#Setting #limits #overempathizing #keys #emotional #wellbeing #veterinarians
“Los Health professionals have been educated and trained to care for others, not for self-care., and preventing emotional discomfort, stress and mental disorders in the veterinary community not only affects one’s own health and well-being and the quality of work, but is a commitment to the sustainability of the profession itself.” The psychologist says it Toni Calvopsychologist and director of the Galatea Foundation, a foundation that works for the mental health of health professionals and with which the Council has collaborated since 2022 within the framework of the Assís program.
It is within the framework of this collaboration, and with the aim of providing veterinarians with competencies and skills to manage their emotions and, therefore, self-care tools for their emotional well-being, that Diana Barenblit y Natàlia Comalrena de Sobregraucollaborating psychologists of the Galatea Foundation, recently offered a seminar entitled “Emotional competence and well-being at work”, organized by the Council of Veterinary Colleges of Catalonia.
One of the participants of the meeting was Ariadna Garciasmall animal clinical veterinarian, and what motivated her to sign up is that “Sometimes, in our work, we assume a lot of emotional burden from the people who come for consultation, and we don’t know how to manage it and we end up overwhelmed, emotionally overloaded.” Talking about basic emotions and understanding their functions is one of the first points addressed in the seminar; Next, the therapists proposed how to regulate them through self-regulation and co-regulation (that is, thanks to the bond with others).
“The seminar has helped me to recognize emotions that I did not know how to catalog, and to be aware that one way to advance in self-care is to know how to detect and recognize what is happening to you,” says Garcia, who, in this sense, values very positively the tools that the seminar has provided him, as well as “to prevent the things that we cannot control from affecting us.”
TAKE DISTANCE AND DON’T OVEREMPATHIZE
These tools are called emotional self-regulation skills. “In the training we talk about empathy, and we put a lot of emphasis on the fact that it is not about putting yourself in the other’s shoes, or in the other’s place, but rather it is about reaching a rational and emotional understanding of what the other person thinks and feels. another depending on their circumstances,” point out Barenblit and Comalrena de Sobregrau. For establish an empathic bond between the veterinarian and the client and the patient, the therapists consider that “we must maintain a distance from the client so as not to over-empathize”; and they do not speak of a distance from coldness, but of “taking perspective to understand the other person’s emotions and being able to accompany and support them, but taking into account their characteristics and without making their conflict ours”.
Another participant, who works carrying out audits for the food industry, confesses that, sometimes, when she finds an irregularity, moments of tension occur. She signed up for the seminar in search of tools to cope. What this colleague takes away from the seminar is that “The important thing is to take distance and, from there, act”. And he explains: “In my case, what happens is that I face people who do not comply with the regulations, and they are the ones who are doing something wrong, not me; Now I can understand that they are angry, but not with me, but with the role I play.”
LIMITS ARE PROTECTION, NOT PROHIBITION
“Limits regulate us; They are closely related to prohibition but, in reality, they are a protection: a traffic light, a terrace railing or a dog’s leash are limits, but at the same time they are protections. Limits give us security and regulate us emotionally because they allow us to know how far we have gone, what we can offer to others, and what we expect from others,” comment Barenblit and Comalrena de Sobregrau. Now, as the collaborators of the Galatea Foundation say, putting them together is not so easy: “You have to connect with your own needs, and with your own work and emotional capacity, and often we don’t do it for fear of disappointing, for fear of to rejection, due to the fear of losing an opportunity…”.
And something they agree on is that we must lose the fear of asking for help, “sometimes we don’t explain that we need help because we are ashamed, but we should care little about what others think and think more about what we think about ourselves.” says Garcia. In this sense, for her, “communicating it, the simple act of saying it, of expressing it, is already a weight that you take off your shoulders and a first step to move forward.”
For psychologists, one of the most important values of seminars like this is to give the possibility of sharing emotional experiences in a trustworthy space. “Different people, from different places, who do not know each other, end up finding many problems and concerns in common, and just because of that and realizing that they are not the only ones who suffer for some reason already has therapeutic value” , they emphasize.
