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 for the Helper: Preventing Compassion Fatigue and Vicarious Trauma in an Ever-Changing World: Updated + Expanded (Second)


Book Description

An essential resource for helping professionals, updated for today’s challenges. Since the publication of the first edition of Help for the Helper in 2006, the world has changed. Significantly. Due to existing and growing threats of war, increasing areas of civil unrest, the COVID-19 pandemic, financial collapse, natural disasters, and more, therapists and other helping professionals now often find themselves in a particularly tricky position: They are struggling to personally cope with traumas and massive stresses that are very similar to those experienced by their clients and others they serve. To address these unique challenges, this revised and expanded edition now includes guidance for helping clients while maintaining therapists’ own safety and sanity in crisis situations, managing the usual stresses and challenges during normal times, and tips for dealing with trauma when that is not a therapist’s specialty. Topics include the neurophysiology and regulation of arousal, self-care during shared community/world crises, maintaining balance and strength, countertransference, somatic empathy, mirroring and mimicry.




Healing Secondary Trauma


Book Description

Taking care of the caregivers—a compassionate guide to healing secondary trauma A traumatic experience can have profound impacts on the people directly involved. However, that trauma can extend to the professionals like first responders and crisis counselors, as well as the friends and family of trauma survivors—even if it wasn't a firsthand experience. Healing Secondary Trauma is the gentle guide to help you identify symptoms, understand the feelings, and begin the healing process of your own secondary trauma. With interactive exercises and cutting-edge strategies for caregivers and professionals, it will help you address the daily realities of compassion fatigue, stress, and anxiety. Your journey to recovery from secondary trauma starts here. Inside this book you'll learn: Find yourself again—Learn how to process and manage your emotional responses so you feel calmer, present, and more in control of yourself. Plan for wellness—Create a path toward healing with a personalized self-care plan and strategies to regenerate empathy when your compassion stores feel low. You're not alone—Stories about everyday people highlight how secondary trauma can affect all of us in different ways. Begin the healing process from your secondary trauma today.




Mental Health Workers' Vicarious Trauma, Secondary Traumatic Stress, and Self-Care


Book Description

This is a 'must-buy book' for mental-health workers, licensed social workers, licensed professional counselors, and licensed marriage and family therapists, and/or the organizations for who these helpers work. This books' research study focuses on keeping the helping work-force mentally and emotionally stable after encountering second-hand trauma from their clients or patients. First responders, social workers, and mental health professionals encounter experiences directly or indirectly through helping others in emergencies, following trauma care, and/or mental health care treatments. While these workers help others, they may also experience vicarious trauma or 're-experience' past traumas of their own as they are re-lived via their patients or clients. The researcher identifies care of symptoms presented by mental-health workers, licensed social workers, licensed professional counselors, and licensed marriage and family therapists who are exposed to and may suffer VT/STS from their clients. This study documents how some social workers treat their own mental, emotional, and physical VT symptoms with 'self-care,' as well as how their supervisors can acknowledge and provide support directly to the mental health professionals to reduce or alleviate VT/STS.




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.




Reducing Compassion Fatigue, Secondary Traumatic Stress, and Burnout


Book Description

This workbook addresses the vital questions helpers, responders, and organizations have about self-care and its relationship to resilience and sustained effectiveness in the midst of daily exposure to trauma victims and or situations. Packed with activities, worksheets, and interactive learning tools, the text provides neuro-based and trauma-sensitive recommendations for improving the ways clinicians care for themselves. Each ‘session’ helps clinicians identify their personal self-care needs and arrive at an effective self-care plan that promotes resilience in the face of daily exposure to trauma-inducing situations and reduces the effects of compassion fatigue and burnout. Reducing Compassion Fatigue, Secondary Traumatic Stress, and Burnout is an essential workbook for any helper or organization looking to enhance compassionate care.




8 Keys to Safe Trauma Recovery: Take-Charge Strategies to Empower Your Healing (8 Keys to Mental Health)


Book Description

Safe and effective principles and strategies for recovery from trauma. Trauma recovery is tricky; however, there are several key principles that can help make the process safe and effective. This book gives self help readers, therapy clients, and therapists alike the skills to understand and implement eight keys to successful trauma healing: mindful identification of what is helpful, recognizing survival, having the option to not remember, creating a supportive inner dialogue, forgiving not being able to stop the trauma, understanding and sharing shame, finding your own recovery pace; mobilizing your body, and helping others. This is not another book promoting a new method or type of treatment; rather, it is a necessary adjunct to self-help and professional recovery programs. After reading this book, readers will be able to recognize their own individual needs and evaluate whether those needs are being met. They will have the tools necessary to put themselves in the drivers seat, navigating their own safe road to recovery.




Trauma Stewardship


Book Description

This beloved bestseller—over 180,000 copies sold—has helped caregivers worldwide keep themselves emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, and physically healthy in the face of the sometimes overwhelming traumas they confront every day. A longtime trauma worker, Laura van Dernoot Lipsky offers a deep and empathetic survey of the often-unrecognized toll taken on those working to make the world a better place. We may feel tired, cynical, or numb or like we can never do enough. These, and other symptoms, affect us individually and collectively, sapping the energy and effectiveness we so desperately need if we are to benefit humankind, other living things, and the planet itself. In Trauma Stewardship, we are called to meet these challenges in an intentional way. Lipsky offers a variety of simple and profound practices, drawn from modern psychology and a range of spiritual traditions, that enable us to look carefully at our reactions and motivations and discover new sources of energy and renewal. She includes interviews with successful trauma stewards from different walks of life and even uses New Yorker cartoons to illustrate her points. “We can do meaningful work in a way that works for us and for those we serve,” Lipsky writes. “Taking care of ourselves while taking care of others allows us to contribute to our societies with such impact that we will leave a legacy informed by our deepest wisdom and greatest gifts instead of burdened by our struggles and despair.”




Forward-Facing® Professional Resilience


Book Description

A Mission To Help Others Heal. A mission to help others heal and regain productive lives is likely what led you to pursue a career in professional caregiving. But what happens when all the accumulated suffering and trauma that you have witnessed and the pain that you have experienced starts to cause problems in your own personal and professional life? Insidious and often steeped in shame, compassion fatigue burnout and traumatic stress are very real issues that members of the caregiving community are not only at risk for but will inevitably confront at some point in their careers. The key is not to fight against or run away from these consequences of caregiving, but to recognize their normalization, origination, and the applicable steps available to heal your existing stress and build resilience for the future. In Forward-Facing® Professional Resilience: Prevention and Resolution of Burnout, Toxic Stress and Compassion Fatigue, trauma and compassion fatigue expert Dr. J. Eric Gentry and medical director and practitioner of emergency medicine Dr. Jeffrey “Jim” Dietz combine over seventy years’ worth of experience treating patients and caregivers to present a two-part text that first examines the cause of compassion fatigue, followed by a proven, simple five-step solution for healing and a renewed sense of mission. Drawing from their Professional Resilience workshop that has been attended by over 100,000 international participants, Drs. Gentry and Dietz address these issues with their readers in ways that are candid, heartfelt, insightful, and most of all—filled with hope.




Treating Compassion Fatigue


Book Description

In recent years, much has occurred in the field of traumatology, including the widening of the audience and the awareness of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). This book from celebrated traumatology pioneer Charles Figley, further clarifies the concept of compassion fatigue through theory, research, and treatment. The basic thesis of this book is the identification, assessment, and treatment of compassion fatigue and this is done over eleven chapters, each from distinguished researchers in the field.