The Unspoken Cost of Compassion in School Counseling

Caring is what makes you good at this job. It’s also what puts you in the most danger.

If you’re a school counselor who still cares deeply about students, but you’ve noticed yourself feeling flatter, heavier, or more guarded than you used to- this episode is for you.

You’re still showing up. 
Still doing the work. 
But the caring itself has started to weigh on you, and you don’t know why.

In this episode, I talk about a kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from being busy or overwhelmed. It builds from sitting with hard stories, holding emotional weight, and being the safe place for everyone else inside a role that rarely offers closure or relief.

This isn’t about burnout.
It’s about the unspoken cost of compassion in school counseling.

If you’ve ever thought, "Something feels wrong, but I don’t know how to name it," this conversation will help make it make sense.

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Episodes I referred to:

Ep. 87- Some of the Best School Counseling Advice I've Ever Heard

Ep. 180- The Question School Counselors NEVER Get Asked

Ep. 181- Why School Counselors Are So Tired (It’s Not Burnout)

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Join the next-level conversation in my Substack.

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Want support with real-world strategies that actually work on your campus? We’re doing that every day in the School for School Counselors Mastermind. Come join us! 

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All names, stories, and case studies in this episode are fictionalized composites drawn from real-world circumstances. Any resemblance to actual students, families, or school personnel is coincidental. Details have been altered to protect privacy.

This work is part of the School for School Counselors body of work developed by Steph Johnson, LPC, CSC, which centers role authority over role drift, consultative practice over fix-it culture, adult-designed systems and environments as primary drivers of student behavior, clinical judgment over compliance, and school counselor identity as leadership within complex systems.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Window Moment
• 1:54 Naming Compassion Fatigue
• 4:15 Responsibility Without Authority
• 6:13 High Demand, Low Control
• 8:46 Why Good Counselors Feel It Most
• 10:57 How Compassion Fatigue Creeps In
• 13:41 Accumulation, Not Decline
• 15:30 What Actually Helps
• 18:09 Pulling The Threads Together
• 20:30 Clarity, Next Steps, Encouragement

