The People Who Approach Suffering

By Kathryn Arbic
Registered Massage Therapist | ART® Certified Provider
Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM)
Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology — Candidate, Yorkville University

Responsibility, control, identity, and what happens when the person who helps everyone else needs help

There are people who move toward suffering when most of us instinctively move away from it.

They enter burning buildings, respond to accidents, sit with people who are dying, care for frightened and injured animals, and make difficult decisions when there are no good options. They step forward when other people step back.

We often call these people heroes.

And I understand why.

But I have come to think about them a little differently. I think they are, first and foremost, people who have learned to approach suffering when others don't.

That distinction matters to me because I have lived a version of it myself.

Not in combat. Not as a first responder. Not in the kinds of situations many Veterans and emergency professionals have experienced. But I continue to work as a veterinarian, and veterinary medicine has taught me something I don't think I will ever forget:

You can do everything right and still lose.

When responsibility and control aren't the same thing

Veterinary medicine can be an extraordinary profession. There is science, medicine, problem-solving, connection, and the privilege of caring for animals and the people who love them.

But there is also suffering. There are euthanasias, emergencies, cases where you don't know what is happening and have to make decisions anyway, and cases you research long after your shift because you desperately want to understand what happened. There are times when you make a mistake and carry the knowledge of it with you. And there are cases where you do everything you can and the outcome is still not what you hoped for.

That last one can be particularly difficult.

When you are responsible for something, it is very easy to unconsciously believe that you should also be able to control it. But responsibility and control are not the same thing.

A veterinarian can make an excellent clinical decision and still lose the patient. A paramedic can provide exceptional care and still lose someone. A firefighter can enter a burning building and still be unable to save everyone. A soldier can follow their training and still lose a colleague. A nurse or physician can devote enormous skill and attention to a patient whose illness ultimately cannot be reversed.

You can do everything right and still lose.

That doesn't necessarily mean you failed. Sometimes it means you were responsible for doing what you could in a situation whose ultimate outcome was never completely yours to control.

The mind doesn't always accept that distinction

Knowing this intellectually doesn't necessarily make it emotionally easy.

When something goes wrong, we look backward. What did I miss? What should I have noticed sooner? What if I had done something differently? What if I had chosen another treatment? What if I had acted faster?

Sometimes those questions are useful. Reflection helps us learn.

But there is a point where reflection can become something else.

Responsibility can become perceived responsibility for everything.

And that is an extraordinarily heavy burden to carry, especially when the person carrying it is accustomed to being competent.

The hidden experience behind the role

People sometimes hear that I work as a veterinarian and say something like, "That must be so nice. You get to work with animals."

It is. I love many things about the work.

But that description doesn't capture the whole experience.

People don't necessarily see the euthanasias. They don't see the cases that stay with me, the mistakes I replay, or the time I spend researching a difficult case because I care deeply about getting it right. They don't see the emotional investment I make in an outcome that ultimately isn't mine to control.

They don't see the experience of holding space for someone else's grief while simultaneously trying to make a medical decision. And they don't necessarily see what happens inside the professional who then has to walk into the next appointment and continue functioning.

The same hidden landscape exists in many professions.

The public sees the uniform, the job title, the person who responds, and the person who knows what to do. What they may not see is what that person carries home.

When approaching suffering becomes part of your identity

There is something else that fascinates me about people who repeatedly move toward suffering.

At some point, it may become more than something they do. It can become part of who they are.

"When things go wrong, I'm the person who steps in."

"I'm the one who can handle it."

"I'm the one people call."

"I know what to do when everyone else is panicking."

There can be enormous meaning in that identity. There can be pride, purpose, belonging, competence, connection, and a profound sense of usefulness.

And sometimes, an extraordinary sense of worth.

But what happens when that role is suddenly taken away?

What happens when someone is injured? When disability changes what their body can do? When retirement arrives? When trauma makes the job impossible? When a career ends before they were ready?

The loss may be much larger than employment.

It may be a loss of identity, community, purpose, competence, or the version of yourself you knew how to be. And sometimes there is grief for something that other people don't even realize you have lost.

This is one reason I am drawn toward Veterans, first responders, and other helping professionals

I want to be careful not to equate my experience as a veterinarian with the experiences of people who have lived through combat, catastrophic emergencies, or other forms of occupational trauma. Those experiences are their own.

But I recognize something about the orientation.

I know what it means to care deeply about an outcome I cannot completely control. I know what it means to make consequential decisions, to encounter suffering repeatedly, and to wonder whether I could have done more. I know something about what it can mean when competence becomes intertwined with identity.

That doesn't mean I know someone else's story.

It means I can approach their story with genuine curiosity.

What happens when the person who approaches suffering has to approach their own?

This may be the question that interests me most.

