Grief Work and Compassion Fatigue

Grief is defined as a loss. We can grieve many things, our profession, parts of our identity, our roles (motherhood/fatherhood), a person, our youth, a pet. Anything that we loved and then lost can create a ripple effect that shakes us. There are different types of losses, some we define as perpetual loss, a loss that never completely leaves us (death of a child for example or a parent). A moral injury loss when we behave or are witness to an act that contradicts our most core beliefs, we lose a certain part of ourselves.

Grief can be felt in our body, our emotions, and can manifest through our behavior. There Isn’t a correct and incorrect way to grief, it lies more on a spectrum of how healthy our grieving process is. There is no defined amount of time or behaviors that have to be met to check off the giving checklist. The process of grief will be dependent on your personality traits, your life experience, your coping skills, religious and or spiritual beliefs and the significance of the loss.

Elisabeth Kubler Ross, through her research found that humans can transition through different stages, they are not linear, we can jump a stage, get stuck at a stage or move back and forth between two. The fives stages are:

  1. Denial

  2. Anger

  3. Negotiation

  4. Sadness

  5. Acceptance

Remember, that some can heal from a loss by transition through all these stages, none of these stages or just a couple of them. Every grief process is different, think of it more as the tide waves of the ocean, some times can have huge waves that seem to tumble us, and others times the ocean is peaceful.

Compassion Fatigue

Compassion fatigue is also known as vicarious trauma or secondary trauma and it happens when one is continuously exposed to others traumatic experiences and or emotional turmoil. It can happen over time to several different types of caregiving professionals: nurses, therapists, lawyers, doctors, social workers ect. It can manifest itself in different ways: depersonalization, low job satisfaction, irregular sleep, emotional exhaustion, feelings of inequity toward the caregiver relationship, and or irritability.

The best policy is to try and prevent compassion fatigue, there are many things caregiving professionals can do to protect themselves from ever experiencing vicarious trauma.

  1. Process the feelings associated with caregiving with a loved one and or a professional.

  2. Recognize possible signs of fatigue early.

  3. Balanced lifestyle with exercise, healthy diet, regular sleep.

  4. Diverse coping skills: support system, hobbies, vacation, routines, mindfulness.

  5. Recognize limitations: certain presenting issues, number of hours employed, etc.