Question

When faced with symptoms of counselor burnout and/or compassion fatigue, what support would you seek in communicating with your clinical supervisor?

Answer 1

• Compassion fatigue, also known as second-hand shock and secondary stress reaction, describes a type of stress that results from helping or wanting to help those who are traumatized or under significant emotional duress.
• Although compassion fatigue is sometimes called burnout, it is a slightly different concept. Unlike burnout, compassion fatigue is highly treatable and may be less predictable. The onset of compassion fatigue can be sudden, whereas burnout usually emerges over time.
• Additionally, severe cases of burnout sometimes require the person experiencing it to change jobs or occupations, but often measures can be taken to prevent or treat compassion fatigue before a change in work environment is required.
• Practicing self-awareness and self-monitoring to recognize changes in behavior, work, and life outside of work is the first step to preventing compassion fatigue.
• Developing either informal or formal supervisory and mentor relationships within your work environment can also help you spot when you are being affected by compassion fatigue. These practices can also help prevent compassion fatigue:
• Reducing stressful workloads;Monitoring sleep patterns;Taking regular vacations;Meditation;Journaling;Seeking personal therapy to process work problems;Regular exercise.
• Counselors may also experience lowered frustration tolerance, disruption of thier frames of reference, anxious or depressed mood, or dread of working with certain clients. Clinical supervisors can help counselors to understand that a reaction of dread is about something within them and not the client.
• Supervisors should be prepared to explore multiple areas that, if left unattended, could lead to compassion fatigue. One of these areas should be to help counselors to explore unresolved primary traumatic history. Also, supervisors should encourage discussion about their work environments to help assess their exposure to clients’ trauma material and the empathy used.
• Furthermore, counselors need help in gauging their work satis-faction because limited satisfaction can become a risk factor. There should be discussion about counselors' stress management techniques, social support systems, grief exposure, and quality of self-care.
• It would be well advised for supervisors to teach and encourage the use of protective factors during supervi-sion. The knowledge of protective factors can, perhaps, help to inoculate counselors against the risk of compassion fatigue.One notable protective factor is compassion satisfaction, which is defined as the pleasure derived from being able to do one’s work well.
• Helpers who rec-ognize the ways in which their efforts make a contribution to the people they serve experience compassion satisfaction.Thus, one’s motivation is shaped by the satisfaction derived from the work of helping others.
• According to the counselor supervision literature, there are three main purposes: counselor, teacher, and consultant.
• The first purpose, supervisor, facilitates both the personal and professional development of an counselor. The second purpose, teacher, enables an increase in counselor competencies by helping the them to acquire, improve, and refine required skills. Finally, the third purpose, consultant, allows the supervisor to become a resource for the counselor client, while encouraging insight about the situation.
• Supervisors are charged with the task of developing a supportive relationship with counselors so that they feel safe to take constructive risks that can result in increased confidence and holistic development.
• In essence, supervision is a problem-solving process in which a clincial supervisor and a counselor identify struggles, collaborate on intervention strategies, assess results, and make adjustments.
• Supervisors need to assess counselors’ needs and make referrals for counseling when deemed appropriate. In this manner, healthy self-care is modeled for them early in the career development process, which is indicated as a protective factor.
• A counselor requires developmentally appropriate training and instruction to build self-confidence in counseling competencies. Supervisors should help them to recognize that new-found confidence in counseling competencies can lead to self-efficacy, which has been shown to serve as a protective factor.
• Finally, consistent evaluation by the supervisor allows counselors to receive direct, honest, and constructive feedback concerning effective and ineffective counseling behaviors.This constructive feedback assists them in mastering counselor developmental phases, thereby lead-ing to a well-rounded professional counselor.
• Supervisors can illustrate for interns how the ability to understand effective counseling behaviors can aid in developing an evolved sense of self-awareness. In turn, this self-awareness serves to help in recognizing negative changes in counseling behaviors that, if left unattended, could result in experiencing compassion fatigue. In this instance, evolved self-awareness serves as a protective factor.