People who are exceptionally good at caring for others are not necessarily exceptionally good at receiving care. The person who can tolerate enormous distress may struggle to admit that they are struggling. The person who has spent years being dependable may feel deeply uncomfortable being dependent. And the person who has trained themselves to remain calm in crisis may have little experience with what happens when there is finally no crisis to solve.

Sometimes the hardest step isn't learning how to help. It is learning how to be helped.

The person who has spent their life approaching other people's suffering may discover that their own suffering is the one thing they have learned to avoid.

The body is part of this story

My interest in this work has also grown from my experience as a Registered Massage Therapist and from my continuing education in counselling psychology, somatic approaches, and trauma-informed work.

I increasingly find myself interested in the places where these disciplines overlap.

Because suffering isn't experienced solely in the mind. It is experienced through the body: through pain, muscle tension, breathing, sleep, fatigue, movement, startle responses, numbness, hyperarousal, shutdown, and the feeling of being unable to settle even when the danger has passed.

That doesn't mean every physical symptom is psychological, and it doesn't mean body-based work replaces medical care or specialized psychological treatment.

It means simply that the body is part of the story.

And for me, understanding that story from more than one professional lens is becoming increasingly important.

The bridge I hope to build

One of the reasons I have continued to develop across several disciplines is that I don't want to see people as collections of separate symptoms.

My background in veterinary medicine continues to teach me about medicine, responsibility, uncertainty, suffering, decision-making, and the emotional realities of caring professions.

Massage therapy has taught me to pay attention to the body, pain, movement, physical protection, and the ways people experience themselves physically.

My counselling education is teaching me to understand psychological processes, therapeutic relationships, trauma, identity, development, and meaning. My continued exploration of somatic approaches is deepening my curiosity about the relationship between embodied experience and psychological change.

I don't see these as competing identities. I see them as pieces of a larger picture.

My long-term goal is to build work that can responsibly bridge these worlds.

Not because one person or one modality can fix everything. Not because every problem needs an integrative solution. And not because I believe I can understand someone's experience simply because I have worked in a demanding profession myself.

Rather, I want to create space for the person whose experience doesn't fit neatly into one category.

The Veteran whose physical injury has also disrupted their identity. The first responder whose nervous system has learned to remain on alert. The healthcare professional who no longer recognizes themselves outside their profession. The veterinarian who has spent years caring for everyone else. The person whose chronic pain has become entangled with grief, transition, or a changed sense of self.

The person who isn't only asking, "How do I get rid of this symptom?" but eventually finds themselves asking:

"Who am I now?"

Maybe healing isn't always about going back

We often talk about recovery as though the goal is to return someone to exactly who they were before: back to work, back to normal, back to the old body, back to the old identity.

But sometimes that person has changed.

Sometimes something has been lost that cannot simply be restored.

And perhaps the work isn't always about rebuilding the old version of ourselves. Perhaps sometimes it is about discovering what remains, what matters now, what has changed, what needs to be grieved, what can be carried forward, and who we might become next.

That process can involve the body, the nervous system, trauma processing, relationships, values, purpose, community, spirituality, work, and meaning.

And sometimes it begins with accepting something profoundly uncomfortable:

I did everything I could.

And I still lost something.

That doesn't necessarily mean I failed.

It may mean I was human in a situation that was bigger than my control.

For people who have spent their lives approaching suffering when others don't, learning to recognize that distinction may be one of the most important forms of healing.

Responsibility asks us to do what we can.

Control asks us to believe the outcome belongs to us.

They are not the same thing.

And perhaps part of becoming human again, after years of being the person who steps forward, is learning that we don't have to carry what was never ours to control.

References

Baysal, Y., Goy, N., Hartnack, S., & Guseva Canu, I. (2024). Moral distress measurement in animal care workers: A systematic review. BMJ Open, 14(4), e082235. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2023-082235

Coimbra, B. M., Zylberstajn, C., van Zuiden, M., Hoeboer, C. M., Mello, A. F., Mello, M. F., & Olff, M. (2024). Moral injury and mental health among health-care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic: Meta-analysis. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 15(1), 2299659. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008066.2023.2299659

Selter, F., Persson, K., & Neitzke, G. (2022). Moral distress and euthanasia: What, if anything, can doctors learn from veterinarians? British Journal of General Practice, 72(719), 280–281. https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp22X719681

Williamson, V., Murphy, D., & Greenberg, N. (2021). Moral injury: The effect on mental health and implications for treatment. The Lancet Psychiatry, 8(5), 453–455.

Williamson, V., Murphy, D., & Greenberg, N. (2022). Veterinary professionals’ experiences of moral injury: A qualitative study. Veterinary Record, 191(8), e2181. https://doi.org/10.1002/vetr.2181

© 2026 Kathryn Arbic / Callisto Therapeutics. All rights reserved. Ottawa-Carleton Place, Ontario, Canada.