Taking Care of Ourselves

The last module in our training seminar is about self-care – how to look after yourself; prevent burnout and traumatisation in yourself; and spot the signs of it beginning. The module begins with a quick overview of the difference between ‘burnout’ and the kinds of traumatisation effects that you can experience when you work closely with traumatised people, discussed in this text on ‘compassion fatigue’ (if you decide to buy the book, go through the button on the CSEL website!) This is a chance to get a discussion going in the group about how we can spot the signs, or even better, prevent burnout – and what personal and professional solutions there are.

We include the self-care module because we think it’s vital to understand that these things can happen, learn to recognise the symptoms, and share ideas of how we can take care of ourselves and take preventive action.

Usually training groups are quite mixed and include a few therapeutic professionals, who have extensive experience of formalised structures to help, such as regular supervisions. But many smaller, grassroots, or traditional voluntary sector organisations don’t have these structures. Some really creative ideas have come out of these mixed group discussions, for example, the suggestion that organisations in one region get together and hold an away day focused on self-care and peer support.

I know that this part of our training is vital, because however long I schedule for this session, and however careful I am to make sure we have time to discuss it at the end of the afternoon, there is still never enough time. People always want to talk for longer than we can carry on!

Well nearly always... At one session I encountered almost the opposite phenomenon: after talking about the difference between ‘burnout’ and ‘secondary traumatisation’, I opened the topic for general discussion about taking care of oneself. A couple of people spoke, then – silence. And then the group began to discuss something completely different. I wondered if this was a kind of collective avoidance tactic – changing the subject rather than talking about something sensitive and difficult.

What all of this suggests – both talking as though the floodgates have been opened, and avoiding talking about it – is that looking after ourselves is a much bigger topic than we are even able to acknowledge.

For more information about compassion fatigue, see Charles Figley’s website.

Clare Cochrane
c.cochrane @ csel.org.uk