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Caring Without Carrying It All: Jillian Yuzpe on Compassion and Equanimity

Christina Janiga Psychotherapy | Clinical team feature

Our team at Christina Janiga Psychotherapy gathers regularly for clinical supervision. This month, Jillian Yuzpe, RP led us through a topic that sits at the centre of her work and in the work as helping professionals: how people in caring roles stay warm and open without burning out.

Jillian completed the eight-week Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) program in 2023, developed by Dr. Kristin Neff and Dr. Christopher Germer. She now brings that training into her clinical work with parents, adult children caring for aging parents, partners of people who are unwell, and professionals in health care, education, and therapy.

She opened our session the way she often opens a client session — a mindfulness meditation with a few slow breaths and a hand over the heart. Then she offered a distinction that changes how many of us practise.

Caring hurts more than we admit

Jillian named a pattern most helpers recognize but rarely map out loud:

Empathy → Emotional Contagion → Empathic Distress → Burnout.

We feel what our clients feel. That shared feeling deepens. Their pain becomes our pain. Over time, the exhaustion erodes the very capacity that brought us to this work.

The research supports her framing. Among mental health professionals, higher self-compassion consistently tracks with lower burnout, less compassion fatigue, and better professional quality of life [1][2][3]. One study of practising psychotherapists found self-compassion partially explained the link between work-life balance and emotional exhaustion [2].

Jillian’s point was not that we care too much. It was that we may be carrying it in a way the body cannot sustain.

Empathy and compassion are not the same thing

This is the heart of Jillian’s presentation.

Empathy says: I feel your pain. It activates the same pain regions in the brain as the person who is suffering.

Compassion says: I see your pain, and I want to help. It engages care and motivation instead.

Neuroimaging research from Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer tested exactly this. Participants trained in empathy showed increased negative affect and greater activation in the anterior insula and anterior midcingulate cortex — the pain-empathy network. When those same participants then trained in compassion, the negative affect reversed. Positive affect rose. A different network lit up: ventral striatum, pregenual anterior cingulate, medial orbitofrontal cortex — regions tied to reward and affiliation [4][5].

The researchers concluded that compassion training may function as a coping strategy that counters empathic distress and builds resilience [4][6].

Jillian teaches this distinction directly to clients who absorb other people’s suffering. Naming it often brings visible relief. The problem was never their capacity to care. It was the absence of a boundary inside the caring.

Self compassion has three moving parts

Jillian walked us through Kristen Neff’s model:

  • Self-kindness — meeting our own struggle with warmth rather than criticism
  • Common humanity — recognizing that suffering is part of being human, and we are not alone in it
  • Mindfulness — holding the present moment with awareness, without judgment

Each part matters. Together, they form a stable way to relate to our own failures, inadequacies, and hard days.

Equanimity is the balance point

 

Equanimity is where Jillian’s presentation landed.

She defined it as the ability to stay balanced while remaining connected to suffering. Not detachment. Not numbness. Not caring less. It means including yourself in the equation while you care for someone else.

Contemplative researchers describe equanimity as an even-minded stance toward experience, regardless of whether it feels pleasant or unpleasant [7]. Some argue it may be the single most important psychological ingredient in improved well-being, and that the field should measure it directly rather than folding it into “mindfulness” [7]. That said, the construct is still young. A systematic review found inconsistent definitions and no dedicated measurement instrument [8], though newer work has begun testing equanimity as both a state and a trait [9].

Without equanimity, Jillian said, caregivers over-identify, absorb too much, and lose the capacity to help anyone — including themselves. With it, presence becomes sustainable.

What the evidence says about training this

Jillian highlighted Neff and colleagues’ adaptation of MSC for health care workers, called Self-Compassion for Healthcare Communities (SCHC) — the full eight-week program condensed into six one-hour sessions [10].

Findings across two studies:

  • Self-compassion and well-being increased, with gains held at three months
  • Burnout decreased
  • Secondary traumatic stress decreased
  • Participants who started lowest in self-compassion benefited most

A later online delivery of SCHC with 116 physicians replicated the pattern: reduced burnout and secondary traumatic stress, improved compassion satisfaction and job satisfaction [11].

Jillian’s takeaway was practical. You do not need eight weeks and twenty-four hours of training to benefit. Six hours moved the needle meaningfully.

