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TRANSCRIPT Mary Coughlin: Well, okay. Welcome to the very first FUN, FABULOUS, FACTUAL Friday. Happy September. Fun, Fabulous, friday has actually been a thing with my team, Tara, Kristy and myself, Kristy actually started it. And it's just been a really cool thing to kind of look forward to Fridays, make them fun, make them fabulous. And we all have different ways that we make things fun and fabulous. And for me, sometimes my fun and fabulousness comes out in my nerdiness. And so I gotta bee in my bonnet today because I'm playing with this new software that I would try and do a fun, fabulous, factual Friday on September 1st. We'll see how it goes. And if you like it, we'll try it again on another Friday. So anyways, I was nerding out, looking at a variety of different articles and I came across this really neat article in this journal called Collegian, it's out of Australia, and it's talking about, well, the title of it is "Contesting the term compassion, fatigue: integrating findings from social neuroscience and self- care research". And for any of you guys that know me, I absolutely love the work of Joan Halifax, and in fact, it's downstairs, I think, I just finished reading a recent book of hers, that talks about edge states, and the stuff that you guys have probably heard me talk about is the paper where she talks about the acronym G.R.A.C.E.. So Joan Halifax is a Buddhist nun and she has done a lot of work in a lot of different settings, and one of the key areas that she's done work with is with palliative care, end of life nurses where she really explores this concept of compassion and compassion, fatigue. And so when I saw this title, I immediately went to the work of John Halifax, and as I was reading it, I was like, aha, this is brilliant. Everybody needs to know this stuff. What this paper does, and it does reference the work of Joan Halifax, is it really starts to tease out, based on what we know from MRIs, functional MRIs, and lots of research on the concept of compassion, that it's actually faulty to use the term compassion fatigue because compassion does not fatigue. That feeling that we get that leads to burnout; that feeling that we get that kind of erodes our capacity for connection and compassion for others is actually empathic distress. And they talk a lot about this in the paper. They really kind of, I'm just kind of flying through the paper right now, pull out a lot of the different concepts, with the intention of helping, particularly nurses, but all frontline healthcare and human care professionals, that it's not our compassion that causes us injury. It, it's not our, our compassion that leads to burnout. It's actually a paucity of self-compassion that can lead to burnout. But more important than that is this concept of emotion regulation, and Halifax talks about this in her book. And she also touches upon it in her other publications, but these authors Hoffmeyer et al really tease it out so that they help us understand that when we're feeling empathic towards another person and remember what empathy is, empathy is feeling with another person, we need to be present to ourselves. That in that empathic moment we can sometimes lose ourself and our capacity to regulate that emotion and the lines get blurred between where I end and the other begins. And so when we're feeling empathy, for the suffering state of another, we can actually get lost in that suffering. The lines will get blurry. And it's that, that moment 'there' that actually causes us distress. And so the appropriate terminology is actually empathic distress and they say empathic distress fatigue, that, that empathic distress fatigues us psychologically, emotionally, and then that also can then tax us physiologically as well. And so I just really wanted to share this with you guys. And I'll share the citation in the transcript below so you can go nerd out on it. I think it was open access. But I'll give you all of the information that you need. And I would invite you to check this out. The thing that I really like in reading this paper, Is that it really calls out that when we don't use the right language to describe situations, like I think about the work that I do with my team on trauma and trauma informed care. When we don't use the language that describes accurately a situation, for example trauma in the NICU we'll say, well, we don't want to use that language because we feel that it will upset people. People are already upset and we need to use the language to describe it correctly. And that's what the authors are saying with regard to compassion fatigue. If we think it is compassion fatigue that is leading to burnout, then we are going to use strategies that are directed towards preventing compassion fatigue. And those are incorrect strategies. Because what they do is they cause us, that the strategies guide us to withhold our compassion so that we don't become fatigued. But when we withhold our compassion we actually, where's the language, we actually become depersonalized and as a consequence, provide sub optimal care that lacks empathy and lacks compassion; which ultimately fails to meet the needs of the patient and ourselves, because we gain a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction when we are able to ease the suffering of another in the course of our work, and that's particularly true in nursing. And so this one sentence here, I'll just wrap up if I can, "it's essential to maintain a self other distinction". You can feel the empathy, but to maintain that distinction and not absorb the others suffering or negative emotion. But honor, it relate to it because we've all had experiences where we can empathize authentically with other, but we just can't lose ourselves, fall off the cliff as Joan Halifax says. So please check out this paper. A lot of the information that I particularly investigate, pursue, gobble up when I'm reading is all related to the work I do in fostering a trauma informed paradigm and cultivating trauma informed professional development through the trauma informed professional certificate program and through all of our writings and publications and such. So. Please comment below if this is interesting, I hope it's succinct, factual, fun. And I wish you all a very fabulous Friday and holiday weekend. Thanks so much. Take it easy. Bye. P.S.: Here are the references Hofmeyer, A., Kennedy, K., & Taylor, R. (2020). Contesting the term ' compassion fatigue'" Integrating findings from social neuroscience and self-care research. Collegian, 27(2), 232-237. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.colegn.2019.07.001 . Halifax, J. (2018). Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet . New York, N.Y.: Flatiron Books. Halifax, J. (2014). G.R.A.C.E. for nurses: Cultivating compassion in nurse/patient interactions. Journal of Nursing Education & Practice, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.5430/jnep.v4n1p121 .