Burnout and Secondary Trauma
Suffering from job burnout can really sneak up on you. You may be feeling tired, detached, and like you just aren’t accomplishing anything worthwhile. Perhaps it feels like you are doing it all on your own without the support that you need from co-workers and managers, or you may be thinking that the company no longer cares about you and how you are doing. You may have taken time off and struggled to unwind, or, if you were able to relax for a time, the renewal that you felt from your break doesn’t last more than a few days after you return to work. Maybe you’ve been feeling this way for a while and it has started to get worse. You used to really love your work – what is happening?
If you are a healthcare worker, you may have been dealing with some major traumas in your work with patients, and the intensity of your work is taking its toll on you. Whether you call if compassion fatigue, secondary trauma, or moral distress, working in the healthcare field is extremely personally demanding and can over time can create a sense of disengagement, irritability, emotional numbing, and a sense that you can’t do enough to solve all of the problems that you are encountering day after day. With covid-19, these traumatic experiences for healthcare providers and first responders have reached extreme levels with little to no relief over more than a year. What can you do to heal from all that you’ve seen and felt in your workplace? Research shows that mindfulness approaches, compassion-building, and enhancing a sense of community can all be beneficial in addition to traditional trauma-focused work. I’ve worked in inpatient hospital settings, ICUs, outpatient clinics and hospice care, and I am familiar with the structures of healthcare settings and the tolls that they take on caregivers of all kinds. I would be happy to talk with you about getting you back on track with the job that you once loved or maybe developing a Plan B. You don’t have to figure it out alone. I can help.