photo credit: SJ Objio via Unsplash
You’re a medical professional, and it’s a pandemic.
In a normal year, you participate in some of the biggest highs and deepest lows in your patients’ lives on a regular basis. Births and deaths are the obvious ones, but there are also new diagnoses, unexpected crises, educating a patient’s family, remissions, tragedies, and recoveries. The list goes on and on!
Caring for others’ health is your job, but it is also emotionally turbulent. You are expected to bring both your humanity AND professionalism into your work. It’s a hard line to walk. But this isn’t a normal year. The stakes are higher, the future more unknown.
This issue is important to me, as I have medical professionals in my family. As a supportive family member, I’ve seen firsthand how difficult this can be. Especially this year.
You can be so involved in caring for everyone around them, that you have very little energy to spend on self-care. Of course, this can be as simple as not spending time doing your favorite hobbies. However, this lack of self-care can lead to ignoring the very real effects that your profession has upon your mental health. It may be very difficult to make time to meet your basic survival needs, making it easy to neglect your mental health. When was the last time you took definitive action to care for your mental health, emotional health, or spiritual health?
I’m highlighting these to warn you about a very important reality: to ignore these health concerns long term is to invite burnout (professionally and personally) into your life.
But first, let’s talk about trauma in your workplace.
Two Layers of Trauma
First responders can experience two layers of trauma: both the real experience of trauma to themselves and the vicarious trauma of being a close witness to the suffering of others. During a pandemic, both of these traumatic experiences are amplified, as you are concerned for both your patients’ safety and recovery, as well as your personal safety for yourself and your family. Maybe in this year of 2020, perhaps both your work environment AND your home environment has felt suddenly like a much more hazardous place.
Besides worrying about your usual job duties, your job probably just got a lot more complicated. Because it’s a pandemic. You may have had to take on a host of new responsibilities: perhaps you’re now facilitating virtual communication between a patient and their family due to visitation restrictions, or you’re running to meetings to be briefed on latest best practices, or you’re simply trying to grapple and cope with witnessing a ravaging illness that no one has ever encountered before.
And, lastly, outside of work, your personal life has taken quite the hit, like everyone else! The pressures of daily life have changed as we know it: limited contact with family and friends, cancelled plans, increased sense of isolation and anxiety. The primary ways we’ve been coping with already stressful healthcare jobs has been stripped away.
It’s no wonder the risk of burnout is so high! Because you’re fighting trauma on two fronts. Home and work.
What Can You Do About It?
One book I’d highly recommend for those in the medical profession is called “Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others” by Lara van Dernoot Lipsky.
In this book, the author explains what a “trauma exposure response” is, and how common this experience is among medical professionals. She writes that it “may be defined as the transformation that takes place within us as a result of exposure to the suffering of other living beings or the planet.”
This response can look like:
feeling guilty for being able to “clock out” at the end of a day
minimizing complicated feelings
a sense of hopelessness about the state of the world
persistent exhaustion
not feeling fully present in your life
feeling angry/irritable often
Does any of this sound like you this year?
Depending on your personality and perhaps your job role, this may be difficult to acknowledge. This is especially difficult if you are in a work environment that prioritizes “toughness”. Or you may feel that you shouldn’t be affected by the things that you see or experience at work. You may instead keep your stress to yourself, not wanting to burden others with your stress. Or perhaps you fear that speaking about it may worsen your stress response. But maybe you’re depressed, and you’re finding the motivation to go to work becoming harder and harder by the day. Maybe you’re experiencing panic attacks or intrusive thoughts for the first time in your life. Perhaps you may find yourself drinking more alcohol on your days off, stress eating, or mindlessly scrolling on your phone to give your exhausted mind and body a break.
Here is what I want you to know and carry with you:
Having a trauma exposure response is not a weakness . It means that you are human. A human with the capacity for empathy and compassion. However, you need to steward your trauma response in order to preserve your capacity for empathy and resilience. In order to avoid burning out, you must acknowledge your feelings, your anxious bodily sensations, and process them in a healthy way.
Processing your emotions in a healthy way can look like:
- intentional mindfulness throughout the day
- slowing down to pay attention to what is happening physically in your body
- discovering personal joy in the face of such suffering
- making time in your routine to speak to a therapist to speak safely and confidentially about your stressors
You are doing SUCH important work. But you’re no machine. To continue showing up at work and life means that you’ve got to take care of yourself!
Next Steps You Can Take
If this resonates with you, let’s talk.
If you’d like to go further in your understanding and work with vicarious trauma, please reach out to me! I’d be happy to walk alongside you as you continue to work harder than you’ve ever had to work before.
Sincerely,
Heather Hawthorne, LMFT