Compassion fatigue
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You love your job, your organization, and your community. But there can still be days when you feel like you have nothing left to give. If at the end of the day you feel drained, or irritated, or both, you may have “compassion fatigue.” Compassion fatigue, also known as secondary traumatic stress (STS), is a condition characterized by a gradual lessening of compassion over time. This session will help you recognize the symptoms and the situations that may trigger compassion fatigue and understand how it affects you and your working environment. Explore ways to take care of yourself so you can continue to show compassion and give your patrons the care they need.
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Compassion fatigue
- 1. Compassion Fatigue: When Helpers Get Tired of Helping Courtney Allison Southeast Regional Coordinator
- 5. Agenda 1. Understand Compassion Fatigue 2. Recognize, Cope, Overcome 3. Cultivate a Culture of Care and Compassion 4. Currently research on sources of stress within libraries in Indiana
- 6. What is Compassion Fatigue? “A state experienced by those helping people in distress; it is an extreme state of tension and preoccupation with the suffering of those being helped to the degree that it can create a secondary traumatic stress for the helper.”
- 7. What is Occupational Burnout “A type of psychological stress that is characterized by exhaustion, lack of enthusiasm, and motivation, feelings of ineffectiveness, and as a result reduced efficacy within the workplace”
- 8. Recognizing Compassion Fatigue • Bottled up Emotions • Irritability • Depression • Chronic Physical Ailments • Difficulty focusing or concentrating • Avoiding work / calling in sick / coming in late
- 9. What are some things that you have encountered that can trigger compassion fatigue at work?
- 10. “Taking care of myself doesn’t mean, me first. It means, me too.” L.R. Knost
- 11. Wheel of Human Needs
- 12. What are some of the things you experience at work that can trigger negative emotions?
- 13. Emotional Labor
- 18. Turn Your Stress Around
- 20. What are some activities that you engage in to relax or promote renewal?
- 21. Cultivating a Culture of Renewal
- 22. Useful Playlists
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon and thank you for attending today’s session, “Compassion Fatigue: When Helpers Get Tired of Helping”. Before we begin, I want to give a short disclaimer. I am a librarian, not a psychologist and I will be approaching today’s presentation as a librarian who has conducted research on the topic so you should not consider me as a mental health professional. We are going to start today’s presentation with a bit of word association. I’m going to say a word and I want you focus on an image that you associate with it. *cat*
- This time I want you to think about the word *work*
- Finally we will be thinking about the word *post traumatic stress*
- You may be surprised to think library staff may be capable of being at risk to traumatic stress, but compassion fatigue is the post traumatic stress disorder related symptoms that you receive vicariously as a secondary target to trauma and it is experienced by those in a helping profession. Health care workers, police officer, caregivers and if your role is that of a helping profession, may be effected by compassion fatigue as well.
- Todays session will be divided into 4 sections. First I will cover what compassion fatigue is and how it differs from occupational burnout. I will then cover common symptoms and methods to cope with secondary traumatic stress and tips on how to overcome it. After todays session you will walk away with a working definition of compassion fatigue, an understanding of the symptoms and an awareness of ways to ameliorate the symptoms.
- For the sake of this presentation, we will be defining ‘Compassion fatigue’ as stress that’s stems from exposure to other people in traumatic or difficult situations. It can go by many other names such as secondary traumatic stress or secondary victimization. For some it may be difficult to understand how librarians may share the same stressors as those in law enforcement or the healthcare industry but thinking back on our own experiences in public service I’m sure we all have stories of trying times when we were exposed to such traumatic stressors. (Give an example) Because public service staff are trained and expected to practice compassion and empathy to build a connection with patrons, they can be particularly vulnerable to the emotional stress or secondary trauma that results in compassion fatigue. Examples: A patron come to you frantically requesting assistance finding resources that will help pay for prescription medication that can be the difference between life and death… A patron needs assistance finding legal aid to help prevent their family from being evicted, or having their home foreclosed… A patron’s odor and physical appearance is disruptive to the environment but you know that their home has had the utilities shot off and your library is the only public space with a bathroom where they can stay warm during the winter…
- For many years compassion fatigue was confused for burnout. Unlike burnout, compassion fatigue is highly treatable and may be less predictable. The onset of compassion fatigue can be sudden, whereas burnout usually emerges over time. Additionally, severe cases of burnout sometimes require the person experiencing it to change jobs or occupations, but often measures can be taken to prevent or treat compassion fatigue before a change in work environment is required. Occupational burnout is typically and particularly found within human service professions. Professions with high levels of burnout include social workers, nurses, teachers, lawyers, engineers, medical practitioners, and customer service professionals. Burnout often stems from your job. Anyone who feels overworked and undervalued is at risk for burnout—from the hardworking library director who hasn’t had a vacation in years, to the frazzled circulation assistant who is struggling to care for their kids, housework, aging parent and work a full-time job. Your lifestyle and personality traits can also contribute to burnout. What you do in your downtime and how you look at the world can play just as big of a role in causing burnout as work or home demands. Untreated compassion fatigue can contribute to burnout.
