On community social and support work, and why empathy is the wrong place to locate either the practice or the burnout.
Community support work arrives with two instructions that pull against each other. The first says to care more, to attune closely, to hold the other person’s experience as though it were your own. The second says to care less, to hold firmer boundaries, to practise self-care so that the caring does not consume you. Both instructions place the problem inside the worker. One asks for more feeling, the other for better management of it. Neither asks what the worker is actually doing.
The argument here is that feeling is the wrong unit of analysis for this work, and that a compositional account does more useful work in its place.
Burnout was never an individual property
The burnout research is clearer on this than the training programs built on top of it. Maslach and Leiter (2016) describe burnout as a chronic response to workplace stressors, running across exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced efficacy, and they locate its causes in mismatch between the person and the job across domains including workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. The causes sit in the arrangement of the work.
The interventions most services deliver sit somewhere else entirely. Resilience training, wellbeing initiatives, and supervision framed as emotional maintenance all address the worker. When the remedy targets the worker and the cause sits in the arrangement, the worker’s improvement becomes one more demand placed on them. Failure to improve then reads as a personal deficit.
Empathy is a condition, not a virtue
Worringer (1908/1953) drew a distinction that transfers usefully out of art history. Einfühlung, feeling-into, is available where the surrounding world is one a person can confidently project into, where forms give back what is invested in them. Abstraktion arises under the opposite condition, where the environment is unstable or indifferent, and the response is to produce form that does not depend on the world’s cooperation.
Community support work operates mostly in the second condition. Housing systems do not reciprocate. Income support does not reciprocate. Clinical pathways for a person with complex trauma and no settled address do not reciprocate.
A practice that makes empathy its primary operator presumes a responsive environment. Where that environment is absent, empathy converts directly into depletion, because feeling-into a situation that returns nothing is expenditure without return. The worker who burns out under these conditions has not failed at empathy. They have applied it in a setting for which it was never the appropriate operator.
Affect is not feeling
Reading Spinoza, Deleuze (1970/1988) separates two things that ordinary usage runs together. An affectio is the state of a body that has been affected by another body. An affectus is the transition between one such state and the next, registered as an increase or decrease in that body’s power to act. Affect in this second sense is not an emotion reported in the first person. It is a change in capacity, and it shows up in what becomes possible afterwards.
The consequence for practice is immediate. The empathic question asks how much the worker feels for the person in front of them, and it can be answered sincerely without anything else changing. The compositional question asks what this encounter does to what either party can do next, and it cannot be answered without looking at what followed.
A worker who leaves a visit moved and depleted has registered an affectio. A worker who leaves a visit having established that a particular phone will be answered at a known time on a known day has produced an affectus, whether or not either party felt much at all.
Under the second description, the worker’s interior state stops being the resource in play. What is actually spent is time, attention, custody of objects, calls made, forms held open, a room kept available.
None of this recommends detachment. Feeling less is not the proposal, and a worker who feels nothing tends to notice nothing. The proposal is that feeling is a poor measure of what the work produces, and that measuring the work by the worker’s feeling is precisely what turns the worker into the thing that gets used up.
What the worker takes responsibility for
Consider a familiar structure. A person holds a belief about harm being done to them that cannot be verified and does not resolve under discussion. Empathic practice asks how far the worker should extend belief. Risk practice asks how the belief should be corrected or contained. Both operate on the content.
A compositional approach asks something else. What can the worker take material responsibility for?
Consider an ordinary request. Someone asks a worker to keep a bag of possessions for them, things they hold to be significant in a way nobody else accepts. The worker takes it and keeps it safe. The worker may well also go through it, and find nothing that would register as significant to anyone else.
The inspection is not the event. Finding nothing changes nothing, because the contents were never what was at stake. The event is the transfer of custody. Something considered significant leaves one person’s hands, is held by someone who keeps it intact, and comes back when it is asked for.
The belief itself stays exactly where it was. Capacity shifts anyway, because one element in the arrangement now demonstrably holds.
This is not a technique for managing delusion. It is a reorientation from the content of an exchange to its structure, and most of what community support work consists of turns out to be custodial in this sense. Holding paperwork. Holding a room. Holding a time each week. Holding a version of someone’s account that can be handed back to them later.
The common third
Danish social pedagogy names this shift at the level of relationship. Husen (1996/2022) describes the common third as an arrangement in which two or more people are together over something that concerns neither them nor their relationship, but sits outside both. The relation stops being a dyad in which one party attends to the other. Worker and person both attend to a third term, which might be a garden, a meal, a shared task, a building, a piece of country. Neither person is the object of the other’s scrutiny.
Two things follow. The medium becomes what is held, not what is felt, which removes the main site of extraction. And the third term persists when the worker’s contract ends, which is not true of a relationship built on the worker’s attentiveness alone.
Non-reciprocity as a design parameter
If the systems a worker deals with do not reciprocate, the useful move is to treat non-reciprocity as a known parameter rather than as a series of individual failures.
Three practical consequences follow.
Build practices that produce something whether or not the system responds. A group that meets, a repaired object, a documented account of what happened. Each of these holds its value independently of any determination handed down later.
Separate the measure of the work from the system’s response. A submission that is ignored and a submission that is never made are not the same act, and a practice that can only register the outcome will misread its own history.
Hold the analysis structurally rather than interpersonally. Frontline discretion is real and it is bounded. Lipsky (1980/2010) established that policy is effectively made at the point of delivery, and Evans and Harris (2004) showed that discretion survives even in rule-dense systems. The worker across the desk is operating inside constraints they did not set. Locating the constraint accurately is what makes the next move possible.
What this changes
Empathy does not disappear from this account. It stops being the engine.
The engine becomes what is composed, what holds, what is transferred, and what continues after the worker leaves. On that footing, burnout reads as information about an arrangement rather than as evidence about a worker’s character, and the practice becomes something that can be designed rather than merely endured.
References
Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinoza: Practical philosophy (R. Hurley, Trans.). City Lights Books. (Original work published 1970)
Evans, T., & Harris, J. (2004). Street-level bureaucracy, social work and the (exaggerated) death of discretion. British Journal of Social Work, 34(6), 871–895. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bch106
Husen, M. (2022). The common third. https://michaelhusen.dk/the-common-third/ (Original work published 1996 as “Det fælles tredje,” in B. Pécseli (Ed.), Kultur & pædagogik, pp. 218–232, Hans Reitzels Forlag)
Lipsky, M. (2010). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services (30th anniversary expanded ed.). Russell Sage Foundation. (Original work published 1980)
Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20311
Worringer, W. (1953). Abstraction and empathy: A contribution to the psychology of style (M. Bullock, Trans.). International Universities Press. (Original work published 1908)