Transforming Compassion Fatigue

Transforming
Compassion Fatigue
Antidotes to the Negative Side Effects
Of Being a Health Care Worker
Written & Presented by
Sharon M. Barnes, MSSW, LCSW
Creative Transformation Specialist
AKA The Scrap Lady─
I can help you Create Beauty from Life’s Scraps
www.TherapistForSensitiveAndGifted.com
303-987-0346
© 2017 Sharon M. Barnes, LCSW, PLLC www.TherapistForSensitiveAndGifted.com

Meet Sharon Barnes, LCSW
AKA the Scrap Lady.
When Life dumps a pile of
. . . . . scraps on you,
o Pick them up . . . one by one
o And make something with
them!

A BIG THANK YOU TO
Colorado Activity
Professionals
Association

Compassion Fatigue

Transforming
Compassion Fatigue
 Here’s what we’ll cover today -
1. What is Compassion Fatigue (CF)?
2. The impact of CF on Health Care Workers
3. Seven Warning Signs of CF
4. Four key activities to Transform CF
5. How to use the tools of scientific invention to transform
CF
6. Effective Intervention & Prevention Strategies

What IS
Compassion
Fatigue ?
o Secondary Traumatic Stress
Disorder
o Vicarious Traumatization
o Trauma Exposure Response
How It shows itself:
o Gradual compassion
It’s common in
o Trauma victims
o Trauma workers
o Health care workers

Psychological vs Medical
Trauma
Psychological Trauma
o Exposure to Life-
threatening event or
experience
o Vicarious = experienced
through others
o Patients with life-
threatening illness
o Watching or reading
news or stories/shows

Vicarious Traumatization (VT)
o VT = Occupational
Hazard for all health care
workers
o VT has an inevitable
effect
o Our empathy is a source
of our vulnerability to VT
o VT effects are pervasive
o Brain structure &
function
o Memory system
o Identity
o World view
o Psychological needs

Vicarious Traumatization
•There’s a Profound loss
of the familiar—
• people,
• dreams,
• Our innocence is gone anew
• Our body/mind/soul/spirit;
nothing is ever the same
• We confront the reality of
these losses daily
• We confront the reality that
these losses could happen
to us and our loved ones

Vicarious Traumatization
• There is a Cumulative
transformative effect upon
the person working with
people in traumatic life
events (McCann &
Pearlman, 1990)
• There is a transformation of
the inner experience of the
HCW that comes about as a
result of our empathic
engagement with the
patient’s trauma
experience.

Misconceptions

Misconceptions
1. I will “fix” the problem…make
everything OK/better… save the
world…
2. I am responsible for outcomes.
3. If I care enough, everything will be
O.K.
4. The sufferer/victim will appreciate
everything I do for them.
5. I will have enough resources (time,
money, material, skills and training)
to fix things.

Misconceptions
6. Significant people in my life will
support and approve my absence
from our relationship while I invest in
this compassionate mission.
7. I know what I’m getting into.
8. I can do it alone.
9. If I’m (spiritual) (good) (???)
enough, I can deal with the stress of
working with suffering people.
10. My definition of success is……..
I’d invite you to write down the first
thing that popped into your head in
response to this question.

Contributing Factors
To Compassion Fatigue

Contributing Factors
To Compassion Fatigue
The individual (internal
factors)
1. Personal history
2. Personality, defensive
& coping style
3. current life context
4. training and
professional history
5. personal growth
including
psychotherapy,
spiritual direction,
coaching and similar
processes.
6. Support sytems

Who’s Most Vulnerable to CF?
CASIGYs! Who’s a CASIGY?
Creative, Curious, Complex
Acutely Aware
Super-Sensitive
Intense, maybe Introverted, often
Intelligent, sometimes
Gifted
You?

Warning Signs of
Compassion Fatigue
 Feeling helpless and hopeless
 Feeling like I can never do enough
 Hypervigilance
 Diminished creativity
 Oversimplification/Inability to embrace
complexity
 Minimizing
 Chronic exhaustion/physical aliments

 Avoidance of painful situations/people
 Inability to listen
 Dissociative moments
 Sense of persecution
 Guilt
 Fear
 Anger and cynicism
 Inability to empathize/numbing
 Addictions
 Grandiosity
Warning Signs of
Compassion Fatigue

Transforming
Compassion Fatigue
Antidotes to CF must address
1. Stress
2. Demoralization
You must love your work or some aspect of
it
o This work is too difficult & personally
demanding to do without passion or a
sense of mission or purpose.
“Don’t just ask what the world needs. Ask
what makes you come alive and then go do
it, because what the world needs is more
people who have come alive.” (Thurman)

Address the Stress
Self- Care (van der Kolk)
• TOP Stress Reliever = physical
exercise
•Foster a sense of personal control
•Within limits of reality
•Serenity Prayer
•Pursue personally meaningful tasks
•Make healthy lifestyle choices
•↓caffeine, nicotine, sugar, alcohol
•↑vigorous exercise,
•↑deep relaxation
•Self-Nurturing
•Escape
•Balance
•Patience
•Perspective

Transform Demoralization
#2 Personal Strategy is to
Transform Demoralization.
o What meaning did this work once
hold for you?
o Where is demoralization present
now?
o Identify the negative
assumptions, beliefs &
conclusions that have come as a
result of your exposure to trauma
o Challenge & reframe these
o Infuse current activities with new
meaning
o intentional awareness
o restore a spiritual perspective

Something’s
wrong with me

Daunting Challenges = An
Engraved Invitation
To The Hero’s or
Heroine’s Journey

“Something . . . comes to our aid from the depths of our
unconscious nature. It is the task of the conscious mind to
understand these hints. If this does not happen, the process of
individuation will nevertheless continue. The only
difference is that we become its victims and
are dragged along by fate towards that
inescapable goal which we might have
reached walking upright, if only we had taken
the trouble and been patient enough to
understand in time the meaning of [that
which crosses] our path.” -Carl Jung
©2016 Sharon M. Barnes, LCSW, PLLC.

