Helping professions, like healthcare and interpreting, are noble pursuits whose core function, simply put, is to assist others in meeting a vital need. Fueled with finely-developed technical skills and a strong desire to be of service, healthcare professionals embark on a soul-journey to “make a difference” in the lives of those with whom we work.

Having been in human service for more than 25 years, I remember very clearly the training that I received as an interpreter (consecutive mode, industry-specific terminology, note taking, customer service) and as a mental health practitioner (therapeutic modalities, areas of concentration, psychopharmacology, counseling techniques). In all of the formal training that I received, one area that was not part of my institutional learning was self-care.

Naively, my desire to “make a difference” was my only goal. It never occurred to me that I would need to learn how to set boundaries, compartmentalizing, oftentimes, traumatic information. My idealism wasn’t synced up with realism.

At one point, I was a telephonic interpreter, working the graveyard shift,  and fielded multiple, domestic violence calls to the police each night. I would listen to callers in despair, sometimes hearing their perpetrators screaming in the background, not knowing if the victims were safe after they hung up. Also interpreting in healthcare, there were numerous times when I had to deliver tragic news to patients either about themselves or their loved ones. I imagine that you can relate to these experiences.

With all of my training, I knew how to get the job done but no one had told me how I was supposed to manage my own despair. Frankly, I did not know I would even feel despair. Maybe you can’t know how to manage it until you know that you will actually feel it. That comes when theory turns into practice.

By the time that I commenced my mental health career, my experience as an interpreter had prepared me with good, fundamental coping skills. I was confident, again naively, that I had learned how to compartmentalize and, thereby, preserve myself.

However, as a clinician, there was a new facet of this “making a difference” that I hadn’t taken into account. The in-depth knowledge of a client’s story that I now have has added a layer that I was unfamiliar with and has not been easily compartmentalized. I have heard “you just have to shut it off” “not think about it” and “let it go” which, in reality, are all true. However, it’s just not that easy. I am taking the liberty to speak broadly when I say – we need to know how to do this in a way that works for us.

Self-care and, by extension, compassion fatigue, aka vicarious trauma, are experiences we must name, discuss, plan for and react to, if we want to minimize the likelihood that we will become casualties of the “making a difference” process. They are not signs of weakness nor “psycho-babble”, as I have heard them termed occasionally. This next set of posts will focus on what compassion fatigue is, how it may manifest  for each of us, individually, how we are socialized to view our need for self-care and practical tools to use in setting healthy boundaries.