Compassion Fatigue Solutions

Creating a World Without Bullying: PREVNet 3rd Annual Conference
Thursday May 29, 2008
89 Chestnut: University of Toronto
Canada's Premier national Bullying Conference
www.prevnet.ca
Toll free: 1-866-372-2495

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that one of the main organisers of this conference, Dr Wendy Craig, is a very dear friend of mine. My children love the fact that their fairy godmother is one of the world's foremost bullying expert. It goes a long way in dealing with tricky school yard problems: "oh yeah, well guess who I am going to call?"

If the past conferences are any indication, this will fill up quickly so sign up asap if you are interested.

Ok, I truly have the best job in the world.

This week, I had the opportunity to meet a large group of very attentive trauma and emergency nurses and social workers (Sunnybrooke hospital in Toronto), present to an inquisitive group of psychology graduate students (Queen's University, Kingston) and nearly 100 Special Ed teachers and counsellors who work with primary school aged children with serious behavioural and emotional difficulties (Toronto District School Board). If you want to meet a group of incredibly dedicated helpers, go visit these teachers. holey moley.

Now I know that public speaking is considered by some to be one of the most aversive experience known to (wo)man, on par with passing a kidney stone, root canal and childbirth, but I find that an incredible energy is created by groups (or, sometimes, a very awful energy, but that's not this week's experience thankfully - That will be for my memoirs..."the ten worst presentations ever").

What I enjoy the most is mapping out the day, how the energy/activities will flow, what would work best with each trade, and then adjusting it as the day unfolds to try and best meet the needs and vibe of the audience. It's actually not unlike my private practice work with military personnel. My favourite new clients are actually the most reluctant ones, you know, the 35 year old corporal who has never been to counselling and works as a radio operator and who is only here under an ultimatum from his wife? I love it. Because, really, what's the worst that can happen? and on the flip side he just might have a positive counselling experience. How wonderful would that be?


I wanted to share with you an email I recently received from a workshop participant (reprinted here with permission)where the author of the email explains her appreciation for the important distinction I make in my workshops between burnout and compassion fatigue:

The author is a registered nurse with 20 years of experience working with trauma in a spinal cord injury unit, neurological trauma intensive care unit and ER work: "[...] I can truly identify with a lot of your topic and many of the signs of compassion fatigue. I believe that is why I left the ICU dept. and am starting to develop [the symptoms of cf/vt] again now in the ER. But I keep labelling these feelings as burnout and then start to look for a new job even though I have absolutely LOVED both jobs. So I thank you in helping me to see what I now believe to be compassion fatigue, but more importantly the tools you have given me to work through this, since I truly love my job."

Receiving an email like this makes it all worthwhile, the sore wrists, the travelling and the risk one always takes when standing in front of a large crowd with a pocketful of courage and a karaoke machine. Thank you.

ps: for TDSB folks, I will post answers to your index card questions next week.

Françoise

It's official! The Train the Trainer Workshop on Compassion Fatigue is booked to run November 13-14th at the beautiful Donald Gordon Centre in Kingston.
[July 16th, 2008 - This workshop is now FULL - if you would like to be added to the mailing list for next year's training, email me clearly stating that you wish to be added to the Train the Trainer mailing list]
As an aside, I should tell you that the food at the Donald Gordon Centre is absolutely stupendous (and it's a wonderful location where participants are treated like VIPs). In fact: "The Financial Times (U.K.) has ranked the Donald Gordon Conference Centre number one in the world for food quality in a survey of international executive education centres." Link: www.dgc.queensu.ca

Great food, beautiful location. A nice starting point for a two day intensive retreat to become (or hone) your skills as a compassion fatigue trainer.

Here's more information on this upcoming workshop:

Compassion Fatigue Train the Trainer Workshop

Revised and Confirmed Dates: Thursday November 13th and Friday November 14th, 2008 at the Donald Gordon Centre in Kingston. (link: www.donaldgordoncentre.com)

**Accommodation: For those of you needing accommodation, the Donald Gordon Centre offers comfortable and affordable rooms for overnight stay. However, at the present time, there is no space on the Wednesday night (although this could very well change, and you can ask to be put on their waiting list) but there are still some beds available for the Thursday night. You should call the DGC asap if you wish to explore this option.) Otherwise, there are plenty of lovely B&Bs nearby and if you need accomodation info, I can send it to you.

Registration Form: If you decide to enroll for this event, please email me and I will send you a registration form.

Workshop Size: Spaces is limited to a maximum of 20 participants and will only run if at least 8 participants enroll (given the interest I have received after posting this for only 5 days, I am not particularly worried about it meeting the minimum number of participant requirement)

Cost: $435 plus $45 for materials which includes training manuals, handout templates and power point on CD.
Total cost: $480.00 CAN incl gst.

To Register: Send a cheque, payable to WHP, in the amount of $100.00 to 837 Princess Street, Suite 300, Kingston, On. K7L 1G8 **balance of payment ($380.00) must be paid by October 1st to secure your enrollment. Please note that the $100.00 is not refundable. Cancellation policy is on our website.