The Big Picture
 Culture
 Don’t think
 Don’t feel
 Don’t talk
 Religion
 Care for Neighbor Before Caring for Self
 Culture of Medicine
 Self-Care is Taboo
 Focus on Objective over Subjective
 Prolong life vs quality of life
 Where & how people are dying
Transforming Compassion Fatigue © 2016 Sharon M. Barnes, MSSW, LCSW

How to Transform CF
o Care for Neighbor First
o WRONG!
o Care for Neighbor First
o Love Your Neighbor ….
AS YOURSELF
o Your ability to love your
neighbor is limited by
HOW YOU LOVE
YOURSELF!
o SO LOVE YOURSELF
FIRST

Flight Attendants’
Secret Formula
o Put on your own
oxygen mask first
….. BEFORE you
help someone
else
How To Transform
Compassion Fatigue

7
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Exploring New Territory –
Hands-on Learning
 “The significant problems we have, cannot be solved
at the same level of thinking with which we developed
them. We must learn to see the world anew” Albert
Einstein
 “Combinatory Play seems to be the essential feature
in productive thought.” Albert Einstein
 “We need new images if we are to change. Images of
other possibilities” Pat Allen
 Creative Handwork™ = making something which
represents our pain – Sharon Barnes
 Contemplative Handwork = connecting our outer and
inner eyes, ears and heart while contemplating our
creation – Sharon Barnes

Becoming
Conscious

Daily
Dynamite:
Tune-iN-Tool

How do we transform CF?
o Our hands know what our
frontal lobes do not and cannot.
(Jung)
o The word center in the brain is separate
from the meaning and the emotional
centers in the brain.
o Learning styles.
o auditory learner/processor: Words
speak to you more than to the other
learning styles.
o Visual? To you, the saying doubly
applies: “A picture is worth a
thousand words”.
o Kinesthetic? You need your body to
be involved© 2017 Sharon M. Barnes, LCSW, PLLC www.TherapistForSensitiveAndGifted.com

Creative Exploration I
Making something with our hands that represents the
challenges or dilemmas we face:
 Bridges mind and body and spirit
 Bridges “right’ and “left” brain/ uses the whole brain
 Bridges conscious and conscious mind
 Promotes soulfulness and spirituality
 Helps us learn beyond mere thinking
 Is practice for exploration in
new territory
©2017 Sharon M. Barnes, LCSW, PLLC www.TherapistForSensitiveAndGifted.com

Creative Exploration II
 Bypasses the inner censor to access deeper awareness and
higher creativity
 Utilizes Inductive Reasoning
 Improves problem-solving skills
 Increases imagination
 “Imagination is more Important than facts/knowledge”
(Einstein)
 Does not require unusual
artistic ability or creativity

Creative Exploration III
 Creating = High Level Learning
(Bloom's Taxonomy)
 Ancient Wisdom-Chinese
proverb
 Tell me and I'll Forget
 Show me and I'll remember
 Involve me and I'll
understand
 Five Steps to Completion:
Creating
Evaluating
Analyzing
Applying
Understanding
Remembering

1. Connect
Body, Mind,
Soul, Spirit,
Self
How?
o Get ride of distractions
o Gather materials
o Set a timer
o Get comfortable
o Relax with Belly Breathing

2. Identify
1. Identify an effect of trauma in your life from the
previous list
a) What aspect of it comes up when your mind is in neutral-
at stoplights, in the shower, when your brain has
downtime?
b) What sticks in your ‘craw’?
c) If you had a Magic Wand, what one thing would you use it
to do or change?
2. Write it down; Set this aside

3. Create
 There is no right or wrong approach to use
 Pay attention to what attracts you or jumps out at you
 Prepare with deep breathing & relaxation
 See with third eye; listen with inner ear
 Proceed with action: make something that represents
or symbolizes the image(s) or sound(s) that you
perceive
 You are the judge of what and
when is “enough”

Create!

4. Contemplate
Stop, look & listen (again)
 What colors, shapes & textures do you see?
 Give it a voice: What does it say to you?
 Activate Your Imagination:
 Have an imaginary conversation with your creation
 Focus this conversation on the
current dilemma
 Follow the conversation (in your
imagination) wherever it leads you

Contemplate

5. Crystallize
 What does this demonstrate about
 What you need to Tune In, Tune Up & Take off?
 What you can do to help yourself and/or your
employees, students or children balance their
complexity, sensitivity & intensity?
 Whatever else came up for you?
 Make a record: write or draw
what you have perceived.

Crystallize

Thanks from ScrapLady Sharon
When Life dumps a pile of scraps on
you,
o Pick them up . . . one by one
o And make something with them!

Resources Used
 Van Dernoot Lipsky, Laura & Burk, Connie: Trauma Stewardship
 Pearlman, Laurie Anne & Saakvitne, Karen: Transforming the Pain
 Pearlman, Laurie Anne & Saakvitne, Karen: Trauma and The Therapist
 McCann,Lisa & Pearlman, Laurie: Psychological Trauma and the Adult
Survivor; Theory, Therapy and Transformation
 Hadamard, Jacques: The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical
Field
 McNiff, Shaun: Art as Medicine, Creating a Therapy of the Imagination
 Allen, Pat: Art Is a Way of Knowing
Thank you for participating! I look forward to connecting again
soon!
Sharon M. Barnes, MSSW, LCSW
Creative Transformation Specialist
AKA The Scrap Lady─
Helping You Create Beauty from Life’s Scraps
303-987-0346

Transforming Compassion Fatigue

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