Month: February 2020
Understanding Compassion
Posted on February 26, 2020 by Laura Hawley, Lic Ac, LCSW - No Comments
Second in a series of five posts
If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.
Jack Kornfield, American Buddhist monk and educator
In my experience, compassion is not defined correctly in the concept of compassion fatigue.
The word compassion is used to include other emotional stances, ranging from empathy to sympathy to pity and even to despair. Compassion, on the other hand, recognizes the suffering of another as a reflection of our own pain. Our desire to alleviate the suffering of others must come from a balanced place if it is to be sustainable.
Sustainable compassion for others includes both me and the other person. My compassion for other people arises from my own compassionate self acceptance. When I don’t have compassion for myself, then what arises from me in response to another’s suffering maybe sorrow, or empathy, or pity, but it is not compassion. Buddhists train in compassion because it is a skilled state, requiring us to discern it from other states that may imitate and undermine it. As a skilled state, “compassion is viewed as a power for purifying the mind of confusion, for inner healing, and for protection of self and others.” Thus true compassion replenishes itself, and does not get fatigued.
This skill of cultivating sustainable compassion in caregiving professions is rarely taught. Leading traumatologists suggest that people who are attracted to care giving often “hail from a tradition of other-directed care giving. Simply put, these are people who were taught at an early age to care for the needs of others before caring for their own needs.” As children, we may have been praised for being nice and listening well to other people. Our own need to be seen, listened to and cared for may not have been as well met. It may have made sense to be seen as caring if we wanted to be seen at all.
Caring for others is a calling, but it can also be driven by a creative adjustment, a largely unconscious defensive strategy that allows the giver to avoid awareness of grief and trauma related to early disappointment, neglect or abuse. We may come to caregiving professions with a distinct lack of compassion for our own selves. We may be using other directed care partly to avoid painful aspects of our own needs. This is the path to burnout. The journey of the caregiver must include confronting the limits of this avoidant strategy. It must include coming to love ourselves as much as we love other people.
(2)Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are, Jack Kornfield
(3)Compassion in Buddhist Psychology, John Makransky, PhD Chapter Four in Compassion and Wisdom in Psychotherapy, edited by Christopher K. Germer and Ronald D. Siegel, Guilford Press, 2012
(4)J. Eric Gentry and Anna B. Baranowsky
Reframing Compassion Fatigue in Caregiving Work- Spirals and Cycles
Posted on February 19, 2020 by Laura Hawley, Lic Ac, LCSW - No Comments
First in a series of five posts
Compassion Fatigue is defined as “a state experienced by those helping people or animals in distress; it is an extreme state of tension and preoccupation with the suffering of those being helped to the degree that it can create a secondary traumatic stress for the helper.”
Dr. Charles Figley, author, Secondary Traumatization and Compassion Fatigue
Chronic compassion fatigue can lead to burnout: physical, emotional and mental exhaustion experienced after a time of intense effort. The word implies a state arrived at from a place of passion. Once engaged and excited, the burnt-out person finds themselves less capable of raising a spark of interest, never mind a flame. It’s not that the person doesn’t care as much, it is that they can’t care as much as they used to. There is a risk of this in all caring professions: educational, medical, nonprofit, political, activist, veterinary, social work, therapy, law enforcement, journalism and ministry, just to begin the list.
People in caring professions ourselves live under systemic oppression related to race, class, gender identity and expression, immigration status, sexual orientation and other aspects of being in a society that is increasingly polarized. We all live with governing and economic systems that undermine our citizenship and our value as human beings. We all live in awareness of climate change and environmental crisis. In this context it is vital that we build our understanding of the compassion that can sustain us in these difficult times.
In this series of posts, I offer some conceptual frames for defining compassion and recognizing and addressing burnout. My aim is to provide new ways of understanding self care and support for people who do such important and challenging work.