Ironically, emotional empathy is detrimental to the very people you serve.

Bloom even says empathy can “make us worse at being friends, parents, husbands, and wives,” because sometimes an act of love involves doing something that causes pain rather than relieving it, such as confronting an awful truth.

The notion that compassion costs, but that the cost can be budgeted for, managed, absorbed – paid – is not the most intuitive one. In fact it runs counter to many prevalent media messages about compassion fatigue and the futility of attempting to engage with ‘big’ social problems. (What’s the point? What difference could I make, anyway?) But nevert