Restoring Passion in The Helping Profession

After enduring a year marked by personal trials, including my husband's melanoma diagnosis and my own battle with breast cancer, I've gained a deeper understanding of the often-unseen challenges faced by those of us in the helping professions. I am Dr. Julie Merriman, and in this episode of SoulJoy, I open up about my journey through these hardships and the critical lessons I've learned about burnout, compassion fatigue, and vicarious trauma. These occupational hazards, if left unchecked, can severely impact our body, mind, and soul, stripping away the joy we once felt in our work and lives.

This episode isn't just about my story; it's also a call to action for all professional helpers to recognize and address these hazards before they become overwhelming. Drawing on extensive research and my own experiences, I provide strategies for setting healthy boundaries and reclaiming joy in our personal and professional lives. With a shocking statistic that 70% of helping professionals face these issues, it's time to confront the epidemic of becoming "crispy fried." Through my book "In Pursuit of Joy" and this podcast, I aim to empower you to reconnect with your life and rediscover the joy that may have been lost along the way. Join me as we embark on the journey to reclaim our lives and find our joy again.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey y'all, it's Dr Julie Merriman and welcome to SoulJoy. In today's episode we're going to explore the occupational hazards of professional helpers and look at some proven strategies to combat these. Okay, thank you so much for joining me for episode one. Can y'all believe that I've been wanting to do this for so long? But y'all, this year, oh, my lanta this year has been rough. My beloved husband, kelly, has been fighting melanoma and it spread to his brain and that's just been a mess. I've spent way too many nights in the hospital with him and then, believe it or not, I had my own battle with breast cancer last June. Oh, but that you know. I'm fine, that's going to be fine. But let me just sum it up by saying we are a hot mess, but you know it's a journey and I'm honored to take that journey with my beloved. As y'all are going to learn pretty soon, I'm pretty crazy about this guy. I really am, and I think June 24th Now I know June 24th is our 29th wedding anniversary, so that's a pretty big milestone these days and he has been my everything since about 1992 when we started dating. But I don't know about y'all and your spouses, but he really is my home and my safe place and just my comfort. So I'm honored to do this hot mess with him.

Speaker 1: 1:44

Okay, so let's segue into this thing called occupational hazards of professional helpers. Charles Figley is the guy that really started. Well, no, sue Joyner, who was a nurse, really coined the term, and then Charles Figley went on to do a lot of research with it and I did my dissertation on this. I've been researching this stuff for a lot of years, but I want y'all to know that the occupational hazards are well-researched and well-documented and the hazards I'm going to be talking about are burnout, compassion, fatigue and vicarious trauma, and you might wonder why it's important to know about these, but I want you to know y'all. If it's left untreated, if you don't do something about it, you're going to feel miserable. These are going to impact your body, mind and soul. So it's worth taking the time to just learn about these hazards. Before I give you the definitions, I want to be honest and tell you about my brush with these occupational hazards. I can laugh now, but it was not funny at the time. But it was not funny at the time. Back. Maybe 2010 is when I really got impacted.

Speaker 1: 3:13

I went through my graduate program in 94, so and started my private practice in 99. So you know, I've been at this, the helping field, for quite a few years. I'm a licensed professional counselor, I'm a registered play therapist, I'm a trauma therapist, I'm a certified yoga therapist. I've been doing this stuff for a while, but when my brush with these bad boys happened, I had no healthy boundaries, y'all. I was a people pleaser. I allowed clients to own my schedule. I worked 15 hour days. Please don't do that. Please don't do that. But I did. I own it. I would skip lunch. I woke up dreading the day and it was my own fault. I'd completely over my days, but I was miserable. I had lost the capacity to feel any sort of joy, no joy. I'd lost the capacity to feel anything. In fact, I'd lost me through all that. I don't want that to happen to y'all. Now here's the good news I did find my way back and that, my friend, is why I wrote my book In Pursuit of Joy and why I started this podcast for professional helpers. I don't want y'all to become impacted and crispy fried because that's become an epidemic. I think it's like 70% of the helping profession becomes impacted by these occupational hazards. I believe it's time to reclaim your life and I want to help you fall back in love with that life. Okay, so that's just a little touch on what I went through and why we're here today.

Speaker 1: 5:05

But let's talk about what burnout, compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma really is. So burnout is that sense of not having enough resources to meet the demands. So you know you just you feel overwhelmed. There's so much before you and you've only got so much time and you're just overwhelmed. Compassion fatigue that's when you give more care than you have to give. And the tricky thing there is that as professional helpers, that's what we do. We care, we're compassionate, we're empathic and we're giving that to others all day long. But there's a finite amount of that and when we give more than we have to give, that ends up with us being impacted by compassion fatigue.

Speaker 1: 5:58

And then there's vicarious trauma and y'all that's especially ugly left untreated, unattended. It changes us, it changes the being of who we are. What you once loved and found joy with no longer gives you joy. You no longer want to be a professional helper. You I don't know if y'all have ever worked or been gone to a staffing and there's that old crunchy counselor or helper in there who no longer likes clients, does not see any good in the clients that they're seeing and really they have very impacted clinical skills and that's because they're most likely impacted by vicarious trauma and they have not done anything to take care of themselves. It's changed. Maybe they were once this fabulous counselor and they allowed it to change who they were and now they hate the idea of counseling.

