selves.

These systems exist at every level: the workplace, the community, the state, and even nationally. Don’t let anyone tell you that our work isn’t political—it absolutely is. Every policy, every budget cut, every administrative decision affects the lives of our youth and those who serve them. The recent dismantling of the Department of Education has been among the most demoralizing developments I’ve seen since the early days of No Child Left Behind. Frustration, apathy, and resignation are telltale signs of burnout—signs that our spirit is withdrawing in self-protection.

When Trauma Echoes: The Layer of Vicarious Trauma

After leaving my role as director of an education program for street-involved youth, I immersed myself in my doctoral dissertation. It became an in-depth exploration of trauma—my own, my students’, and the vicarious trauma I carried from our shared experiences. Imagine a pinball machine with trauma energy as the silver ball, ricocheting from one point to another, hitting walls of pain, resilience, and exhaustion — this was me and my exile and protector parts trying to navigate systemic imbalances, old wounds awakened, and a demand from my deepest core to address what was waiting to be healed.

Vicarious trauma develops when repeated exposure to others’ trauma becomes internalized. Over time, service providers may begin to absorb aspects of those experiences, resulting in shifts in worldview and belief systems. This is a deep, internal process—affecting not just emotions or work satisfaction, but our sense of safety, trust, and meaning. The work becomes deeply personal because there is a resonance there. Whether it is a resonance between our pain and theirs, or between our humanity and open heart and their pain. 

In my experience, vicarious trauma grows on the combined foundation of empathy fatigue and burnout. The beliefs that take root might sound like: “There are no good answers. No one cares enough. I’m powerless. It’s too much, and I’m not enough.” These thoughts often emerge from fear, mistrust, and loss of safety—the emotional residue of trauma that’s not our own but has become part of us nonetheless.

Healing Through Boundaries and Support

Burnout, empathy fatigue, and vicarious trauma are not signs of weakness—they’re the body and soul’s signals that boundaries have been crossed too many times without restoration. Learning to set and maintain boundaries with integrity has been essential in my own healing and in supporting others. This is why I created my online workshop, Boundaries with Integrity, designed to help educators, counselors, and service providers prevent burnout and address the toxic workplace dynamics that can erode our wellbeing.

Resources for Reconnection

If you’re seeking tools for re-centering, my website offers a collection of free resources to support your growth and healing. These include breathing practices, the fundamental practice of validation, and guides for creating dynamic youth programs that nurture both young people and the adults who serve them. These resources are meant to restore balance—to remind us that caring for ourselves is the foundation for caring well for others.

Closing Reflections

Burnout, empathy fatigue, and vicarious trauma can feel isolating, but they are deeply human responses to deeply human work. By understanding these states, setting boundaries rooted in integrity, and practicing daily self-compassion, we can sustain the heart that drives our service. Healing begins when we recognize that our empathy is not infinite. Empathy can be a path to connection; compassion, however, is a much deeper well to draw from. When that compassion comes from Self Energy, it is an infinite well. Our Self-led compassion can hold a world of pain without buckling under the weight of it. That world of pain is met with Love, Courage, and a grounded knowing that we’re all in this together, that there is a way through, that we can hope and our hopes will not be rebuffed. The pain points of burnout, empathy fatigue, and vicarious trauma can be points of connection between our hearts and the hearts of the kids we work with and serve. 

Photo by: Juhku