What Can Be Done to Help Helping Professionals?
By Gina Cipriano
Many people enter into a helping profession due to having a passion for assisting others in overcoming a difficult point in their lives. Helping professions can include some of the following professions: nurses, therapists, teachers, emergency medical technicians, and police officers. However, working in a helping profession can sometimes come at a price. Within the helping profession, it is not uncommon for people to experience compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, and/or burnout.
Often, in order to help someone, a helping professional must hear intimate details about how a client or patient endured a trauma. Further, they are expected to provide the survivor of the trauma with support during this process. Vicarious trauma may occur when a helping professional “is exposed to the retelling of a traumatic event by a client;” even without experiencing the trauma themselves, vicarious trauma can occur (Pirelli et al., 2020, p.455). Compassion fatigue occurs when a helping professional empathizes with their clients or patients to the point that they are unable to separate themselves from the experiences of their clients and patients (Pirelli et al., 2020). Finally, burnout occurs as a result of multiple stressors in a person’s workplace; this can include problems within the workplace environment and exhaustion in relation to the work that one does (Pirelli et al., 2020).
Compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma and burnout can result in some of the following symptoms:
• Emotions such as anger and helplessness• Bringing work home with them • Decreased work satisfaction • Intense emotional reactivity • Numbing emotional pain with substance or alcohol use• Detachment from clients and patients • Decreased relational satisfaction
Burnout can contribute to more severe issues such as somatic symptoms (mental symptoms shown as physical symptoms) and depersonalization (having a detached feeling from oneself) (Pirelli et al., 2020).
Self-care is a huge buzz word but is often failed to be talk about within a clinical context. All this being said, there are preventative measures that can be taken through the use of self-care. Some of these measures can include the following:
• Making gratitude lists (Roux et al., 2020)• Journaling (Roux et al., 2020)• Coloring (Roux et al., 2020)• Meditation (Roux et al., 2020)• Exercise (Killian, 2008)• Personal Therapy • Practicing Spirituality (Killian, 2008)• Increasing Social Support (Killian, 2008)• Increasing Supervision (Killian, 2008)• Reducing Case Loads (Killian, 2008)
Compassion satisfaction is the opposite of compassion fatigue as it explains that a person feels rewarded and a sense of purpose for their work with others. For people who are currently experiencing symptoms of burnout, compassion fatigue, and/or vicarious trauma, therapy can potentially help them in overcoming these symptoms to feel compassion satisfaction once again. Further, therapy can assist in the prevention of these symptoms. Therapy can help a person in defining what self-care looks like to them and formulate a plan to engage in self-care. Additionally, therapy can assist a person in challenging their outlook on life to a more flexible worldview, which can ultimately allow a helping professional to help others without losing themselves in the process.
References Killian, K. D. (2008). Helping till it hurts? A multimethod study of compassion fatigue, burnout, and self-care in clinicians working with trauma survivors. Traumatology, 14(2), 32-44. https://doi.org/10.1177/1534765608319083Pirelli, G., Formon, D. L., & Maloney, K. (2020). Preventing vicarious trauma (VT), compassion fatigue (CF), and burnout (BO) in forensic mental health: Forensic psychology as exemplar. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 51(5), 454-466. https://doi.org/10.1037/pro0000293Roux, N., & Benita, T. (2020). Best practices for burnout self-care. Nursing Management, 51(10), 30-35. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.numa.0000698116.82355.0d
