Help for the Helper: The Psychophysiology of Compassion Fatigue and Vicarious Trauma


Book Description

How empathy can jeopardize a therapist's well-being. Therapist burnout is a pressing issue, and self-care is possible only when therapists actively help themselves. The authors examine the literature from neurobiology, social psychology, and folk psychology in order to explain how therapists suffer from an excess of empathy for their clients, and then they present strategies for dealing with burnout and stress.




Help the Helper


Book Description

“The real lessons of teamwork don’t happen on camera. They happen behind the closed doors of locker rooms and team meetings and practice facilities. Kevin and John open those closed doors. All you need to do is get reading!” —Larry Bird “Help the helper” is a basketball motto preached by some of the sport’s legendary coaches, including Dean Smith and Phil Jackson. All good players know they should support a teammate who’s under pressure. But the true greats know how to take it one step further. They fill the gaps left behind when one teammate goes to help another—gaps that are often far from the bas­ket and out of the spotlight. The true greats step up in quiet ways to make sure no subtle holes develop on defense and no opportunities are missed on offense. Help the Helper will show you how to put this level of teamwork to work in your business, to build a cul­ture that recognizes and rewards those who help the helper—even when they don’t have sexy statistics. In the process, it will teach you how to de-emphasize the CEO/quarterback/superstar and effectively redefine leadership. You’ll learn, for instance, how to: Create a dynasty of unselfishness. Manage energy, not people. Eat obstacles for breakfast. Act like an “unleader.” Consider how it works in the hospitality industry. In a great restaurant you don’t have to wait for your server to check on you; your needs are taken care of instantaneously, sometimes before you notice them. Everyone from the busboy to the maître d’ has one goal: the success of the team. Such coordination seems complicated for a small eatery, nearly impossible for a large organization. But it’s easier than you think. For a combined forty years, Pritchard and Eliot have focused on building high-performing groups. They’ve crushed Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-Hour Rule, logging upward of 50,000 hours studying the factors that create champions and dynasties, from the NBA and Major League Baseball to the Fortune 500. Exhaustive testing, scouting, and evaluating have taught them that truly special teams in all fields have one common denominator: a willingness to do what­ever it takes to help the helper. Drawing on true and inspirational stories from sports to medicine to business, Help the Helper shows what’s behind the curtain that fuels great team performance.




Help for Helpers


Book Description

Written by addiction treatment center staff members from across the country, these daily meditations encourage, comfort, and challenge helpers to understand others and themselves. Written by counselors for counselors, Help for Helpers is the only meditation book of its kind. As relevant and popular today as it was when it was first published more than 25 years ago, this book offers personal reflections and guidance to those who help addicts recover. Nearly 200 topics cover the gamut of challenges counselors commonly face, from ways to avoid burnout and fatigue to how to achieve balance and serenity in one's life.




Helping


Book Description

A Strategy+Business Best Leadership Book of the Year: An “uncommonly wise” analysis of the psychological and social dynamics of helping relationships (Warren Bennis, author of On Becoming a Leader). Helping is a fundamental human activity, but it can also be a frustrating one. All too often, to our bewilderment, our sincere offers of help are resented, resisted, or refused—and we often react the same way when people try to help us. Why is it so difficult to provide or accept help? How can we make the whole process easier? Many words are used for helping: assisting, aiding, advising, caregiving, coaching, consulting, counseling, guiding, mentoring, supporting, teaching, and more. In this seminal book on the topic, corporate culture and organizational development guru Ed Schein analyzes the social and psychological dynamics common to all types of helping relationships, explains why help is often not helpful, and shows what any would-be helpers must do to ensure that their assistance is both welcomed and genuinely useful. He shows how to navigate the delicate acts of asking for or offering help; avoid pitfalls; mitigate power imbalances; and establish a solid foundation of trust—and how these techniques can be applied to teamwork and organizational leadership. From the bestselling author of Organizational Culture and Leadership, and illustrated with examples from many types of relationships—husbands and wives, doctors and patients, consultants and clients—Helping is a concise, definitive analysis of what it takes to establish successful, mutually satisfying helping relationships.




