I think it’s safe to say that most of us vets enter the profession because we care deeply. That capacity to care is not just a personality trait; it’s a clinical tool, applied many times a day, across every consultation, every euthanasia, every grieving client. But there is a paradox at the heart of this work. The very quality that makes veterinary teams exceptional is also the quality most at risk of being quietly exhausted.
Understanding why requires a distinction that is often overlooked: the difference between empathy and compassion.
Empathy, as the psychologist Carl Rogers described it, means sensing another person’s inner world as though it were your own but crucially, without losing that “as if” quality. He observed that this is only possible for someone secure enough in themselves to enter another’s experience and still return to their own (Rogers, 1974). When that boundary dissolves i.e. when a clinician no longer experiences a client’s distress as if it were their own, but simply as their own, something significant has shifted.
This is the mechanism that neuroscientists Klimecki and Singer (2012) identified when they proposed replacing the term “compassion fatigue” with the more precise empathic distress fatigue. Continual activation of empathy for pain responses can lead to a strong aversive, self-oriented reaction to the suffering of others accompanied by a desire to withdraw in order to protect oneself from excessive negative feelings (Watson et al., 2025). It is, in other words, the cost of feeling with rather than caring for.
Compassion is different. Where empathy involves the capacity to share the feelings of others, compassion is oriented toward concern for others and the motivation to help. (Singer & Klimecki, 2014). Neuroscientific research has shown that compassion training can reverse increases in negative affect and instead augment positive affect, activating a distinct brain network associated with warmth and prosocial motivation (Klimecki et al., 2014). Compassion, then, does not deplete in the same way. It sustains.
This distinction matters practically for practice owners. Without addressing empathic distress, organisations face high absenteeism, loss of teamwork, and reduced clinical effectiveness (Carreras, 2021). These are not signs of weakness in individuals, but they are signs of an unmanaged professional hazard. When a team member becomes withdrawn, cynical, or emotionally flat, they are not caring less. They may have been caring, unprotected, for too long.
Therapeutic support in the form of counselling or psychotherapy offers a direct and evidence-based response to this. In a confidential one-to-one setting, a therapist can help veterinary professionals identify where their empathic boundaries have eroded, process accumulated distress, and rebuild the psychological security that Rogers described as essential — the capacity to enter another’s world and return, intact, to their own. Crucially, working with a therapist who also understands the veterinary context means that nothing needs to be explained or minimised. The moral weight of economic euthanasia, the particular grief of losing a patient whose owner could not afford treatment, the cumulative toll of daily exposure to suffering – all of it can be held and worked with directly.
This is not about making veterinary professionals less empathic. It is about helping them sustain the right kind of care, that is compassionate, boundaried, and resilient… for the long term. For practice owners, providing access to specialist therapeutic support is not simply a wellbeing gesture. It is a sound investment in the clinical and operational health of the whole practice.
References
Carreras, S. (2021). Compassion Fatigue in Veterinary Medicine. [online] MentorVet. Available at: https://www.mentorvet.net/articles/compassion-fatigue.
Klimecki, O. & Singer, T. (2012). Empathic distress fatigue rather than compassion fatigue? Integrating findings from empathy research in psychology and social neuroscience. In B. Oakley, A. Knafo, G. Madhavan & D. Sloan Wilson (Eds.), Pathological Altruism (pp. 368–383). Oxford University Press.
Klimecki, O.M., Leiberg, S., Ricard, M. & Singer, T. (2014). Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(6), 873–879. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nst060
Rogers, C. (1974). Carl Rogers on Empathy; Part 1. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_ORjFWhMqY
Singer, T. & Klimecki, O.M. (2014). Empathy and compassion. Current Biology, 24(18), R875–R878.
Watson, T., Waters, R., Watts, L. and Hodgson, D. (2025). Exploring the Challenges of Empathy in a Therapeutic Context: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Qualitative Health Research. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/10497323251331460.
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