Two honest caveats. These studies used small samples, and one had no control group. A systematic review of self-compassion interventions for secondary traumatic stress rated the existing evidence as promising but methodologically medium quality, and called for controlled trials [12]. The physician study’s own authors noted that individual well-being programs cannot substitute for fixing the systems that generate burnout [11].

The evidence for the caregiver population outside health care is somewhat stronger. A 2025 meta-analysis of eight randomized controlled trials with 1,978 family caregivers found web-based compassion interventions improved self-compassion and mindfulness while reducing stress and anxiety [13]. Among parents of children with neurodevelopmental disorders, self-compassion showed a large negative association with parenting stress and depression [14].

The practice: Compassion with Equanimity

Jillian closed by guiding us through the exercise she uses most with clients. It comes from The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook.

You bring to mind someone you are caring for who exhausts or frustrates you. You feel the struggle in your own body. Then you let these words move through your mind:

We are each on our own life journey. I am not the cause of this person’s suffering, nor is it entirely within my power to make it go away, even though I wish I could. Moments like this are difficult to bear. Yet I may still try to help if I can.

Then the breath does the work.

In for me. Out for you.

Inhale compassion for yourself, filling your body. Exhale compassion toward the person you are caring for. Scan for distress as you go, and send the breath wherever it is needed most.

What makes this practice so usable, Jillian noted, is that it asks nothing of your schedule. It is not a self-care plan requiring sleep, exercise, and a free evening. You can do it mid-conversation, mid-shift, mid-crisis, and no one will know.

Her clients tell her they return to it often.

Working with Jillian

If you are caring for someone and finding that the caring is costing you more than it used to, that is worth bringing to therapy. It is not a sign you care too little. It may be a sign you have been carrying it alone. We encourage you to reach out to us for a free 15-minute consultation. During the consultation, we will answer any questions you have about our practice and our psychotherapists, and help you determine if we are the right fit for you. We believe that feeling comfortable with your therapist is essential for a successful therapeutic relationship.

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Image of Jillian Yuzpe, registered psychotherapist (qualifying), providing psychotherapy services

About The Author

Jillian Yuzpe is a Registered Psychotherapist with our practice, working virtually with clients across Ontario. Her areas of focus include perinatal mental health, health anxiety symptoms, chronic pain, grief, menopause, and EMDR therapy. She also supports individuals with relationship and parenting challenges, including divorce, separation and co-parenting.

References

  1. The Benefits of Self-Compassion in Mental Health Professionals: A Systematic Review of Empirical Research — Crego et al., 2022, Psychology Research and Behavior Management
  2. Burnout in Professional Psychotherapists: Relationships with Self-Compassion, Work–Life Balance, and Telepressure — Kotera et al., 2021, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
  3. Measuring relationships between self-compassion, compassion fatigue, burnout and well-being in student counsellors and student cognitive behavioural psychotherapists — Beaumont et al., 2016
  4. Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training — Klimecki et al., 2014, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
  5. Functional neural plasticity and associated changes in positive affect after compassion training — Klimecki et al., 2013, Cerebral Cortex
  6. The plasticity of social emotions — Klimecki, 2015, Social Neuroscience
  7. Moving beyond Mindfulness: Defining Equanimity as an Outcome Measure in Meditation and Contemplative Research — Desbordes et al., 2014, Mindfulness
  8. A Systematic Literature Review of Equanimity in Mindfulness Based Interventions — Weber, 2021, Pastoral Psychology
  9. Trait and State Equanimity: The Effect of Mindfulness-Based Meditation Practice — Juneau et al., 2020, Mindfulness
  10. Caring for others without losing yourself: An adaptation of the Mindful Self-Compassion Program for Healthcare Communities — Neff et al., 2020, Journal of Clinical Psychology
  11. Self-Compassion for Healthcare Communities: Exploring the Effects of a Synchronous Online Continuing Medical Education Program on Physician Burnout — Gardiner et al., 2024, Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions
  12. Self-Compassion Interventions to Target Secondary Traumatic Stress in Healthcare Workers: A Systematic Review — Rushforth et al., 2023, IJERPH
  13. Web-based compassion interventions for family caregivers’ mental well-being — Zhang et al., 2025, Age and Ageing
  14. Self-Compassion and Psychological Health of Parents: A Meta-Analysis Focused on Some Neurodevelopmental Disorders — Ozturk et al., 2025, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders

The “Compassion with Equanimity” practice is adapted from Neff, K. & Germer, C., “The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook.” Guided audio versions are available free at self-compassion.org.