Certificates of completion will be provided.

Prerequisites: This workshop is aimed at helping professionals and educators in the helping fields. No prior Compassion Fatigue training required but a basic working knowledge of the topic would be best (by reading some of the titles listed below ahead of time).

Workshop Description: Some past participants of our one day Compassion Fatigue workshop (Walking the Walk) expressed an interest in receiving help in designing a workshop to bring back to their communities and developing skills and knowledge base to deliver compassion fatigue workshops themselves. This train the trainer workshop offers tools, handouts, strategies, training material and marketing strategies to adapt Walking the Walk to your community's specific needs (and to your own presentation style). You do not need to have attended WtheW in the past to benefit from this training.

Because of the small size of the group, we will customize certain aspects of the training to your specific needs. A questionnaire will be sent ahead of time to establish your needs/goals and objectives and aim to fulfill as many of these as possible.

Day one will be experiential (you will participate in a one day CF workshop) and Day two will discuss tools, strategies and techniques to develop and deliver the workshops on your own and become a CF educator and trainer.

What differentiates this workshop from other educational sessions out there is the extra layer of understanding and validation that we hope to convey to our workshop participants. Therefore, the train the trainer workshop is designed to take you deep first, to gain a true and thorough understanding of your own relationship to CF. Then we go into the didactic details (what to teach, how to teach) and finally talk about the mechanics of the whole process (how to customize this for your own work needs/goals etc.)

Commitment on your part:
-fill out questionnaire ahead of time and return no later than October 1st
-fill out the reflection section of the workbook before attending the workshop

Detailed outline:

We will be using the Walking the Walk training manual:

-What are Compassion Fatigue, Caregiver Stress, Vicarious Traumatization and burnout
-Signs and symptoms of CF/VT/Burnout
-Assessment tools
-Warning signs
-Resiliency skills
-Self Care Strategies
-Academy of traumatology standards of Ethics
-How to offer psychoeducation on this topic
-Experiential activities that work with audiences
-How to design your own workshop: what is your target audience
-Lessons I have learned during the past 7+ years of offering these workshops

and more...


Recommended Reading: If you would like to read ahead, I would recommend:

Transforming the pain by pearlman and saakvitne - a nice little workbook on designing VT workshops

Trauma and the Therapist by Pearlman

Secondary Traumatic Stress by Beth Stamm

Compassion Fatigue and Treating Compassion Fatigue. 2 books by Charles Figley

Help for the Helper by Babette Rothschild

50 strategies to simplify your life: Patrick Fanning

Take time for your life by Cheryl Richardson

A therapist's guide to self care by lillie weiss


I would also suggest you surf the net and read anything from the Headington Institute and Figley Institute.

A great place to start is to visit my website: www.compassionfatigue.ca and read the articles I have written (Running on empty and 12 Self Care Strategies) as well as visit my blog weekly.

Directions: For those of you interested but wondering where in the heck is Kingston, Ontario? We are midway between Toronto and Montreal and about 2 hours north of Syracuse, NY. You can fly to any of these destinations and then drive or take a train to Kingston. The easiest way to get here is to Fly to Montreal and then take the free shuttle to the train (a 5 minute ride). The train schedule can be viewed: www.viarail.ca. You can also fly to Toronto and take a 45 minute shuttle to Union train station. It is then a 2 hour train ride to Kingston.


Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

Françoise

A few weeks ago I bought a new desk for work. Apparently it was the wrong height and now I have some manifestation of carpal tunnel/messed up wrists. Darn. So I will make these next few posts very brief in order to rescue the wrists. Not easy when you type for a living (well, type and talk, so I'll talk more and type less this week).

On Weds, I will be confirming the dates/space details for November 2008's Train the trainer workshop in Kingston. I have already received several emails from interested potential participants which is great considering that we are in March. I will likely have to cap the audience size at 15-20 depending on the room. More info on this shortly.

I am on my way to Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto today to present to their Trauma Unit. If you have a few spare moments, google this venerable institution and take a look at their work. Can you say "leaders in the field" ten times fast? They are the bees knees in acute trauma work, burn unit and overall emergency care. I am thrilled to be given the opportunity to meet them.

Friday I am back in Toronto presenting to a group of special ed teachers. This is a full day workshop which is always very enjoyable as we get to really "get into it" and hash it all out.

It's probably Spring for some of you. For those of us up here in the slushy north, take heart, we'll get there eventually!

WHP has agreed to become an affiliate to Leading Edge Seminars to promote this upcoming workshop.

Join John and Julie Gottman by WEBCAST live and/or at your own convenience for 45 days after the event!

A new and revised 2-day workshop of Gottman Couples Therapy will be presented for the first time on May 1 and 2, 2008 from 9:00am to 5:00pm both days. Webcast participants can attend the seminar in live time and/or view the entire 2-day seminar at their own leisure for 45 days after the event. During the live event, participants can send in questions over a live feed. After the event, the webcast will be archived on our website and indexed so you can review or resume viewing any segment at any time. Registration fee includes a 175-manual valued at $125 with useful assessment tools.