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:07

Years ago, I walked out of a difficult meeting. It was about a student with severe safety concerns. Their mental health was escalating, and there were no good answers in that room. But I didn't go back to my desk afterward. I remember walking down the hallway to my office. I shut the door and I just stood there, staring out the window. And I had no words, not even internally. No emotion, even, just flat. And here's what scared me. Even hopeless would have felt like an improvement. At least hopeless was something. This was blank. At the time I did not have language for what was happening. I just knew that the concerns kept stacking up. I was the one that everybody kept coming to, and no matter how hard I tried, nothing seemed to be getting better. I thought I was burning out, but I wasn't. Or at least it wasn't just that. Now I know what I was experiencing, and I know why it hit school counselors so dang hard. Hey school counselor, welcome back. If you've been following along over the last few episodes, you've heard me talk about why so many school counselors feel stuck. In episode 180, we talked about responsibility without authority. In episode 181, we looked at why that exhaustion you feel is a burnout. And today we're gonna go one layer deeper. We're gonna talk about compassion fatigue, what it actually is, and why it so often shows up after years of being really, really good at your job. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity about your work and maybe a little bit of rebellion, you are in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast. There's a moment that a lot of school counselors describe that sounds like this. I still care, but something feels off. So this is when you're not imploding and you're not crying in the parking lot every day, and you're you're not Googling alternative careers for school counselors at midnight. But you do feel heavier. You're more irritable than you used to be. You feel more flat in situations that used to hit you emotionally. And then you go home tired in a way that sleep doesn't really help. And that's usually when this internal monologue kicks in. And it starts saying things like, I must be bad at boundaries. Maybe I'm not cut out for this anymore. Maybe I've lost my edge. And intellectually, those explanations seem to make sense, but they're also usually not the right explanations. There is a name for this experience, and it's compassion fatigue. And I want to be really clear first about what compassion fatigue does not mean. It's not a diagnosis, it's not a disorder or evidence that something is wrong with you or wrong with the way that you work. In the research world, compassion fatigue is described as the cost of caring. That phrase comes from Charles Figley, who I mentioned in the last episode when we talked about secondary traumatic stress. Basically, when your job requires you to be emotionally present, attuned, and responsive to other people's pain or concerns over and over and over again, there's a cost to that. And school counseling is full of that kind of work. You don't manage schedules or just coordinate programs. You hold stories, you hold hard ones, heavy ones, and you hear them on repeat. But I also really want you to hear this. Compassion fatigue isn't just about what you hear. It's also the seat you're sitting in when you hear it. If you listen to episode 180, it was called The Question School Counselors Never Get Asked. You'll remember what I said about school counselors living in this weird in-between space where you're expected to think like a mental health professional, but without the authority or time or structural support that mental health roles are usually built around. You're trusted with deeply personal information, but you're often limited in what you're actually allowed to change. You carry responsibility without full authority. And that gap between what you're responsible for and what you can realistically control creates this kind of low-grade, consistent, constant strain. Empathy keeps flowing out of you, but resolution doesn't flow back. Think about it. A student discloses abuse, you report it, and then you wait with the student still on your caseload, still in your building, while systems outside your control decide what happens next. Or a kid is struggling with severe anxiety and you know exactly what would help, but there's no therapist available, the family can't afford one anyway, and your admin wants you in a classroom doing lessons on study skills. I know you've seen this, where you see the problem clearly, you care deeply, and you can't fix it. And over time, that's not just exhausting, it's erosive. And this connects directly to what we talked about in the last episode: that job demand control model. High demand plus low control is toxic. But here's the added layer to that. It's not just that the demands are high and the control is low, it's that the demands are emotional. They require your empathy, your presence. They require your care. And when the care keeps flowing out with no closure, the caring itself starts to wear you down. I think this is why school counselors experience compassion fatigue very differently than therapists in private practice or even social workers and agencies. Those roles have guardrails. They've got supervision baked in somehow. They've got clearer lanes than most school counselors are ever gonna get. In schools, you're often the only person doing the work. And the system was not designed with your emotional sustainability in mind. Kim and Lamby school counselor researchers have pointed out that the constant exposure to student distress with minimal built-in recovery is a key risk factor. So let's make this a little bit more concrete. I talked to a school counselor recently who told me about a student she'd been working with for several months. This was a kid dealing with a really unstable home situation. And the counselor had done everything right. They'd built a relationship, they created safety, they helped the student to start opening up. And then one day the student transferred to another school. No warning, no transition plan, not even a chance to say goodbye. And the counselor told me, I know that I did good work with this kid. I know it wasn't my fault, but I still felt it in my soul for days, like something had been taken away. That's compassion fatigue. It's not a failure of boundaries like most people would have you believe. And it's not burnout. It is just the cost of caring about someone inside a system that doesn't hold the caring with you. So let's talk about how all this fits together. In the last episode, we talked about moral injury, the exhaustion that comes from being blocked from doing what you know is right. It's about the gap between what should happen and what the system allows. Compassion fatigue is related to this, but it's different. Compassion fatigue is about what it costs to keep caring, even when you're doing the work. So look at it this way: moral injury says, I know what the student needs, and I can't provide it. Compassion fatigue says, I'm providing what I can, and it's slowly draining me. You can experience both at the same time. And in school counseling, I find that a lot of people do. That's why so many folks feel confused about what is actually wrong. Because you can address the moral injury piece, right? You can consciously stop blaming yourself for outcomes you can't control, but the tiredness is often still there. That's the compassion fatigue layer. And the really surprising part about this is compassion fatigue does not show up in mediocre counselors. It shows up in the best ones. It shows up in the school counselors who are still all in, who are trying, who are showing up for students when it would be easier just to coast in neutral. And it's kind of a cruel irony about our work, if you think about it, where the thing that makes you effective is the same thing that makes you most vulnerable. Your competence builds trust in others. Their trust leads to disclosure. And disclosure increases your emotional load. Studies by Thomson and colleagues show that counselors who are deeply engaged, highly attuned, and relationally strong can actually be more vulnerable to compassion fatigue. You know, the counselors who have it all together often become the