The third and final section of “COMPASSION FATIGUE IN THE ANIMAL-CARE COMMUNITY” by Figley and Roop, is practical strategies for self-management and community management of the condition.
Included for a person to do alone are:
1. Breathing exercises
2. Visualization
3. Self-hypnosis
4. Self-talk, Self-advice
5. Gestalt Chair Technique, when you sit in a chair facing a person with whom you have unfinished business, except that they are not there. Instead, you sit in your chair, speaking for yourself, and then you sit in the other person’s chair, speaking for them. Moving back and forth often reveals and relieves useful forces. An observer or video might be used.
6. Acupressure stress-relief: you don’t insert needles, but rather press or tap the appropriate place.
7 Meditation.
8. The Eight Step Rewind Technique: a structured way of recalling and replaying something stressful.
If a community is involved, there are other structured techniques:
1. Six Step Defusing Model for Support, Reassurance and Provision of Information
2. Five Step Crisis Debriefing Model
Then there’s a 47 item checklist of stuff a person ought to be bringing to consciousness in their private life. You know -- all that stuff about diet, exercise, enough sleep, smoking, etc. It’s too easy to skip over a few things without a list.
That’s not the end. There are some useful appendices about standards and bibliographies.
This is almost banal advice -- we hear the same things over and over as we trek along from one crisis to another through our lives. But some people take it seriously and make it work. I’m going to embarrass Phyllis Johanson, who was also there in the Seventies in Portland trying to understand what we ought to do for the animal community and now STILL saying, “I really want to get out of all this animal stuff” forty years later. Then she says, “Someone brought me this homeless cat. I’d better hang up and get to work.” And she does.
She and George eat according to the “Diet for a Small Planet” suggestions, nearly vegetarian but hardly boring food, including a few daring ethnic experiments and some very nice wines. They believe in exercise, enjoy sculling on the Willamette River at dawn for instance, and throw wonderful parties where the talk is hilarious. Because George is an outstanding well-known artist, they belong to a group of artsy people who have a long history together. Trust is high, inventiveness is even higher, and reasonable (if indignant) political talk and action is valued most of all. They do for each other what the exercises above suggest, but without having to think up strategies -- this sort of questioning and confronting is just a part of their ordinary community style.
Here’s a sample of Phyllis’ style. http://www.petoftheday.com/talk/showthread.php?t=94193
It’s a little story about arriving at a hotel for a conference, opening her suitcase and finding... aaaiieeee!
The Johansons live on a side street just across a high bridge over a highway which is often called “suicide bridge” because hopeless people throw themselves off it. One day a woman on that street saw a man standing on the bridge, looking morose. She ran out and asked him, “What would it take to keep you from jumping off this bridge?” “Five bucks for booze,” he said. She got him the money and from then on the people on that street have kept a five dollar bill by the front door. So little to make a big difference. But it was not provided in judgment -- rather in generosity. And that’s the difference between Phyllis and the people many animal control officials privately call “humaniacs.”
Phyllis is a member of PETA. She thinks they go off the deep end sometimes, but also they do a lot of good work. She’s an includer, not an excluder. She’s fascinated by all sorts of things: psychology, other cultures, and always animals. Branching off from her sidestreet is a path up into the shrubbery of the West Hills, and in the mornings Phyllis used to take a walk up that path. Along with her always went the dozen or so cats who were with her while waiting for new homes, all of them with their tails stuck straight up in the air like kittens following their mum. When there was a railing, the first cat jumped up on it, so all the other cats did the same in follow-the-leader style. Pretty soon they all came back down the trail, looking calm and cheerful. Life is good. George puts Phyllis in his paintings and often a cat or two.
This a sort of life many people yearn for. It's very simple really. One must be open to others, ready to reach out. Save oneself so as to have the strength and skills to save others, including animals -- not JUST anmals.
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