Compassion Fatigue & Burnout in Nonprofit Leadership: One Leader’s Honest Story

As I sat at the table, like I had done joyfully so many times during the past six and a half years, I struggled. I yearned to find connection, conversation and a mindful presence. My mind was elsewhere. 

The neighbor in front of me deserved the dignity of presence, and I tried. I started like I had so many times and introduced myself and asked his name.  

I asked, “Where are you from? Where’d you grow up?”  

He shared his name was Alex, and he grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. We talked about Tennessee and his family. He asked if I’d ever visited. 

I shared that I had visited: Dollywood, Graceland and Nashville, and that I was actually a Nashville TV star when I was a little girl.  

My family was traveling on one of our many road trips in the summer. We visited the filming of a show called, Nashville Now, and the producers asked the audience to answer a question, “What do you put on your hot dog?”  

I was selected to share mine on the air and on TV! Now picture me, in perfect form, with my big, curly Texas hair and my big Texas smile, sharing my big Texas list of critical ingredients that I slather on my hot dog at every barbecue: ketchup, chili, cheese, onions and sweet pickle relish.  

I also shared that my hometown was: Littlefield, Texas. It is indeed a little field in the middle of the West Texas plains and the hometown of one of the original, legendary outlaws, Waylon Jennings. 

I smiled with pride. I owned my hometown and my list of condiments to mask a plain ole hot dog. 

It became an even bigger deal that I was on TV during the summer, because small town news travels fast, and there’s not a lot of it in a little field. It became a front page story in our hometown newspaper: The Lamb County Leader News! 

Quickly hot dogs became big news, and I was a local celebrity! 

We laughed at my story. We talked some more about Nashville and its music scene, some of his favorite parts of the state including the mountains. How he’d made it to Tampa, and what brought him to Trinity Cafe, a free restaurant serving a three-course hot meal for neighbors. 

It was an easy conversation, and yet, it was hard. Hard for me to be present. Challenging for me to empathize with his journey and how he got here. I was so tired. He could have been any guest or neighbor. These names, these stories had become interchangeable to me. While each one was unique, it no longer felt unique, it just felt stale, empty and like the line would never end. 

A colleague shared that many years ago he approached me near the end of our lunch service the first time he served at Trinity Cafe to ask if the line had ended.  

I responded, “The line never ends. We simply stop serving at 12:30.” 

It sounds so straight-forward, yet it also sounds so hopeless to me. The line indeed never ends. Every day, there’s a new line of neighbors who need our help. Every day filled with human suffering and unmet basic needs like food and housing.  

It used to fill me with meaning, a sense of purpose, and a reason to get up every day, but in this season, I was despondent.  

I shared with a close friend and my therapist that the work had become meaningless to me.  

It was so disingenuous and incongruent with the leader and person that I knew myself to be. Yet, it was true. I had headaches every day. I was beyond tired. I was waking up with pain in my jaw from grinding my teeth. I struggled to do the work of leading. I wasn’t as patient or kind with my colleagues, our guests, or myself.  

I had burnout and compassion fatigue.  

I recognized it, and yet, I had no idea what to do about it. 

Earlier in the year, I had read: Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Code by Emily Nagoski, PhD, and Amelia Nagoski, DMA. 

Burnout was first coined by Herbert Freudenberger in 1975 and defined by three components: 

1. Emotional exhaustion — the fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long; 

2. Depersonalization — the depletion of empathy, caring, and compassion; and 

3. Decreased sense of accomplishment — an unconquerable sense of futility: feeling that nothing you do makes any difference. 

When I first started serving our neighbors struggling with hunger and homelessness, I could barely make eye contact because it made me so sad. I was wrecked with seeing human suffering that I had not known existed until it confronted me in a line of neighbors. It broke my heart. I wanted to do more. 

After more than ten years serving in community-based organizations addressing hunger and homelessness, I saw myself in Freudenberger’s definition. I felt it as I drove familiar routes around my city, and I saw neighbors sleeping under the underpass and begging for change at the intersection. 

In this season, it seemed that nothing I did made any difference at all. 

Burnout is highly prevalent, especially in the nonprofit industry. Even before the pandemic, a study from Nonprofit HR https://www.nonprofithr.com/research-data/ revealed that 

45% of responding nonprofit employees indicated that they will seek new or different employment in the next five years. Of that group, 23% said that nonprofits would not be among the types of organizations they intend to pursue — in fact, they intend to leave the nonprofit world.  

Fundraisers were prone to burnout and quick job turnover long before the pandemic with the average tenure being approximately 18 months. Past surveys by the Association of Fundraising Professionals found 75 percent were considering quitting in any given year. The pandemic encouraged some to be more conservative, with just 50 percent of fundraisers saying they had thoughts of quitting last year. https://www.philanthropy.com/newsletter/fundraising-update/2021-09-22 

I cried out to God, “Mercy.” I need help. I can’t do this anymore. 

