Healthy Healers Course

As a Tribal Health Provider,

• How often are you called to the scene of a bad accident?
• Have you ever had one of your patients pass away?
• How often do you sit and listen to stories of despair?
• In spite of knowing that your clients' journeys are separate from your own, do you sometimes feel overwhelmed by all of their pain?

Meda Dewitt-Schleifman talked about traditional societies that recognized their healers at a very young age. From childhood, the prospective healers were prepared through tools and ceremony for their roles and responsibilities. Today’s healers sometimes have only a few years of training. Perhaps as a consequence we can feel overwhelmed, haunted by the things we see and the pain we hear.

That pain can spill over into our own journey and affect us in many ways. There are various terms for this: compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, or burn-out. While they all have slightly different meanings, they really come down to the effects of accumulating the pain and trauma of those we serve resulting in pain and trauma overload.

The symptoms of compassion fatigue (vicarious trauma) vary widely and are similar to those of chronic stress. They include:

• Chronic tiredness.

• Trouble sleeping or sleeping too much.

• Feeling disconnected or feeling hypersensitive.

• Wondering if one's work is making a difference.

• An inability to get thoughts related to traumatic material out of one's head.

• Difficulty with personal relationships.

• Seeing danger everywhere.

• Stress-related physical ailments (get sick more often, headaches, stomach aches, chronic fatigue syndrome, etc.).

• Substance abuse.^{1, 2}

If you think that you are suffering from compassion fatigue, it is more than likely you are. The first step to recovering is to become aware of your feelings and the source of them. The next step is to remind yourself to take care of yourself.