Complete workshop description: http://leadingedgeseminars.org/gottman108.htm
If you would like a registration form, email: whp@cogeco.ca

This photo was taken by my father during the last snowstorm that sent gazillions of centimetres of snow on Ontario and Quebec. And yes, that's a real car, now a toy one. I dread to think of all that snow melting sometime soon.

In early March, I met a group of incredibly dedicated, positive and open minded helpers at the Ontario Harm Reduction Conference conference in Ottawa. They were helpers in the harm reduction field (folks who work in needle exchange, methadone programs and other work with individuals with drug addictions). I would like to thank them for they generosity and willingness to take risks during the three compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma workshop I delivered. Apparently one of these presentations was videotaped and will be availabe online shortly: www.ohrdp.ca. I do not often have the opportunity to run small group workshops, but at this conference a special 3 hour session had been planned with a cap at 20 participants. There is a depth of sharing and connection during a small event like this that is unparalleled. And for someone who usually does large group presentations, what a treat!

If you read my travel story to Winnipeg a few weeks back (the one with the airplane being de-iced) you will recall that getting there and back with two back-to-back storms was a challenge. Well, two weeks ago I attempted to travel from Ottawa, make a pit stop in Kingston to refill suitcase and kiss the family and fly to Edmonton. Storms galore made the pit stop impossible and I ended up being in 4 different hotels in 3 different cities, washing my socks in hotel sinks (and drying them with the hair dryer) and eventually getting home days late. I am a pretty laid back kind of gal, and I took it all in stride, read books, drank lattes and enjoyed the unexpected turn of events (other than being in a trembling 18 seater plane during the last leg of the trip when the storm hit full force and we couldn't land at home, see below). But during this trip, I made some wonderful connections that made me reflect on human nature, groups dynamics and the like.

On our final leg of the trip. Flying from Toronto to Kingston, the weather conditions were becoming increasingly poor and the pilot announced, as we were scheduled to land in Kingston that the runway was too unsafe and we would have to return to our original destination.

This is never good news, but it was even more discouraging as we all knew that a huge storm was headed our way and that we would likely be unable to get out of Toronto the next day (which turned out to be accurate). Moments later, the pilot announced that actually we couldn’t fly back to Toronto as we needed to refuel (gulp) we were going to land in Ottawa instead.

To make a long story short, the evening ended with 8 of us in a hotel bar, sharing stories, getting to know each other, realising that the world does indeed only have 6 degrees of separation (or if you live in a small community like Kingston, .5 degrees). I met a poet, a marine biologist, an IT expert, an oil guy and his wife who love living in the People's Republic of Georgia and several other fascinating individuals, all with their own reasons for going to Kingston (mostly to see loved ones).

This may seem like a simple enough story, but I was fascinated to see how we came together, helped each other out and mostly just laughed together. Loretta Laroche, positive psychology expert and stand up comic says that children laugh on average 400 times a day, and by adulthood that is reduced to 15 times per day… That's kind of sad don't you think?

Happy Easter for those of you who celebrate it, happy Purim and finally happy Human Rights Day (S. Africa according to my calendar).

As I am travelling quite a bit in the next few weeks, I won't stick to my weekly Sunday post but rather will add things of interest as they come across my "desk" (my desk at the moment is a shaking little table on a train that is running 1.5 hours late which means that I may or may not arrive to my destination in time to present a workshop. The joys of winter travelling continue!)

I would like to thank Dr Charles Figley for bringing the following article to our attention through the Traumatologist forum which is an email listserv. For anyone interested in being part of a compassion fatigue network that occasionally shares new findings/articles/book ideas: https://lists.fsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/traumatologist-forum

Basically, this and other research on VT is confirming what we all know experientially: that exposure to traumatic stories causes profound changes in helpers. This study will be published in the upcoming issue of the journal of Traumatology, and is based on the researcher’s Master’s project.

Crime takes heavy toll on legal minds
March 1st 2008 - By Lynnette Hoffman in The Australian

"SEAN Brown still remembers the details a decade on. From the horrific sequence of events right down to the specific type of bullets that were used; how many there were, where they went in, how long it took the victim to die.

Brown (not his real name) wasn't a witness, nor was he on the ground at the crime scene, but plenty of grisly stories have been embedded in his memory in 20-odd years as a senior crown prosecutor.

Brown has "seen a lot" over the span of his career, a career that has required him to immerse himself in the intricate circumstances of violent death and homicides, brutal rapes, war crimes, you name it. The sum total of all that, he says, is "not very healthy".

New research from Macquarie University, to be published in the international journal Traumatology, has found that criminal law work can have profoundly damaging psychological effects.

By and large, Brown has been rather fortunate in that regard. He has not suffered a debilitating depression, nor has he felt the need to seek professional assistance for mental health issues, or fallen into a pattern of abusing alcohol or drugs.

But that's not to say the work hasn't taken its toll. His dreams are sometimes affected, as are his relationships. "I tend to get moodier with my family and become more difficult to get on with at home," he says."

To read complete article, go to: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23292980-23289,00.html