AMEN Australia 2015: Eden Unlocked- the Secret of Healing Ministry

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Carina Cotaru

Compassion Fatigue

All right, let's just start this morning devotional with a word of prayer.

Dear Heavenly Father, we want to thank you for this time away to recharge and to hear your Word.

I just pray that you speak through me this morning that those who are here hear not my words but hear what you have to say to them.

Will you do that from the back or do you want me to?

So this morning I've been asked to speak to you about compassion fatigue and as I thought about what I could talk to you about.

Lots of ideas came through but being a devotional I really wanted to link it back to a Bible reading.

So our reading for this morning is quite long.

So if you've got your Bibles, you can follow along.

I've actually put it up on the PowerPoint as well.

The apostles returned to Jesus from their ministry tour and told him all they had done and taught.

Then Jesus said, let's go off by ourselves to a quiet place and rest a while.

He said this because there were so many people coming and going that Jesus and his apostles didn't even have time to eat.

So they left by boat for a quiet place where they could be alone, but many people recognised them and saw them leaving, and people from many towns ran ahead along the shore and got there ahead of them.

Jesus saw the huge crowd as he stepped from the boat, and he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

Late in the afternoon, his disciples came to him and said, this is a remote place and it's getting late.

Send the crowds away so that they can go to the nearby farms and villages and buy something to eat.' But Jesus said, you feed them.

With what, they asked, we'd have to work for months to earn enough money to buy food for all these people.

They came back and reported, we have 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish.

Then Jesus told the disciples to have people sit down in groups on the green grass.

Jesus took the 5 loaves and 2 fish, looked up toward heaven, and blessed them.

Then, breaking the loaves into pieces, he kept giving the bread to the disciples so they could distribute it to the people.

He also divided the fish for everyone to share.

They all ate as much as they wanted and afterward the disciples picked up 12 baskets of leftover bread and fish.

A total of 5, 000 men and their families were fed.

Immediately after this, Jesus insisted that his disciples get back into the boat and head across the lake to Bethesda while he sent the people home.

After telling everyone goodbye, he went up into the hills by himself to pray.

And I thought, well, where can I find a definition of compassion, given that this is what I'm talking about?

And I had to look through the dictionary, but I thought, let's go back to a Bible dictionary.

And I actually found that there are 3 Greek words in the New Testament which have been translated into English as compassion.

The first 1 is Elios, which means to have mercy upon, help the afflicted.

It is an action but it doesn't particularly place much emphasis on the feeling of the 1 performing the action.

You see someone who's upset, in pain, and you help them out.

But you're not particularly interested in why or what's going on with them.

The next word is oikteros, which means to have pity, a feeling of distress through the suffering of others.

And now this is an emotion without the action.

So you see someone, you're like, oh, I feel really sorry for you, but okay, maybe I can't do anything, or you're not really, I can't help you, I'm not interested in helping you.

The third word is splagnitumai and it's actually a verb and it means to be moved in the inner parts which at the time were thought to be the seat of emotion.

So we see that this word actually combines the 2 previous words.

So you have an emotional reaction, and then that actually produces an action.

And the word that's actually most commonly used in the New Testament is splagnitamai, which is this last word.

So you are emotionally moved, but then you do something.

And it actually occurs 12 times, and it's particularly used in the Gospels when it refers to Jesus.

So given that you have that definition of compassion, what do you think compassion, or what are some of the things that run through your mind when you think about compassion fatigue?

Just from your everyday practice or just those those words.

So on December the 2nd 2014 Amanda Lambros wrote an article for the conversation website which by the way I don't know if you if you read it but it's a really interesting website which is an independent source of news.

And it's from the academic and research community.

And she entitled this article, Compassion Fatigue, the cost some workers pay for caring.

So she wrote that researchers first identified compassion fatigue in the 1970s, which I think has been around for longer than that.

And they first actually coined this term in the 1990s to describe emergency care workers who are experiencing similar symptoms to burnout.

And she gives the following definition of compassion fatigue.

Compassion fatigue is a combination of physical, emotional and spiritual depletion associated with caring for people in significant emotional pain and physical distress.

So again it goes back to that Greek word, sphagnitamai, which shows that it's fatigue in the emotional sense as well as the physical sense.

And she, from her research, She estimates that the prevalence of compassion fatigue ranges between about 7% to 40% of workers in intensive care settings.

And even up to 70% of inexperienced mental health workers.

And she reports that it's more likely to occur in inexperienced health professionals and those who help others only for short periods of time and her supposition is that it may be because they haven't yet developed coping strategies or don't have good support or debriefing networks as those who've worked in those areas for longer time periods.

So this might be reassuring for some of you.

You've probably been working for 10, 20, 30 years even.

You may not work in an intensive care setting.

But I think none of us actually experience or escape the consequences of caring for others.

And there was a book that I read quite a number of years, and I came across this quote again from it.

It's called Kitchen Table Wisdom, Stories That Heal by Rachel Naomi Remen.

And she describes the impact of caring and compassion on healthcare professionals.

She says, the expectation that we can be immersed in suffering and loss daily and not be touched by it is as unrealistic as expecting to be able to walk through water without getting wet.

And whether you're touched by it in a positive or a negative way certainly is what we're going to be talking about a little bit this morning.

But I just want you to just kind of read that quote again and think about it.

It's like, it's just absolutely impossible not to be touched by the things that we see every day.

And so as I was researching this topic, its causes, symptoms, and what the remedies for it are.

I noted that the remedies offered by secular researchers and writers were really starting to echo over and over again with the story of Jesus and his disciples.

And we see that the disciples faced exactly the same challenges that we do today.

And Jesus was the 1 who recognised their condition and showed them what the remedy was at the same time.

So I want us to have another look at verses 30 to 32 in Mark 6.

The disciples had just returned from their first mission without Jesus.

And they told him all they had done and taught.

And then Jesus must have recognised something that was going on with them and said, let's go off by ourselves to a quiet place.

And it does say there that they hadn't even had time to eat.

So he's thinking they hadn't even been able to meet their physical needs.

They obviously hadn't been able to meet their spiritual or their emotional needs.

And he realized that, and he invited them to spend time with him away from the crowds to recharge.

So I thought we'd just very quickly look at some of the symptoms of compassion fatigue.

And I've tried not to overwhelm you with too much information.

But just some of the sort of breaking things into a few different areas, emotional indicators, physical indicators, personal, and work indicators.

Some of the emotional indicators might be just anger, sadness, prolonged grief, anxiety, depression.

Compassion Fatigue

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