Compassion Fatigue


Book Description

First published in 1995. Traumatology, or the field of traumatic stress studies, has become a dominant focus of interest in the mental health fields only in the past decade. Yet the origin of the study of human reactions to traumatic events can be traced to the earliest medical writings in Kunus Pyprus, published in 1900 B.C. in Egypt. Many factors account for the recent emergence of this field, including a growing awareness of the long-term consequences of shocking events. Among these consequences are violence toward others, extraordinary depression, dysfunctional behavior, and a plethora of medical maladies associated with emotional stress. This is the latest in a series of books that have focused on the immediate and long-term consequences of highly stressful events. The purposes of the book, then, are (a) to introduce the concept of compassion fatigue as a natural and disruptive by-product of working with traumatized and troubled clients; (b) to provide a theoretical basis for the assessment and treatment of compassion stress and compassion fatigue: (c) to explain the difference between compassion fatigue and PTSD, burnout, and countertransference; (d) to identify innovative methods for treating compassion fatigue in therapists, and (e) to suggest methods for preventing compassion fatigue.




The Skilled Helper


Book Description




The Professional Helper


Book Description

The professional helper should be a teacher, a mentor, a motivator and a guide when assisting helpees find solutions to their life situations. Most clients have within themselves the answers to most if not all of their life situations; quite often, what they need is someone to assist them in sifting through and evaluating the various possible responses for a situation. This revised and expanded new edition continues the theme of the first edition in providing a basic understanding of the various kinds of helping relationships and characteristics that an effective helper must possess. An overview of the major issues the United States has encountered, and to some degree successfully overcome with the involvement of the helping professional, is presented. Part I covers personal skills that a helper should possess such as understanding self, understanding human behavior, cultural differences, disabilities, religion, and resources. Part II discusses the impacts of the changing roles of helping professionals, roles in cultural evolution, and future challenges for helpers. Part III provides an analysis of theoretical views for helping relationships. A discussion of the theories are provided to enable helpers develop their own professional approaches to helping clients. Other topics include understanding individual and family counseling, preparing the helper to provide the best professional and ethical services possible, a sound understanding of human behavior, how to conduct the helping relationship from the standpoint of process, establishment of goals, and the implementation of these goals. The Professional Helper will be a beneficial text to all counseling students, as well as students in social work, human resources, psychology, sociology, and human relations.




The Skilled Helper


Book Description

Internationally recognised for its successful problem-management approach to effective helping, this book offers a step-by-step guide to the counselling process.




Carpenter's Helper


Book Description

A warm, wonderful picture book that gently reminds us of the importance of respecting our natural world and highlights the joys and rewards of helping others. Join a girl as she helps a mama and papa bird build a nest in her bathroom, hatch their eggs, and teach their babies to fly away. Renata and her Papi are hard at work at renovating their bathroom. Renata can't wait to build castles of bubbles in the deep, old-fashioned bathtub. But one morning, she finds dried leaves and pine needles heaped on a shelf in the corner. How did they get there? She soon realizes that a bird has built a nest on the shelf, and inside it are four rosy eggs! Weeks pass, and Renata watches as the wrens come and go, building a home in her bathroom... until, one day, with a little help from Renata, the birds are ready to fly.




The Compassion Fatigue Workbook


Book Description

The Compassion Fatigue Workbook is a lifeline for any helping professional facing the physical and emotional exhaustion that can shadow work in the helping professions. Since 2001 the activities in this Workbook have helped thousands of helpers in the fields of healthcare, community mental health, correctional services, education, and the military. In addition to a comprehensive description of compassion fatigue and vicarious traumatization, The Compassion Fatigue Workbook leads the reader through experiential activities designed to target specific areas in their personal and professional lives. It provides concrete strategies to help the reader develop a personalized plan for identifying and transforming compassion fatigue and vicarious traumatization. Topics covered include: understanding compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma symptom checklist targeting areas for strategic planning understanding warning signs assessing contributing factors evaluating self-care identifying triggers solutions: personal, professional and organizational strategies.