Care Workers: Is There Such Thing as Caring Too Much?

There’s a thing care workers say in our field sometimes, whispered with a grave shake of the head behind a colleague’s back: “Oh, so-and-so is over-invested in the clients. It’s great she cares but she cares a little too much.” It never felt like the right take, but when I went home with a hurting heart, sometimes I thought maybe I cared too much as well.

For the last two years, I have been studying and reflecting on how workers can stay in care work without losing our well-being. Caring too much has not emerged as one of the issues.

There are some things we are too invested in, but the problem isn’t caring about our clients. I am going to talk about the real issues over three articles.

I believe that a primary cause of our pain is that we over-invest in the outcomes that we envision and hope for our clients. When we are attached to outcomes we can’t control, we set ourselves up for suffering.

I worked with a caring team of frontline workers at a shelter serving vulnerable young people. For reasons we will never understand, a young man we worked with attacked and seriously injured his friend when they were hanging out. Thankfully, the friend healed. The youth who became violent was arrested. The young man was only 17, a newcomer, smart, musically talented, and very traumatized when he came to the shelter. Before the incident, it was easy to picture two paths laid out before him: one involving mental illness, addictions, and incarceration, and…