Compassion fatigue can come from the sense that your work is being undone.

One of the hardest things about taking care of others is that often they don’t take care of themselves. Whether you tend to a person’s body, mind, or heart, in your professional career or personal life, it’s one thing to offer others your compassionate attention and skill. It’s another to see them repeat the same self-sabotaging mistakes over and over, and then come to you to get patched up. It can become exhausting.

We all like to be effective and make a difference. Physically creative labor can be…