- Compassion Fatigue symptoms are normal displays of stress resulting from the work you perform on a regular basis. While the symptoms are often disruptive, depressive, and irritating, an awareness of the symptoms and their negative effect on your life can lead to positive change, personal transformation, and a new resiliency. Reaching a point where you have control over your own life choices will take time and hard work. There is no magic involved. There is only a commitment to make your life the best it can be. Something that can make compassion fatigue more easily distinguished from general stress is an overarching loss of faith in the character of your patrons. If you begin to assume the worst about your patrons continuously before interacting with them or notice a shift where you are judging them more harshly then usual, you may be experiencing compassion fatigue. When Compassion Fatigue hits critical mass in the workplace, the organization itself suffers. Chronic absenteeism, high turnover rates, friction between employees, and friction between staff and management are among organizational symptoms that surface, creating additional stress on workers. In addition, you may see staff less eager to assist patrons or willing to engage in innovation or change within your organization.
- Once you accept that you are a candidate for compassion fatigue, or are already suffering its effects, the key to overcoming and preventing compassion fatigue is taking personal responsibility for yourself and recognizing your own limitations. You need to take care of yourself before effectively taking care of someone else. Remember, what are you told to do on an airplane in the event of cabin pressure loss? You must put your own oxygen mask on before assisting others. A common and understandable coping mechanism in care giving is to simply stuff the overwhelming emotions that surface repeatedly in your work. How else can you keep going? Eventually, those emotions refuse to be ignored. All too often, psychological and physical crisis occurs. With support, insightful information, and authentic self-care, you can begin to understand the complexity of the emotions you’ve been juggling and, most likely, suppressing. Most people never take the time to understand how their jobs affect them emotionally. Give yourself credit for moving forward and affecting change. Your hard work will pay off.
- We all have basic human needs and if they are not met it makes it difficult to maintain happiness and contentment within your life. The wheel of fundamental human needs can serve as a guide to evaluate your own life to determine what if any essential needs are currently being unmet in your life and what if any areas you need to invest more time and energy to develop. The important thing to remember is that no one else can meet these needs, it’s a personal burden or responsibility to seek and achieve the fulfillment of these needs. This can be a really useful personal assessment tool to get in touch with your emotions. A basic way to implement this into your own professional or personal life is to sit down with a copy of the wheel and evaluate where, if anywhere you need to invest more energy to fulfill any deficiencies. Once you have a better understanding of what your needs are you can then try to develop a personal plan on how you’re going to fill these deficiencies, for example if you are lacking in Autonomy in your personal like, perhaps you have children, care for elderly parents, etc. you can make an effort to grant yourself at least 30 minutes a day to walk alone outside and focus on your own thoughts. If you find that any of your unmet needs correlate to work, be sure to communicate your limitations and needs to your supervisor, if it is something that they may be able to accommodate. This can be something as basic as recognizing that after especially trying patron interactions, you need 5 minutes to re-center yourself otherwise your service and emotional health will suffer. Of course organizational staffing does not always allow us to take breaks when we need them most, but it will allow your supervisor to gain a better understanding of what your limits are and how to read your emotional signals they can make an effort to accommodate you as much as possible.
- When were dealing with coworkers and the public, we need to adhere to certain emotional expectations in order to promote a healthy work environment. Emotional labor is the work we have to do in order to manage out emotions to promote a healthy work environment that avoids conflict and it is something that we all engage in on a daily basis. There are three different types of emotional labor: Deep Acting: is a cognitive effort to reframe the situation. It is a process through which employees change their internal feelings to align with organizational expectations producing a more natural and genuine emotional display. ( a patron is not mad at me, they are mad at the policy) Genuine Acting: is unguarded expression of emotions. For example you had a bad day and refuse to engage with patrons in a pleasant manner. This can cause a conflict between you and your employer. Surface Acting: is when a person has to fake emotions to meet certain social and work rules. Example: You wake up to discover that a relative has passed away before heading to work. Even though you’re in emotional turmoil you deliver great customer service that doesn’t betray the internal turmoil you’re experiencing. In short, surface acting is “faking it” which regulates outward emotions although internal feelings are left intact. There have been many studies conducted that suggest that prolonged ‘surface acting’ can have serious damaging effects on ones mental health and those who use it have a high instance of burnout. When thinking about addressing compassion fatigue, it is important to remember that the goal is to manage your emotions, not to suppress them.
