They say that one of the problems with burn victims is that their caregivers come to hate them. It took a long time to realize this, because doctors, nurses and aides try hard to hide such a counter-intuitive and reprehensible feeling, but some “cracker” (in the sense of the BBC series about an aggressive psychologist) of an investigator finally realized what was happening. First of all, burn victims are constantly in agony in spite of pain-killers, and second, burn victims often suffer a long time -- then die. They constantly beg for help and no help is enough. Even when they get well, there is much trauma left. Thus, the satisfaction in taking care of them, healing them, is eroded beyond tolerance. The caregivers become victims of “compassion fatigue.”
In fact, these days it seems as though we are all exposed to so much hate, destruction, genocide, trauma -- both in real life and through the media -- that we are all victims of “compassion fatigue,” which can cause some people to inflict even more trauma and suffering as they try to blame, punish, and demonize their way out of their own pain. Others try to save themselves by turning away, not “going there.”
In the best cop shows, the characters who are in trouble sometimes speak of “reaching out” to an older officer or some kind of professional who is likely to understand. In the Seventies Mike Burgwin in Portland and Doug Fakkema in Corvallis reached out to other people in the same work and found each other. The two were the most progressive animal organization managers in the state and learned much from each other, aside from supporting each other in a quietly emotional way. Yet they were very different.
Burgwin came to the work through a police force in a port town in California. He saw some terrible things, took actions that had unforeseen consequences, saw injustice and destruction beyond what most of us know about, and reacted to it -- possibly because of a strong father and good professional mentoring -- with a drive for justice and protection of the innocent. He sought competence and control, through strategy if simple strength and skill wasn’t enough, and he had a high consciousness of court protocols.
I don’t quite know where Fakkema was coming from before animal welfare work, but he was more of a lover than a fighter. Not a pushover (he’s a motorcyclist), he was a thinker and philosopher. His thoughtfulness finally led him to develop one of the cutting edge documents in the field, a description of the five phases a person working in an animal shelter is likely to go through. (It’s available online at animalsheltering.org/resource_library/magazine_articles/mar_apr_2001/four_phases.html
The five phases are:
Phase One: The Dream
One dreams of a job that really helps animals.
Phase Two: The Start
One arrives to work and leaps to the tasks, full of energy.
Phase Three: Losing Our Breath
It’s not working. It’s not what we expect. It’s eating us up.
Phase Four: Desperately Seeking Rhythm
This is what the cop shows call “reaching out.”
Phase Five: Finding a rhythm
Coming to philosophical terms, taking pride in skill, being part of a team, and finding ways of relief and healing in outside life.
In turn, this simple schematic, which Doug taught in workshops alongside workshops that teach injection euthanasia so that it’s done well, converged with a whole movement coming out of the social sciences and social work. The key to these ideas and practices, specifically for animal care and control professionals, is a book called “Compassion Fatigue in the Animal-Care Community” by Charles R. Figley, Ph.D. (a professor of “traumatology”) and Robert G. Roop, Ph.D. (a psychologist and human resource development professor) Laura Reeves Figley is also active in this area. (Fakkema’s wife is a shelter veterinarian. One of the keys to survival is a marriage in which both partners understand what this work can do to a person.)
This book is invaluable. It will work for an individual, for a group, for a manager, for any sort of job. In many places animal shelter and control employees are young because the jobs are low-pay. Turnover is high. No one will pay for the training available at workshops. There is a shortage of veterans who can mentor as Burgwin’s sergeant did. Managers don’t tend to be very sophisticated about the sort of material in this book. There’s nothing too “far out” for ordinary people to use and the skills and theories will be helpful to any person who is under pressure.
When I went from being an AC officer in the street to being the education coordinator, I simultaneously discovered the Unitarian Universalist church. At that point the PNW District, under the urging of the Reverend Peter Raible in Seattle, was innovating “Leadership School,” which was based on organizational design and human resource development blended with spiritual growth in community. It was material moving along the same lines as the questionnaires, stress-relieving techniques, stage analysis, as what is in this book. My response to the trauma I witnessed with animal work and -- before that -- among my Blackfeet students translated to broader questions that took me into the ministry. And then the reluctance of seminaries and church communities to be progressive in real-world areas brought me out the other side of professional religious work and gradually into something that might be called green philosophy. Possibly that’s where I had really been all along. It's not that different from what is often called "The Perennial Philosophy." It's not an institution, but institutions use it.
The Green Cross Foundation is an organization that studies how to heal trauma. The Delta Foundation is an organization that studies and supports healing through animal companionship. There are probably many other such foundations that choose a specialty from broader movements. They do research, isolate factors and give them names, find solutions and respond to intolerable situations ranging from something so catastrophic as Katrina to something so personal as being stuck in a wheelchair. There is a foundation that studies the phenomenon of animal hoarding, when someone with few resources accumulates so many animals that they can’t be sheltered humanely.
But people are NOT getting the news! Over and over the news is full of the same old cliches. Municipalities and counties continue to understand animals only in terms of mean monsters and kind little children, without ever considering social dynamics or progressive responses. The burden is made heavier. And much of the compassion fatigue is expressed in an unnecessary clash between people in the humane movement (like Doug Fakkema) and people in the animal control movement (like Mike Burgwin).
I’ll continue this later.
No comments:
Post a Comment