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From September 10, 2010 CBC The Current:

“Twenty years ago today, CBC Television put a man named Peter Jepson-Young on the evening news. They brought him back every week and for 111 episodes, he documented his days as he died of AIDS. A lot has changed since then. But a lot has stayed the same. We revisit the Dr. Peter Diaries” Click here to hear the podcast.

Summer is here and I am done with workshops for the season. Phew! Although I thoroughly enjoyed meeting wonderful folks all across the country, I am in need of a little R&R after a rather punishing pace since the Fall. I will only be blogging intermittently during the next couple of months as I am taking part of July and the entire month of August off. Being self-employed is not always all it’s cracked up to be (no job security, no pension, no sick pay), but one real bonus is having control over your schedule.

Here are some upcoming events that may interest you:

The next Compassion Fatigue Train the Trainer sessions will be held in Ottawa November 4-5th and in Kingston November 16-17th. The pre-requisite course, Walking the Walk, will be offered on October 15th in Ottawa and November 15th in Kingston. For more information on the Ottawa course, please visit Safeguards. For more information on the Kingston event, please visit www.compassionfatigue.ca

Back by popular demand – a workshop just for Managers with Dr Pat Fisher: June 13-14th, 2011 in Kingston. This manager’s workshop received rave reviews last May. Please visit my website for more information.

Save the date! The first annual Compassion Fatigue Conference will be held on June 15-16th 2011 in Kingston with Dr Gabor Maté and Laura van Dernoot Lipsky as keynote speakers. Please visit the conference website for more information.

Toronto’s Leading Edge Seminars has just published their Fall schedule, and wow, what a great lineup! In particular, I draw your attention to John Briere’s workshop on “Deconstructing Trauma: Memory Exposure, Mindfulness and Existential Awareness in Psychotherapy”. As many of you know, John Briere has had a great influence on my clinical work and I heartily recommend you go hear him if you have not already done so.

Last week I was at the drugstore with my 10 year old son. I was paying for my things when an elderly man approached the counter. He appeared to be in his late eighties and had deep red bags under his eyes. He looked, in a word, absolutely terrible. With a shaking hand, he took a photo out of his pocket and showed it to us and to the women behind the cash. “This is my wife” he said “She died two days ago, we were married for 58 years. She was the love of my life. Now I can’t sleep and the doctor wants me to take these pills” We all fell silent for a minute and then I had a little chat with him. He told me his children all lived out of town, and that he was completely alone. When I left the store with my son in tow, I felt regret that I did not do more. My head was already buzzing with all the community resources I know about, how to link him with the right ones, how we should have taken him out for tea, etc. I was dying to case manage this man into getting support right on the spot but I also had to go home and cook dinner and take care of my family.

This is the constant challenge we face as helpers. Pain and suffering is all around us, it’s not just at work. Where do you draw the line? Do you take every elderly widower out for tea? Do you tell every person with a funny-looking mole to go get checked out? Do you rescue every kitty you see? So what we do is we try our best to figure out boundaries. Sometimes we over-correct and we become like Fort Knox, not letting a single person inside our walls. Sometimes we go too far in the other direction and become ambulance-chasers, rescuing every stray dog and baking for every little old lady on our street.

In my workshops, I am always advocating that we need to gain a better understanding of our own warning signs along the continuum of compassion fatigue. Using traffic lights as an analogy, the green zone is where you are when you are at your very best (I sometimes joke that you are only in the green zone when you’ve been in the field for two weeks or when you have just returned from a 5 month yoga retreat in Tahiti). The yellow zone is where most of us live most of the time. We have warning signs emerging but we often ignore them. The red zone is the danger zone. The extreme end of the red zone finds us on stress leave, clinically depressed or totally withdrawn from others and wracked with anxiety.

We will all visit the less extreme end of the red zone several times in our career – it is a normal consequence of doing a good job.

What suffers first is our emotional and physical health, our family and friends, our colleagues and eventually our clients do pay the price as we become less compassionate, irritable and may make clinical errors.

But back to my story. The reason I am telling you this little anecdote is that I would not have always had this warm compassionate reaction to this man. In fact, my reaction is actually a sign for me that I am well out of the red zone of compassion fatigue (for the time being!). You see, there have been times where I have felt so depleted by all my work demands and difficult stories that I would have hardened myself to this old man’s story and not talked to him at all. Not nice, eh? Have you ever noticed that in yourself or am I the only hard crusty person out there? Conversely, for some of you, being in the red zone would mean you would have jumped into rescuing this man and neglected your family’s needs for the evening.