- Meditation can yield a surprising number of health benefits, including stress reduction, improved attention, better memory, and even increased creativity and feelings of compassion. The term meditation refers to a broad variety of practices that includes techniques designed to promote relaxation, build internal energy, and develop compassion, love, patience, generosity, or forgiveness. In popular culture, this image may be the most common representation of meditation, the enlightened individual surrounded by a natural, knees bent, eyes closed. In practice the styles and methods of meditation are as varied as the individuals who practice it. Mediation is a practice where an individual trains the mind or induces a mode of consciousness. It’s about self-regulation and focus. it can be spiritual or secular, it can focus on a targeted goal such as developing compassion or taking a few moments to reflect on your day. It can be as short or as long as you like and occur anywhere you find accommodating. Like any skill, it will becoming easier to let go with time. Just be advised that no one method is suitable for everyone so you may want to practice a few different meditation styles and see which best fits your personality and objectives. We’re going to do a quick guided meditation.
- LiveSlide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L09i3_YeIbo
- Research carried out on a group of volunteers by the consultancy Mindlab International at the University of Sussex found that reading was more effective at reducing stress then listening to music, playing video games, taking a walk, or drinking tea. Psychologists believe this is because the human mind has to concentrate on reading and the distraction of being taken into a literary world eases the tension in muscles and the heart. Subjects in the study only needed to read, silently, for six minutes to slow down the heart rate and ease tension in the muscles. Doing so reduced stress levels by 68 percent, where as listening to music reduced stress by 61 per cent, having a cup of tea or coffee lowered them by 54 per cent and taking a walk by 42 percent. Playing video games brought them down by 21 percent. In order to gain the greatest effects you should read print materials and avoid subjects that can trigger stress or are related to issues that you’re struggling with. (the reading test used fiction in print, it was not conducted with e-books)
- Maintaining a solid work-life balance can help protect you from compassion fatigue. When all your time is spent working or thinking about work, it can be easy to burnout. Studies have shown work-life balance is becoming more important to workers, and making time for leisure activities and personal hobbies outside of work can help lower stress levels and improve overall life satisfaction. It also gives you something to engage your mind and body in an actively creates joy.
- Stress is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it can be good to have a little pressure to motivate you to accomplish a task and break out of a procrastination slump. Just make sure you are not allowing stress to rule your life. Don’t be afraid to use your stress to your benefit. By employing deep acting techniques, remind yourself that sometimes you are not actually ‘stressed’ but excited about a project, such as a conference presentation and use it as a motivation to accomplish task.
- The focus should be engaging in activities that will facilitate sustainable well-being. Easy fixes can create an vicious cycle that only builds your stress by creating an unhealthy dependence on different substances. Procrastination can also build your stress by making your to do list longer. Eat healthy, avoid too much sugar. Focus on fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean protein. When you’re stressed, you’ll probably want less-nutritious comfort foods, but if you overdo them, they’ll add to your problems by disrupting your sleep cycle and in the case of sugar and caffeine, adding to your anxiety. It’s important to take time for the things you enjoy that renew you but procrastinating by binging on television or the internet can actually increase your stress levels by disrupting your sleep cycle and ignoring your to-do list can just make the list longer and increase your anxiety.
- Our schedules don’t always allow it but starting each day with a 5 minute meeting in your department to share something positive can be an excellent way to start the day off on a positive note. This could be something as simple as a child telling you they loved a book recommendation to sharing a positive story in your personal life. You can also guide your department in a positive affirmation in the morning or take turns delivering a short guided meditation that helps you to focus on what you hope to achieve and be the that day. If you choose to practice guided meditation in the work place, accompanying it with a diffuser can generate a positive feeling or sense of safety with a specific scent profile which you can leave in shared staff spaces to encourage relaxation in the space. This is also something that can be employed before technology training sessions, tax preparation, or similar events when you know that tensions tend to be high. An adult educator from Evansville employs to this in all of her classes to reduce stress in her students and help promote a positive association with the class as many of her students have had overwhelmingly negative associations with education. Lavender has been shown in some studies to reduce stress and can be a useful scent profile to promote calm in the workplace. All libraries should promote staff taking breaks from work, schedules and staffing may not always allow staff to take them when they are needed most but they should be accommodated as much as possible. This could be something as simple as giving staff ten minutes a day to be able to walk away from their desks and step outside. Sometimes removing yourself from the environment is enough to give you a break from negative associations with a space such as a bad patron interaction or work related stress, to refresh yourself. See if local gyms or yoga studios may be willing to give library staff discounts on classes or if they would be willing to deliver a free session at your next staff day.
- Each image is hyperlinked
- This 3 part series was designed around a statewide survey assessing common triggers of workplace stress in libraries. It provides an overview of common stress triggers in libraries, how to recognize symptoms of burnout, and useful tools to manage work related stress. In order to access the training, you will need to create an account and enroll in the course. Upon completion, an LEU certificate will self-generate.