We Need a Word for This Emotion

I remember reflecting early in my career about difficult situations I would often encounter and desire to help more than I could. As a crisis worker at the time, there were days when I'd long for resources that didn't exist, wishing I could magic someone a place to call their own or to trace back a family cycle of abuse to heal the entire tree. A supervisor introduced to me an acknowledgment that it is difficult to feel both responsible and powerless. I didn't have words for what I felt at that moment, but that seemed to fit. Those words were empowering.

Social workers, health care professionals, and therapists choose to walk with people through some of the darkest corners. Most of us enter this field with a hope to help others, people we haven't yet met. Still, compassion fatigue and burnout are noted to be hazards in the helping and healing professions. We have all met someone who seems to have burned through their capacities and who shows up as a shadow of themselves in their work or situation.

But it doesn't start there.

There needs to be a word for the emotion of wishing to alleviate someone's suffering yet being unable to.

It's something that I and most people in my life have experienced at one point or another, how we feel when we are in a place where anything we could offer feels insufficient.

You don't have to be a helping professional to feel it. When someone we love is seriously ill, or after a death, it's natural to feel almost desperate to do something. Sometimes, what we dream we could offer is not possible.

We have a word for taking joy in another person's pain, schadenfreude. We also have a word for mourning in someone's pain, empathy.

Compassion is both concern and desire to take action.

Still, there is no word for that in-between place.

Emotion vocabulary gives us language to communicate our experiences with others. To recognize that we are not alone in a human experience and support each other.

So, I'm going to call this emotion of a great desire to alleviate someone's suffering without the ability to do so "compassion fire." I believe that this particular emotion creates a need that if left unmet, can burn someone out. Taking a day off, or self-care can help. Yet, it carries with it a core need that no amount of days off can satisfy.

There is so much pain in the world. Sometimes, we are limited. Still, by leaning into our compassion, connecting, making meaning, and taking steps to show up for each other, we can make meaning of it. We can take our fiery passions and create a kinder world.