How To Turn Life Challenges Into Opportunities

What is compassion fatigue? In a discussion at a Womens' Healing conference sponsored by Hazelden, author and presenter Stephanie S. Covington, PhD defined compassion as "losing ourselves in order to emotinally join with our clients." Dr. Covington discussed how counselors' constant surrendering to that "deeper than empathy" level can exhaust and lead to compassion fatigue.
Endless compassion combined with personal and professional stress can destroy a counselor's optimism, diminshing the belief in the human spririt's resilency. When counselors pull up to park at work, they have to remember that they are entering a danger zone where countertransference, compassion fatigue and burnout can , if ignored, grow from a tiny acorn into a full -size oak.

Signs of compassion fatigue: Compassion fatigue presents as apathy, low personal accomplishment, frustration, boredom, depression, anxiety, and hopelessness. Constant exposure to people suffering from trauma sets addiction counselors up for compassion fatigue, more so than other mental health professionals.
The range of personal and professional behaviors indicating compassion fatigue can include, abusing chemcials, spending less time with patients, being late and absent from work, making professional errors, being hypercritical of others, depersonalizing patients, making sarcastic and cynical comments about patients and the organziation, and keeping poor records.
Compassion fatigue also can erode spritiudal development. A counselor might begin doubting his/her values and most deeply felt beliefs.
Compasssion fatigue, if left untreated, can reduce job performance, increase mistakes, lower morals, damage personal relationships, spark a deterioration of personality, and generate a decline in general health.

The best prevention against Compassion fatigue, is maintaining awareness that this can happen to the best of therapists, having a mind set that you are not immune, educating yourself about the signs and symptoms, and getting help when the first signs appear, weather it is with collegues or just taking some time for yourself.

I have had people ask me how to get anger management quick, before they blow up. My response to them is , while I appreciate you wanting to solve this dilema, that is all anger management is, ” a quick fix” for a long term problem. If you really want to resolve the problem, you need anger awareness.
What is anger awareness? It is learning to identify, what gets you mad, when does this happen, why does it happen. Usually it is due to an unresolved trigger or event that you never processed and worked through. Why do we do this? We usually want instant gratification, and anger awareness is not one of them. As a past therapist, I would tell my substance abuse clients, that we need to get to the meat of the issues, so you can stay sober. If not, you will certainly return to the same behavior again and agin. Doing the same thing and wanting different results, is the definition of INSANITY.
Anger is the same way. First we have to identify when anger occurs, at what intensity, is their a pattern, how often etc. We do this by keeping a diary for at least one month. I know, it seems like a long time, but you didn’t get this way over night and you will not get better over night either.
Next step, identify anger triggers, is it a person, place, how does your body feel, do you have trigger symptoms etc. Once we have all these answers, while you are processing your unresovled issues for long term health, we can develop an anger management plan to help you direct your anger in an appropriate way.
Anger is an emotion, probably one of the most popular among all the emotions. It is easy to verbalize or act out, but it is not always the easiest to understand. Acting out behavior is not always what it appears to be. We get mad at our co-worker cause we had a flat tire on the way to work, this is mis placed anger and most of us do it. Mis placed anger makes us feel better, we can blame someone or something else and not take repsonsibility for the behavior. We can’t change, what we can’t see. Sometimes we need others to point out observations about behavior. When they do, we need to be ready to hear it and accept it. This is the only way for change.
Anger is about loss of control or fear. We don’t know how to express that emotion or don’t know we have it and so do “what comes naturally”.
I feel anger is one of the biggest causes of mis communication due to the fact that there is a lot of “hidden anger” “unresolved anger” . IF we don’t learn to identify it , learn from it and make it work for us, we will all be unhealthy, unhappy and miserable people.

