The COVID-19 pandemic exposed senior living and other aging services workers to unprecedented trauma and loss. As the world emerges from those dark days, workers now are exhibiting compassion fatigue, but resilience life coaching offers hope, according to the Rev. Stacey L. Brady.
Brady, director of church relations for Lutheran Social Ministries of Maryland, knows all about compassion fatigue. It’s what led her to become a trauma and resilience coach. Serving as a chaplain in one of Lutheran Social Ministries’ continuing care retirement / life plan communities at the height of the pandemic, she succumbed to compassion fatigue.
Brady shared her experience recently during a LeadingAge policy update call with members.
“I crashed and burned,” she said, describing the time as “difficult time.” Brady said she sought professional help through the Arizona Trauma Institute.
A seven-hour online training course on compassion fatigue and professional resiliency led her to approach Lutheran Services Ministries’ executive leadership team about investing in training for her to become a trauma and resilience life coach. With her certification, she will lead ongoing workshops and education in the organization to “chip away at this compassion fatigue and burnout that seems to be systemic since COVID.”
Compassion fatigue, Brady said, is different from burnout. Compassion fatigue is caused by prolonged exposure to someone else’s trauma, whereas burnout is reserved to describe the working environment, she said. Burnout, she added, occurs because someone is not working in a supportive environment and has job dissatisfaction.
Compassion fatigue is not just feeling tired or worn out, Brady added. Rather, she said, it is something that happens to caregivers as a result of caregiving, as a result of secondary trauma.
“When we, as caregivers, are exposed to trauma that someone else is enduring — particularly in aging adult services when we are caregiving for seniors who are declining and we experience that loss with them — that exposes us, makes us vulnerable to compassion fatigue,” Brady said. “Over an extended period of time, if we don’t have the tools or resilience built up in ourselves, we succumb to compassion fatigue.”
Compassion fatigue presents as physical, psychological and emotional exhaustion, she said, adding that symptoms include irritability, anger, sadness and numbness. People also can experience a change in their worldviews and spirituality, a change in sleep patterns, and self-blaming for not doing enough to help those suffering, Brady said.
In teams, she said, compassion fatigue can present as reactivity and defensiveness. Those responses occur when the team lacks cohesiveness or has poor communication, leading to isolation, Brady added.
Lutheran Services Ministries is just starting offering trauma and resilience life coaching, although Brady said she has worked with individuals one-on-one and that all of them have stayed with the organization.
Practicing resiliency
Resiliency is the main way to combat compassion fatigue and burnout, Brady said, adding that resiliency is a shift in mindset and needs to be practiced daily. Practicing resiliency as a group increases the probability of success compared with going it alone, she said.
“Resiliency involves realizing aging adult services is a stressful environment,” Brady said. “We have to admit it [and] make a commitment to learn the tools to strengthen ourselves so we can be sustained to work compassionately and successfully within the industry.”
One of the tools to gain resiliency, she said, is optimism — that is, realizing that setbacks are to be expected but that there are tools to overcome them. Optimism is even more necessary post-COVID, as job descriptions and expectations have shifted in the wake of the pandemic, Brady said.
Setting goals — big ones and small ones — flexibility, adaptability and problem-solving skills also are necessary for resiliency, she said.
“It is a ‘chipping away,’ ” Brady said. “There is much hope in building resilience, especially when we decide to do that as an organization, as a team.”
