Help for the Caregivers: The Impact of the Work on the Worker and Taking Care of Ourselves
I’m delighted to host this month’s Forum topic: Help for the Caregivers: The Impact of the Work on the Worker and Taking Care of Ourselves. I’ve taken the approach of gathering lots of information and breaking it down into more bite size pieces for you to ingest easier. My hope is that you will explore all of the information and share your own challenges and how you’ve addressed them so we can help each other.

My own interest in this topic is long-standing. Many years ago, at about 20 of the 25 I’ve been involved in the movement to end violence against women; a UT graduate student was working on a paper concerning “burnout”. I was among about 30 managers of Austin human service organizations that completed her survey; however my responses were such that I skewed her results! I was more enthused about the work I was doing, more optimistic that we were making a difference and more assured of a better future than most of the others and she requested an in person meeting to figure out why that was. As we talked about my work at the Austin Center for Battered Women and the Austin Rape Crisis Center, (now merged into one organization called Safeplace) she confessed that she’d expected me to be tough and uncaring. She couldn’t fathom how else I could score so on her assessment and all the while working closely with individuals who’d been hurt intentionally in so many awful ways and whose struggles to find safety and well-being meant they were confronting a myriad of barriers. She was both relieved and perplexed to find that I was very emotionally involved in the women and families we served. As we talked, we identified a few of the factors for me personally that thought had made a difference in my ability to keep moving forward and I’ve tried to stay mindful of those as I have continued in this work.

One factor that seemed to make me more optimistic than others is that I was always considering how what I was learning from the women’s experiences could be infused into advocacy for changes in policy (laws, regulations) and practice (standards, training, protocols). In other words, whatever I was hearing was helping me to advocate with policy makers from a sound base of knowledge of how it really is for people so that I could propose the changes most needed. As well what I was learning got incorporated into training and technical assistance offered through the Texas Council on Family Violence so that I could influence others to advocate for changes that would be responsive to the needs of victims. Sometimes this meant challenging my own colleagues about the services and approaches being used by programs and professionals.

Another was my firm philosophy “But for the Grace of God Go I”. That I didn’t see the victims as dramatically different from me and the other workers in our agency, but recognized that anyone can have the misfortune to become involved with someone willing to use violence to control us. The researcher talked about how discouraged she had been by interviewing a couple of directors of programs that were completely the opposite, convinced they were ministering to poor unfortunates who didn’t have good sense and were in need of services through sloth or ignorance.

Finally, and I’m only a tad embarrassed about this one, I am an avid Star Trek fan. Even though the shows are no longer on the air, I am able to continue to access that support through the books that are published based on the four different series! And if I am truly overwhelmed, I can watch one of the movies or episode videos. The Star Trek Universe has the Vulcans who’ve struggled so to overcome the use of violence and have “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination” as a guiding principle. The themes and circumstances are often about those we face in our work……creating mutual understanding based on respect for differences.

Over the years I’ve certainly had moments when I wondered if I was experiencing “compassion fatigue” or “burnout”. I’ve had to stop and think about what it was getting to me and what I could do about it. It hasn’t always been easy. There have been times when I had to cry, had to ask for help, had to acknowledge that there were some serious chips in my armor! I’ve been fortunate to have friends and family upon whom I could rely at those difficult times.

I’ve used many of the strategies I discuss in the materials. As a manager I’ve also had to support others to look at the impact of the work on them, urging them to adopt whatever combination of approaches could help them recover, regroup, renew. And sometimes I’ve had to suggest that doing this work was no longer reasonable for an individual and for the agency. There does sometime come a point when we are overtaken by the grief, horror, and despair that we cannot help others or ourselves. When we don’t incorporate strategies that work for us, then the kinds of things we hear and feel can lead to the need to stop and there’s nothing wrong with that. It is better to stop and recover than to add to the stress for ourselves and not truly be able to focus on the needs of those coming to us for assistance.

So let’s jump in! Please consider just going through the attachments to see what’s there for you and how it might support you in your own process of taking care of yourself and encouraging those around you as well.

Attachments:
1. Help for the Caregivers: Introduction and Definitions
2. The Personal Impact of Secondary Trauma and Stress
3. Categories of Compassion Fatigue
4. Vicarious Trauma
5. Impact of Secondary Trauma and Stress on Professional Functioning
6. Organizational Solutions: The Manager’s Role and Responsibilities
7. Help for the Caregivers: Ideas for your Care
8. The Three R’s, Ways to the Real You: Relax, Reflect, Remember
9. National Resource Center on Domestic Violence References on Vicarious Trauma
10. Introduction to Breathing and Relaxation

Okay, y'all, I see that many of you are downloading the discussion and supplemetal information. I hope you are finding it useful and sharing it with others.

Anyone have any feedback for me?

Thanks, Debby