Research shows that compassion fatigue hits hardest among those of us who are the most caring. As helpers, we have a homing device for need and pain in others and we have this from childhood onwards (for many reasons: family of origin issues, birth order, heredity, etc.) So often for helping professionals the main challenge in their personal life is setting limits and not being a helper/rescuer to everyone around. But eventually, compassion fatigue makes us detach from others: often our colleagues, family and friends suffer far before our clients and patients. Although I am not proud of it, I know that I always seem to save the best for work and give the remaining crumbs to my loved ones. In my clinical work, I feel present, warm and loving towards my clients, even the most challenging soldier who has never wanted to come to counselling and hates being there. But when I am in the red zone I avoid my neighbours, ducking into my house as quickly as possible to avoid a chat, feeling slightly guilty and irritated at the same time. I avoid the phone: “why is my lovely dad calling me to say hi? grrr”

Each of us will have different warning signs. The key to developing an early intervention plan is getting better acquainted with your own. (If you want more resources on this, consider reading my Compassion Fatigue Workbook).

The fact that I feel ready to give again is a great sign of “green zonedom.” Now the trick is keeping it in check and not overcorrecting and becoming depleted again. Keeping the balance, my friends, is a lifetime’s work. I’m ok with that.

It’s been a very busy month. Veeeery busy. I had to travel weekly for work and nearly every weekend for family reasons. Now, 90% of the time, I am speedy gonzales, always on the go, thinking about projects, recipes I would like to make, future ideas of all sorts. Then, once in a while when I’ve been going full spin for weeks, I need a little time off to do absolutely nothing. As you likely know, doing nothing is really hard!

Anyhow, that’s what I’m doing now, lying on the couch, about to watch the World Cup (England vs USA), reading the paper and eating healthy foods to make up for the weeks on the road (way too much salt in everything and never enough greens).

There is a lot I want to write about: meeting amazing foster parents in Manitoba, being given a green smoothie along the way, last week’s Train the Trainer (wow. What a great great group of people), the upcoming Compassion Fatigue Conference in June 2011. But that will all have to wait until this energizer bunny reloads.

I have three more trips before the summer break (Nebraska being the further afield, Oshawa and Guelph) and then….

What do you think when you hear the word “syndrome”?

My first reaction when I hear that word is to think disease or disorder, that something really wrong and it is systemic within a person. Many genetic or chromosomal disorders are referred to as syndromes, often named after the scientist who first discovered the root cause of the anomaly (think of Down Syndrome, for example).

I am noticing that it is being used more and more in the websphere in conjunction with compassion fatigue (as in Compassion Fatigue Syndrome) and for some reason this really goes up my nose.

Compassion Fatigue (CF) is an occupational hazard -it is a normal consequence of doing our work well, it is not a disease or a disorder.

I feel that we helping professionals and caregivers already experience too much guilt and shame around CF without further pathologising it. Words are important, they have an impact on how we perceive ourselves. So can we stop using syndrome in association with compassion fatigue, please?

Your thoughts?

This interview stopped me dead in my tracks. Take a listen: Pt 3: The Global Forest –
“The potentially powerful and altogether untapped healing properties of trees. We all know trees give us oxygen, food and fuel. But according to Diana Beresford-Kroeger, some of them — the Hawthorn for example — have powerful healing properties.”

Cdn military chaplains suffering burnout, compassion fatigue at high rates

My son turned 10 today…This led me to reflect on a ton of things, which I won’t bore you with, but thinking about it all also made me look at the photo on my blog profile and think, yikes, it’s time to age that photo a bit! I think it was taken when he was two.
Ahem. I will put that on my summer to do list. (yay)

Meanwhile, I am travelling a whole lot this month and am starting to plan a Compassion Fatigue Conference for June 2011. Stay tuned for that! In a week or so, there will also be an announcement of the launch of a new web-based resource for those of you wanting to start a private practice or improve your small business. This is very exciting but I can’t tell you more until it’s ready. So please come back or join my mailing list to hear all about it when it launches.

Meantime, if you are a nurse or a hospital worker, you must get your hands on the great new show Nurse Jackie. It’s just brilliant (though if you are easily offended, you may wish to take a pass). Edie Falco is superb as Jackie – a senior ER nurse who hates bureaucratic BS and who puts her patients first, even though she leads a highly imperfect life.

3rd Annual “Renewing the Spirit of Caregiving Conference” with Françoise Mathieu, M.Ed. CCC.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
8:30am-4:30pm
University of Utah, College of Social Work
Goodwill Humanitarian Bldg.
395 South 1500 East
Cost: $100 (Before May 17)
Group: $85 (5 or more)

Evening session for Caregivers
Wednesday May 19th
7:00pm-8:30pm
Cost: $35 or free with conference registration

Register online or call Wendy Anderson (801) 571-2111