What is Burnout? EVeryone that has ever had a career has been through it, sometimes more than once. Burn out is when you can’t stand to go to work, maybe have some physical symptoms, don’t feel like doing anything and is a very stressful time for many. The most important thing I think that happens is that we make some bad decisions, and mistakes during this time. I have met people that have made such bad desicions that it cost them their career, all the way to just having a typo in a written report. This time can be very dangerous if we don’t take care of our selves. How do we do that? By understanding all you can about yourself, and burnout. For instance, their are 4 stages of burnout, and we need to either intervene ourselves or get some intervention well before we get to the 3 or 4th stage. So you need to be in tune with your self, your signs and symptoms. You need to know when your work/life balance is out of wack. You need to have some “me” time at least 2x a month, I recommened 1x a week as part of your prevention program. Therapists and others in the helping field are notorius for going the extra mile for their clients, but neglecting them selves. Isn’t that ironic. We are in the helping field and we are the ones we take care of the least. IT IS A MUST to take care of yourself, I feel espcially if you are in the helping field. You can only be as good of a helper as you are to your self. We need to feel that work/life balance in sinc, we need to be able to identify our issues, and we need to especially be good to our selves, for the very reason that we are here to help others. If we are not well, we can’t help others and after all that is our nature, to be helpers and a change agent in our client’s lifes.
So how can we prevent this?
First of all you need to learn the symptoms of burnout, be able to identify them in yourself and then do something about it. For some it may mean, getting away from our practice for a while, taking a vacation, for some it might be time to call it a day, and for still others, it may just mean a night out with friends, or a couple hours with those we love. ONly you can decide what is right for you. If it is extreme, you maybe even want to get your own therapist. Sometimes we can’t go to our suprervision team with things, nor should we, especially if they are personal. The supervision team is not the one to help us in that area. But you can bet, they will notice if we are failing in our work, or seem off in some way. Then they might suggest that we do something. We don’t want it to come to that. Thats why we want to make sure we are a tuned to our selves, our attitude, our thinking, our emotions and feeling. So even if you don’t fee you need it, take some me time this week. It will prevent some me time for a month, later.

I bought the Oprah magazine this month and the cover story is What’s your Next Chapter? I thought givin that this is a new year, it was real appropriate. Alot of us are faced with choosing a new path in our life. Some of us are retiring, some of us have lost jobs, divorced, or some are choosing to create a new path such as returning to school, or changing careers. What ever “next chapter” is in your life, make it count. Sometimes a “Next Chapter” can seem overwhelming, even a little scary. It is the fear of the unknown. For so long we have been in a routine, maybe even for years, that to try something new seems so different, that we often return to what “feels comfortable” our comfort zone. That is ok for a minute, but unless we learn to step out of our comfort zone, we will not grow as a person, we will only exist in life and not LIVE it. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to just exist, I want to squeeze every thing out of life I can while I am here on earh. Sometimes, that means even dealing with the challenges that life can bring us sometimes. Life can be tricky sometimes, often giving us the kick in the behind that we need to grow and change, that we wouldn’t have taken on our own. (this is when life changes for us and not when we want it to, such as divorce, death, loss of job etc.) If we learn to embrace the challenges, we can turn them into opportunities to experience new growth and create a “Next Chapter”. When we do that, we are taking charge of our life instead of life taking charge of us.
So many of us choose the easy way. What would happen if you suddenly chose a differnt way to drive to work, a different place to eat lunch, a different arm to wear your watch on. Guess what? It would seem awkward for a minute, but like everything else, it would be come a “new comfort zone” after a while. We just have to be willing to take the risk.
Not to get morbid, but we only go around once, we are not given tomorrow, so we need to embrace every part of life we can. Those of you that have experienced the death of a loved one know what I am talking about.
So ……instead of having life make dictate your “next chapter” why don’t you dictate your own “next chapter”. Try one thing new. Find a new hobby. Take a new route to work. Read a book. These are little things you can do to get ready and prepared for the “next chapter” in your life. What do you want the chapter to look like? Where do you want it to lead? Exciting and empowering questions, that only you can answer. Have a fantastic journey!!!!!

Well it is 2011, what will the New Year bring. I hope it is a better year than last year. Do you believe in resolutions? I think the problem with resolutions is that people are all excited and make them in January and then by April, they let the resolution slide. So I think a better way is to do one new thing each month for a New You. New Year, New You means that if you just make one change in your life, weather it is physical or internal, it will make a difference and you will feel better about yourself. For me, I got a new WEb site and a new Hair do. The reason why one thing one month works, is that you feel like you have accomplished something and the feeling makes you feel good about yourself. If you do this every month, you can have this feeling all year.
Positive change makes a difference. It motivates you to want to do more. When you have small successes, you eventually build your self esteem up because you don’t fail. With resolutions, when we stop the commitment, we feel like we have failed and that can’t possibly do anything for our self esteem. Change can be as little as buying a new book, or going for a walk, it just needs to be one thing that you have never done, need to do, or have done before and loved it.
Its kind of fun to plan your new things every month for the next month. I have a friend who keeps a monthly calendar and on the 1st of every month is her “new thing” to do for that month. It is something for her to look forward to and she can always change it if when the month comes she wants to do something different. It is very empowering to know that you have the control to make the change if and when you want.
So what will be your new thing for Janurary? You still have 28 days to make one. Go for it. New Year, New You