emotional hub of the campus. Students seek you out, teachers send kids your way, and admin knows that you're going to handle it. And then there are the people that aren't even officially on your caseload, like staff members who stop by to process something hard, parents who kind of hang around after a meeting because they need somebody to talk to. You're not tasked with supporting them, but they sense that you're safe. And so they show up anyway. And because you're capable, people assume you're fine, including you. So this is not a boundary failure. It is just the cost of being visible and trusted. We also need to recognize that compassion fatigue never announces itself. It never arrives with fanfare. Hello, we're in compassion fatigue land. That doesn't happen. It creeps in. And all of a sudden, one day you realize that you've stopped asking follow-up questions because you're not sure you want to hear the answer. Or you start feeling relieved when you call for a student to come to your office, but they're absent. Or you sit across from a student who's finally opening up about something very real, and you notice that your brain is thinking about the next meeting. It feels like your brain replaying student stories when you're trying to fall asleep, or avoiding certain conversations or people because you just don't have it in you today. Physically, it can show up like chronic fatigue, tension, headaches, or sleep that just doesn't feel restorative. Research using professional quality of life measures shows that these patterns often build slowly and are very easy to dismiss as, ah, it's just stress. Especially if you're someone who's good at pushing through. And school counselors are very good at pushing through. So let's say this out loud. Experiencing compassion fatigue does not mean that you chose the wrong profession. In fact, it often shows up after years of doing the work well. So it's not about professional decline, it's accumulation. Think about it like this every story you hold, every crisis you absorb, every student that you care about that leaves without closure, none of those disappear. They just settle layer by layer, like sediment in a riverbed. And because you're still functioning, you're still showing up, still doing good work, you don't notice the weight is building until one day you're standing at your window wondering why you feel nothing. That does not mean there is something wrong with you. It's a sign that you've been carrying things for a long time without anywhere to set them down. And when school counselors miss that distinction, they often start making big decisions from panic instead of from a point of clarity. They leave jobs or campuses that weren't actually the problem, or they just doggedly push through years that didn't have to feel that hard. Neither one of those are necessary. Not when you understand what's actually happening. So what actually helps? Well, there's not any quick fixes. But there are two things that the research keeps pointing back to. The first is consultation. And if you've been listening to the last couple of episodes, you knew I was gonna say this, didn't you? In the last episode, I talked about how consultation is the protective infrastructure that every helping profession builds in. Psychologists, social workers, medical professionals, but school counselors are just told to set better boundaries and take better care of themselves. That's not a substitution for consultation. The research is clear. Humans don't do high-stakes helping work well in isolation. And across studies on counselor wellness, one conclusion comes up again and again. Consultation is what keeps you in the game. Not inspirational quotes, not have you tried better self-care? And not spaces where you have to perform competence instead of just telling the real raw truth. What actually helps is having a place to process emotional load with people who get the work without having to explain the basics or downplay the weight of it. When your role limits what you can fix or change, trying to cope alone intensifies compassion fatigue. You're carrying the emotional weight and the unanswered questions and the isolation. Consultation restores perspective. It gives you a place to think. And that's one of the reasons my School for School Counselors Mastermind exists. It is not a productivity tool, it is not a resource hub, but it is a space where school counselors don't have to translate their experience before they're allowed to talk about it. That's the structural piece. That's the support you need to carry what you're carrying. But there's also something that you can do on your own. The research also highlights something called compassion satisfaction. That's the sense of meaning and fulfillment that comes from doing work that actually helps someone. It doesn't ease the strain, but it can act as a buffer. And here's the thing: compassion satisfaction doesn't just happen to you. You have to notice it on purpose. If you listen to episode 87, doing a lot of callbacks today, but episode 87 was called Some of the Best School Counseling Advice I've Ever Heard. And in that, you heard my colleague Jessica Nitch talk about this same idea, the practice of noticing, not really as a gratitude exercise, but as a way of letting your brain register what's really happening within your work. So here's one thing you can try if you want to. Just a moment where your presence mattered. A kid who made eye contact when they hadn't looked at you all week. A parent who finally was able to exhale because someone listened. Or a student that came back to finish a conversation that they'd walked away from the first time. When you name these moments, you're not naming them to fix anything. You're doing it so your brain registers the meaning of your work, not just the weight. And over time, that practice begins to build a buffer. It won't make hard things less hard, but it can help you stay connected to why you do this work in the first place. So if you haven't heard that episode, I'd encourage you to listen. I'll link to it in the show notes. All right, so let's pull this whole thing together. Over the last three episodes, we've kind of been unpacking something that I think the school counseling profession has gotten wrong for a long time. We've been told that when we're exhausted, we're burning out. And that the answer is better self-care, stronger boundaries, more resilience. But that is not the whole picture. In episode 180, we named the structural problem responsibility without authority. You're held accountable for outcomes you don't control. In episode 181, we named the ethical weight, which is moral injury. Exhaustion that comes from being prevented from doing what you know is right. And today we named the emotional cost, which is compassion fatigue. What happens when the caring itself, the very thing that makes you good at this job, also starts to wear you down. These three things are not the same. But for school counselors, they're unfortunately usually happening together. And when you can finally name what's going on, when you stop treating a structural problem like a personal failure, or an ethical injury like a mindset issue, or even emotional depletion like something that a bubble bath can fix, something starts to shift. Not because your job magically gets easier, but because you stop carrying the weight that was never yours to carry alone. I'll be writing more about how all these pieces interact over on Substack, including how to tell which one is driving what you're feeling on any given day. So if you're interested, you can go grab that next step. And if you've been experiencing this, wondering if maybe something's wrong with you, there's nothing wrong with you. You've been doing hard work inside a system that wasn't built to hold you up as a human being. That's not your character flaw. That's a design problem. And we are allowed to name that. So if you are standing at your window right now, feeling that blankness that I described at the beginning of the episode, now you know why. And hopefully gaining this clarity is where things start to change. So take care of yourself this week. And I mean do it in a real way, not the bubble bath way. And I'll be back again soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. I'm Steph Johnson. I'm rooting for you, and you've got what it takes. Take care.