Empathy’s Armor (A Nurses’ Defense)

I’m not a touchy feely person, nor have I ever been one that could be accused of “feeling things deeply”.  My average emotional state is “pretty good”.  My highs are never that high, and my lows are never that low.  You could call it being boring, or peaceful, depending on your perspective. This used to bother me quite a bit, probably because God blessed me with very close friends who were the polar opposite of my emotional composition. Who felt things very deeply, and were comfortable with emotional expression (it makes me a little squirmy).  I would try and mimic their enthusiasm and sincerity, but it always felt flat and a little fraudulent.  Falling in love with my husband introduced me for the first time to passion (!) and having kids introduced me to an emotional spectrum that I hitherto hadn’t known possible (good and bad) – both stretching my composition to something a little more dimensional. Yet even with the great expansion my kids brought to my heart, I still see other moms’ tears on first days of preschool and kindergarten through my bone dry eyes.  Sorry darlings.  Maybe I’ll cry at college drop off. Or dance.  Time will tell.

I used to worry that my lack of deep feeling would be a problem for my chosen profession of nursing. Because nurses are supposed to be like caring and empathetic and stuff.  But I’ve learned something.  You don’t have to feel deeply to care deeply. Some of us engage the world with our feelings first, some of us with our minds.  Neither is better and both have their downfalls.  I can deeply and sincerely want and work for what’s best for my patient without anything squeezing inside me or any tears brimming in my eyes.  And I’ve learned something else.

Feeling deeply is often not an asset in the field of healthcare.  In the ER where I work, as well as in so many other areas of healthcare, you can go through one heartbreaking story after another from the start of your shift to the end of your shift, and if you feel all the emotions of what each person must be going through – you will not survive.  As a nurse I need to be empathetic, but I also have to clothe that empathy in a good layer of armor.  The empathy keeps me caring, the armor provides the emotional removal necessary to work in areas full of pain, sadness, and loss.  I need to be able to help lift a body into a body bag, and then step out to take care of my other patients with a smile on my face.

For me, my innate disposition has made that balance of attentive removal come naturally, for others it’s a learned skill. For all of us, the challenge is to keep the armor from becoming the flesh.  We can lose the soft sense of caring underneath and over time become quite apathetic. Burn out and all that.

But even with the armor, and even with my innate emotional dullness, we all have those unguarded moments of vulnerability. When the unexpected or the particularly tragic strikes. When you’re the team to try and save a co worker’s life but in the end it’s not yours to save. When the mom of a drowned child is wailing outside the room. For me it’s usually those nights I can’t fall asleep, and a progressive mental assault of faces and stories begin.  Then I’m again looking into the eyes of a dying man and I can feel his fear. I can see the deep brown eyes of that sweet baby before injuries inflicted by one who should have been his protector closed them for good. I can hear heart wrenching screams of loss. There without my armor I begin to feel. And it can be too much.

All that to say, sometimes the trait that you think will be inhibitive can actually be protective.  And maybe I actually am cut out to do this- armed with God’s grace, empathy, and just enough armor.