Last Friday, the Executive Presbyter, Alan Cutter, gave the new Presbytery employees a seminar on compassion fatigue. It was mostly us YAVs but there were a few new long-term volunteers. Cutter is a Vietnam veteran who saw so many of his compatriots deal with post-traumatic stress disorder and who struggled with his own addiction and anger. He put together this presentation that is often delivered to veterans’ groups but he doctored it slightly for us disaster recovery people. He started by affirming that the Gulf Coast is akin to a combat zone and that we will indeed experience many of the same kind of traumas. So he defined trauma and told how one gets post-traumatic stress disorder. One of his slides was a chart of ‘F’s, all of them natural human responses to stress and trauma. The first four are well-known in psychological circles and they are: Fight, Flight, Feed and, duly modified for church purposes, Make Love. He gave the example of getting on an airplane and flying somewhere. Sitting inside an aluminum tube going hundreds of miles per hour at 35,000 feet is a trauma; we’ve gotten somewhat used to it, but it’s still a trauma. So the airlines have to satisfy one of those four responses. Three of them are impossible (some given space constraints, others not), hence passengers are fed. Cutter included a dozen or so other ‘F’s that people resort to, like fifth (that is, denial or addiction) or forget. These ‘F’s are often employed by “survivors” of trauma.
Instead of just surviving trauma, we’re meant to learn from it and then grow out of it. So the rest of the compassion fatigue workshop was on growing out of surviving and into being a witness. That is, being open about your trauma, dealing with it, learning from it, and also teaching others. Being in this hurricane zone is very difficult but this compassion fatigue session was engrossing and helpful. I came out of it with a lot of motivation for being a witness for the coast, for practicing self-care and keeping boundaries between work, rest and play.