It wasn’t actually the first time that these feelings plagued me. They had shown up in my body before. It was about five years ago. My mouth was on fire, it hurt to eat, the pain, the stinging. I had for more than two months been diagnosed with recurring yeast infections in my mouth, also known as thrush, which is common in babies.  

Our bodies are somatic. If we don’t deal and process our stress and our emotions, they leak out, or they find a place and we hold onto them in our body. 

With the help of a holistic therapist, I discovered that the source of thrush were the words that I was leaving unsaid: the stress of not being able to articulate and share my fears and my sadness. The vicarious trauma that I was experiencing by entering into relationships with neighbors and colleagues experiencing hunger and homelessness was showing up every day in my body, and particularly in my mouth, causing me great pain. 

She worked with me to find ways to share that pain in a writing exercise. She encouraged me to ask myself very simple questions about the pain and write it down with my right hand. Then, I was to transfer my pen to my left hand and answer those questions with my left. It was such an awkward exercise. The question so abundantly clear, neat, precise. The answer shaky, squiggly, almost illegible and whittled down to a few words that I could write with my non- dominant hand. 

The last time my body revolted it took eventually writing a resignation letter, which I never turned in. I also had to use medication and diet changes to combat the recurring yeast issue, and employ some new strategies to combat my stress. It also took precious time. 

So this time, I felt like I knew what I needed: the time to process. I scheduled a couple vacations. I took time away and really unplugged. Like many, I had banked a good amount of paid time off during the pandemic, and I took more than three weeks over a couple months: one week in July, 10 days in September, and another week in October. I visited Texas, Yellowstone and one of my favorite beaches, Anna Maria Island. 

When I came home from each trip, I felt rested, refreshed and reinvigorated. But it didn’t last long, a couple days at most. Then I would be triggered by a relatively common encounter with a neighbor, a conversation with a colleague, any number of workplace conflicts, and all of those same emotions returned. 

If you’re unfamiliar with compassion fatigue, it is sometimes referred to as the cost of caring or STS (secondary trauma syndrome). Signs of compassion fatigue include: 

• Checking out, emotionally-faking empathy when you know you’re supposed to feel it, because you can’t feel the real thing anymore;  

• Minimizing or dismissing suffering that isn’t the most extreme— “It’s not slavery/genocide/child rape/nuclear war, so quit complaining”; 

• Feeling helpless, hopeless, or powerless, while also feeling personally responsible for doing more; and 

• Staying in a bad situation, whether a workplace or a relationship, out of a sense of grandiosity— “If I don’t do it, no one will.” (Burnout, Nagoski & Nagoski, p. 96) 

I cried, and I walked a lot turning things over and over in my mind struggling internally with what to do next. I talked to my therapist and trusted mentors and friends.  

“Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.” Tony Robbins 

I was coached by a brilliant mentor and friend to ask for what I needed: a pathway to depart, a graceful exit. 

I wrote a graceful exit strategy. I printed it out. I carried it around for a couple weeks until I had the right opportunity to ask, and I knew, it was time. 

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens,” Ecclesiastes 3:1. 

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened… in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you,” Matthew 7:7-12 

I was greeted with more compassion than I was showing myself. I received grace, acceptance and understanding. When I started sharing with others, I heard stories that mirrored my own. 

“Many of us are taught to see a shift in goals as ‘weakness’ and ‘failure,’ where another culture would see courage, strength, and openness to new possibilities. We have been taught that letting go of a goal is the same as failing” (Burnout, Nagoski & Nagoski, p. 47). 

For years, I have become an expert at covering up, pushing down, ignoring my emotions, my feelings and soldiering on. Much like I do with my hot dog, I mask the substance with lots of condiments and toppings. 

There is freedom and peace that comes from sharing our suffering and our hardships with others. There’s also an implied invitation to share your own. We are not alone in this. 

By prioritizing my own health and dreams, I have let go of one goal to pursue another. It does not mean that my feelings or my stress have disappeared though. 

I have found odd, new stress-related symptoms: eczema on the back of my neck, a constant need to scratch at it, and continued jaw pain from clenching and grinding my teeth when I sleep. Those emotions they still find a way to come out.  

My challenge today is to actually acknowledge the emotions, uncover and process them. Sit with those difficult feelings, and as the Nagoski sisters recommend: complete the stress cycle. 

“Being compassionate toward yourself— not self-indulgent or self-pitying, but kind— is both the least you can do and the single most important thing you can do to make the world a better place” (Burnout, Nagoski & Nagoski, p. 211). 

That hot dog is still underneath all those condiments, even if I don’t taste it. 

Mandy