Speaker 1: 6:57

I mean, I've sat in staffings and just thought what is going on? Well, that's what's going on. It's our brain. When we sit and listen to trauma all day and sit with broken souls all day, our brain doesn't know. When we're good at it and we're plugged in to that client, our brain doesn't know the difference, that that trauma isn't our trauma. So it's reacting to all those stories and dumping all those hormones into our system that we have to metabolize and it just it wears us out. So we don't want to be impacted by vicarious trauma, compassion, fatigue or burnout. It's really a neuroscience of exhaustion, if you will. We give more than we have to give and we connect with others and, like I said, our brain just reacts and it becomes too much.

Speaker 1: 7:58

All right, so you might be thinking, okay, great, dr M, I get it. But now what? And that's the good news. There are things to be done, and I'm glad you asked so. First, if you think you might even be impacted by any of this, I want you to go directly to Amazon and purchase my book In Pursuit of Soul Joy a 12-week guide for overcoming burnout and compassion fatigue. Now, it won't hit amazon until, um, uh, I'm just gonna say august, the fall. But when it does, I really invite you to to get a copy, because I have a lot of good techniques, techniques that I used as I was recovering from all this razzmatazz. If you will, will, okay, so that's enough of the plug there.

Speaker 1: 8:48

I do want you to know it's there for you, though, but y'all, since we're here together right now, I want to give you just a real simple technique to try to start building a tool belt, if you will, or toolbox, if you will, to help you combat any of these what I'm going to call secondary traumatic stressors, and that's burnout, compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma. I want to normalize that for you. So often in this profession, we feel ashamed, like maybe we're not doing something right because we're being impacted by this and y'all. That's just not the case. It's just not the case's just not the case. It's because you are badass at what you do that you've become impacted or that you might be feeling a little bit raw around the edges. So here's a real simple technique that I just invite you to try.

Speaker 1: 9:39

Okay, so it's summer, right, it? We've passed memorial day, it's summer and it's time to invite nature into. So I want to invite you to go outside. Find a nice grassy little spot. Maybe you have to take a little walk to find it. Maybe you walk out your front door and make sure it's clean, make sure no puppy dogs have been around there.

Speaker 1: 10:05

But find a nice little grassy patch and I want you to take off your shoes and your socks and I want you to stand in this nice grassy patch and just rub your feet, maybe walk back and forth, just really feel the grass between your toes, the earth under your being, and ground yourself. Really find that enjoyment in just grounding yourself and notice how yummy that grass feels on the bottom of your feet. And as you're doing this, I want you to just stand there for a moment, soaking in that vitamin D that the sun so, so generously offers. And as you're standing there, I want you to do just a real quick scan. Pay attention to your feet and how that grass feels under your feet, notice your legs. Move your attention to your tummy, notice your chest, your throat and your head and just notice. Notice how the sun feels on your body, notice how your feet feel on the ground and just find some joy. Maybe just smile and think how beautiful it is to be able to do that and it's absolutely free and it's absolutely good for you. And do that for about five minutes. Just wiggle your toes, walk around, maybe go up on the balls of your feet and down, get some energy into your feet. Maybe do a couple of squats, get some energy into your legs, notice how different that might feel. And remember that that wonderful vitamin D helps to regulate your emotions and helps with your overall wellness. So take a couple of deep breaths, go back to your shoes, get your shoes back on, go back inside, find a nice comfortable place to sit and do just another body scan Feet, legs, tummy, chest, throat, head. I'm hitting your chakras. We'll talk more about chakras in another couple of podcasts. I'll be talking about chakras a lot on this podcast because I think that they are eminently important in our health, our overall wellness, our overall mental health.

Speaker 1: 12:37

But as you're doing that second body scan, I want you to just be curious and notice any physical sensations that might be coming up as you're doing that body scan. Bring absolute curiosity, no judgment whatsoever. Curiosity, no judgment whatsoever. Just be curious. How does it feel to have gone outside and gotten a little dose of vitamin D and gotten myself grounded into Mother Earth for just a couple of seconds? Do I feel the joy? Where did that smile land that I did, which probably didn't conjugate it right, but I did a little bit earlier? Do I have any joy in my body? Where might it be? So, just practice the body scan. That's a great tool that I'll be using with y'all quite a bit in this podcast.

Speaker 1: 13:26

But that, my friend, is just a real quick technique to get out of your office, get out of your head. I know when I'm writing books I have to leave my office and go ground like that just to just to readjust and and, um, just get a hot minute of relief, if you will. That is there for you in between clients, when maybe someone at home has escalated some of your adrenaline, maybe when you're just feeling blah. It's a great tool and technique to use. So this week, I just invite you to bring in more nature and y'all. This could be a walk, it could be adding houseplants to your house, it could be pulling weeds in your garden, it could be harvesting some yummy squash out of your garden, or maybe y'all it's just mowing your yard. But I want you to be very purposeful in this process, because research tells us that bringing nature into your life is healing and it amplifies your overall wellness. And again, it's free. So that, my friend is it for today.

Speaker 1: 14:49

Please, please, please, subscribe to this podcast. Wherever you like to listen to podcasts, please leave me a review. That helps me so much. I'm also able to reach more people the more reviews I have. So thank you for that and y'all. If you're bored or you're thinking, man, I'd like to know about this, that or the other, drop me an email. Let me know what topics you might be interested in. I want to support you. Okay, so until next time, I want you to take care of you. Outro Music.