What if there’s more going on with you than just burnout?

If you’re feeling demoralized, fatigued or nothing at all when it comes to your work these days, you might have burnout. But burnout has a close cousin, secondary traumatic stress, that creates a more complex dynamic than burnout alone, and requires a different kind of approach for both healing and prevention.

Burnout and secondary stress together create compassion fatigue.

In 2023, we know burnout well. It comes from working in a toxic environment that demands more from us than the resources we have available. Secondary traumatic stress can seem like less of an issue, but it’s more prevalent than we might imagine. It may be that your job itself is cushy enough: sitting at a desk, thinking big picture thoughts, staring at spreadsheets, or maybe you’re in the thick of it: on the hospital floor, helping people through crisis, or in the classroom caring for people

If you are affected by witnessing someone else experiencing trauma (secondary traumatic stress) or being surrounded by people who are consistently in crisis (environmental trauma), the stress and resultant trauma of it can transfer to your nervous system. Combine this with never being done, never having everything you need to do what you signed up to do (burnout), and you’ve got yourself compassion fatigue. 

If your ultimate goal is to help people in crisis, you’re going to be surrounded by people in crisis every day. If you want to heal others, most of your human contact will be with people who are not well. If you want to fix a broken system, you’ll be operating in a broken system. Our nervous systems take note of this and start responding as if we are in crisis all the time – even though that’s not the case. Crisis is not a choice. Vocation is.  

Most people with compassion fatigue got into their work because of a deep, prevailing set of values and a vision for a better world. When compassion fatigue sets in, that initial vision fades to nothing as you contend with exhaustion, a body that’s breaking down, and a demoralized mind.  It doesn’t have to stay that way. 

We now have the science available to help you return to the work you love without being destroyed by the work itself. 

The definition of compassion fatigue (burnout + secondary traumatic stress) you’ve seen so far was coined by psychologist, Dr. Charles Figley in 1995. I’ve trained with his research assistant turned traumatologist, Dr. Eric Gentry, to better understand the effects of compassion fatigue both on the way we perceive the world and the way compassion fatigue affects our bodies. But most importantly, I’ve learned techniques for prevention and recovery of compassion fatigue. 

I work with people experiencing compassion fatigue using something called the Accelerated Recovery Program. This program was developed by Dr. Gentry and his colleague Dr. Baranowsky and has been used across the globe to help people recover from and prevent compassion fatigue. It has been well-researched in its conception and its implementation – over 17 peer-reviewed studies have demonstrated how effective it is.