Compassion Fatigue

I am tired. I think I am suffering from compassion fatigue. I became a parent in 1972 and through 1998 continued to have children or foster children at home. 1989-90 was the height of parenting when we had 5 teenagers plus a 12 year old in our home. 3 of the teen-agers were developmentally disabled. 2 of them were bedwetters so there was all of their bedding to be washed each night. Grocery shopping was a nightmare as I filled 2 grocery carts each week to say nothing of the dentist/doctor visits, IEP and other school meetings, parent-teacher conferences and meetings with social workers and working with the mother of the foster children!! Although, I was and am married, Arden did little or none of the caregiving. He didn’t wash clothes, or shop for groceries, or take children to appointments or go to school appointments or write reports or prepare meals. It wasn't his fault, I didn't ask him to help me as I thought it was my duty to do it all. He was a good financial provider and was inciteful in providing council to the kids. In addition to all of the kids and those responsibilities, I held a very demanding job that required compassion, decision making, conflict resolution and problem solving. WHEW!! No wonder after nearly 40 years, I am tired. Added to all of that is this difficult placement in an extremely rural area of high poverty with many, many struggles. The area is not going to change, but I think that I must make a change, sooner rather than later to save my sanity. I am showing many of the signs of compassion fatigue. I came across some notes from a workshop on "Surviving Compassion Fatigue". In the people business there are certain givens:1. You're going to feel overworked2. You're going to feel under-appreciated3. There are going to be communication glitches4. Burn out is a daily event so daily we must do something (selfish) daily to fill our tanks5. Don't let circumstances steal your joy--do not take offense What is compassion? Dacher Keltner, a psychologist who leads the Greater Good Science Center, defines compassion as “concern to enhance the welfare of another who suffers or is in need.” This is different from empathy, which is the “mirroring or understanding of another’s emotion.” So empathy is feeling; compassion is action. Why is compassion so universal, not just in individuals but through social networks and institutions? It was thought for a long time that compassion was the exception, selfishness the rule. After Charles Darwin made his case for evolution, many Europeans interpreted the survival of the fittest to mean that only the fittest should survive. Europeans even invented an ideology called Social Darwinism, the belief that alleged intellectual and behavioral differences between people with different skin pigmentations were rooted in biology, making some races fit to rule and some fit to serve. But that was all wrong right from the start, because Darwin’s theory of evolution suggested that the good in human beings was just as adaptive as the bad. In other words, we have compassion because compassion helps our species to survive. Compassionate acts, Darwin wrote in Descent of Man, “appear to be the simple result of the greater strength of the social and maternal instincts than that of any other instinct or motive; for they are performed too instantaneously for reflection, or for pleasure or pain to be felt at the time; though, if prevented by any cause, distress or even misery might be felt.” In other words, our evolved instinct to help other people is a reflex, like smiling back at someone who smiles at us or flinching at the sound of a gunshot. When we are prevented from acting on the compassionate instinct, it hurts; we feel miserable. The effect can be deadening. So we are literally wired for compassion; we experience compassion in both our minds and our bodies, and the experience makes minds and bodies healthier. This explains why the absence of compassion is so painful. But I believe that when we’re confronted with evil, we cannot respond in kind. I don’t believe in fighting fire with fire. Instead, I’d argue, we must aim to reestablish the connection between us as human beings; this is the definition of goodness. In the face of cruelty and stupidity, we have to respond with empathy and imagination. We have to leave the confines of our own minds, and travel that biological and social bridge of emotion, and try to help those who have hurt us, and try to imagine what drove them to hurt us. We must make their pains our own. Not for their benefit, but for the sake of our own potential. But human beings are not, as we know, robots, and there is a great deal of research suggesting that somatic empathy — that is, the involuntary, unconscious empathy we feel in our guts—is a major factor driving compassion fatigue, a state of mind in which we become less and less able to help others, for fear of being hurt ourselves. We’re talking about natural processes—namely, compassion and empathy —being put to use over and over again in highly repetitive, artificial situations. That kind of work will wear down even the strongest person, especially during times like these, when budgets are being cut and resources, including human resources, are being stretched to the limit, and distressed people are counting more than ever on infrastructures of care. It’s in historical moments like this one that compassion fatigue becomes a real threat, not just to professions like nursing but to our entire society. Charles Garfield is an advisor to Greater Good magazine, clinical professor of psychology at the UC School of Medicine, founder of the Shanti Project, one of the first HIV/AIDS community organizations in the world, and an expert on compassion and compassion fatigue. In his book Sometimes My Heart Goes Numb, Charlie describes the symptoms and consequences of compassion fatigue: depression, anxiety, hypochondria, combativeness, the sensation of being on fast-forward, an inability to concentrate. Caregivers, he writes, “describe greater and greater difficulty in processing their emotions. They are anxiety-ridden or distressed. Fellini-esque images intrude on their days and nights, painful memories flood their world outside the caregiving arena.” So what we can you do? First of all, take care of yourself. Use your weekends and your time off to do things you enjoy, eat healthy foods, read novels, go for long walks. If you’re struggling with darkness, look for light wherever you can find it. Show compassion for yourself—recognize suffering in yourself and act to alleviate the suffering. That’s different from self-pity, when we see suffering in ourselves and we don’t do anything about it. We just feel sorry for ourselves. With self-compassion, we don’t allow the suffering to define us. Instead, we are defined by our resistance to suffering. What is in italics was taken from http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/greatergoodscience/?p=404