Compassion Fatigue: Coping With Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder In Those Who Treat The Traumatized [Hardcover]

Designed as help for the therapist, it is also appropriate, and may be as or more important, for helpers who happen to be mothers, spouses, children, or even friends who find themselves suffering from the personal after-effects of being around physical, mental, emotional or psychological trauma of others - acting as mediators, menders, negotiators, and/or reservoirs of the pain and troubles of others. They may also need to address their own baggage of current or distant pain caused by disruptive circumstances in their own past to complicate the difficulty of handling multiple sources of distress and stress. Seen frequently in domestic violence situations, or arising from elder or ailing parents, or in trying to accommodate severe illness in anyone close to them, long term stress becomes the distress of psychological trauma. It may or may not be recognized by others, at work, or by those who are in a position to give relief. It may or may not be a known fact within the family where caregivers rarely allow themselves to acknowledge being weak, or in needing services themselves. Left unattended, the helper may become the person needing help, often some time beyond the time that help is being given (in the form of an aftershock) which may or may not be seen as having come from overextending themselves in serving the needs of others. Rescuer's remorse, it might be called, to identify the time when caregiver's come to assess the harm done to themselves and the need for recovery. It usually follows burn out in time when adjustment and incentive may be lacking with the realization of being psychologically or emotionally spent as well as physically tired and fatigued. It also happens to children (when in orphan situations, or even in single parent families) where they have been a primary emotional carrier of siblings, or younger children, a source of support for siblings, or even parents, in daily or sporadic struggles of emotional trauma. Often, refusing to give in to the need they also require for care, support and affection, they develop an overdeveloped sense of the "atlas-syndrome" where they cannot allow themselves to give in, for recognizing their own weakness, realizing they may not have a resource to turn to in that event. In denial of their own weakness, they forge onward without acknowledging their need for affection and solace. While admirable, it is also self destructive, however necessary they feel it to be. Long term deprivation of their own needs can have difficult emotional, physical, emotional and educational ramifications in addition to social consequences inconsistent with their desires and their intention to attain their own extraordinarily high defensive standards. Failure of society to recognize this vulnerable class of persons usually means that they are misunderstood, devalued, and may be mis-classified as social misfits rather than the begrudging individuals they are who willingly adopt the problems of others, sometimes to their own detriment.

This is a good introduction to "compassion fatique". For years we have known about burn out, but this is far more. The field is just now considering the possibility of secondary PTSD/O, but many of us, who have worked with trauma victims, have seen the signs of copassion fatique. As a supervisior, I have dealt with counselors and psychologists who work with trauma vitims who display copassion fatique. I recommend this book as start in the study of compassion fatique.

Figley stands out as a pioneer in compassion fatigue studies. This book was essential to my literature review for my Master's research paper and the work I did in New York City as a Red Cross caseworker in response to 9/11.