The vicarious impacts of helping work: the joy and the pain
13 Dec 2023
As helping professionals, the question is not if, but 'when will we experience the vicarious impacts of this work?' In recent years, we have become more aware of terms such as vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue and moral injury in helping others. There are, however, also joyful, hopeful and inspiring aspects of this work. Here at Tempo, we make sense of both sides through the 'Joy - Pain Spectrum'. Take a look at the graphic overview to understand more.
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.
The purpose of this blog is to offer a graphic overview of the 'joy' and the 'pain' in helping work: the pleasant and challenging vicarious impacts of your work as a health or education professional, carer or other kind of helper. It invites you to reflect upon, be curious, learn about and build awareness of how your work is impacting you - for better, worse, or anything in between - in order to support you to keep doing the work you love without burning out.
Take a look at the graphics below to understand how your helping role might be affecting you.
What is the 'Joy - Pain Spectrum'?
Helping work requires us to step into another’s experience, in order to understand, meet, be with, or collaboratively transform it in some way.
The experience is shared: the struggles, the pain; the triumphs and the joy.
Whilst workers are trained to, and practise keeping themselves separate, inevitably we step into the joy and the pain of those with whom we work.
Just as doing this helps to make changes in the lives of those with whom we work, in turn, it has an impact on us: it is a reciprocal, neurobiological phenomenon.
We can conceptualise this as a spectrum with two sides:
pain, fatigue and exhaustion at one end
and joy, satisfaction and energy at the other.
Both ends of this spectrum are a natural and normal part of the work; and can be seen through the following perspectives:
moral health
compassion
empathy
vicarious impacts
To see this as a whole, we can conceive of this as a spectrum:
Post-traumatic growth is a familiar concept to many. But what about other positive impacts that workers can experience? Vicarious resilience and compassion satisfaction help us to understand the ways that workers in helping or caring roles can be positively impacted, or even transformed, by witnessing the strength and resilience of others. Holding an awareness of both ends of the spectrum - the joy and the pain in the work - may hold the key for a healthy, successful and durable career.
Within the helping professions we often focus on the more challenging end of the joy - pain spectrum in this work: exhaustion, compassion fatigue, secondary stress and vicarious trauma. This blog series seeks to rectify that, with Part 1 focusing on vicarious resilience, Part 2 unpacking compassion satisfaction, Part 3 looks at suggested changes in terminology and Part 4 addressing the importance of, and risks associated with, connecting with others when in a helping role. Cultivating awareness of both ends of the joy - pain spectrum in the helping professions is essential in supporting worker wellbeing.
We can hardly explore the joy-pain spectrum in helping roles without looking at the pointy end. While previous blogs in this 5-part series explored the positive, protective factors, this post examines the risks in empathic connection when working with those who are suffering. Here, we will consider the symptoms, contributing factors and the differences between empathic strain (compassion fatigue), burnout, secondary traumatic stress and vicarious trauma.
This five-part blog series of the 'Joy-Pain Spectrum' has explored the opportunities for growth, hope and positive change that help to protect us and mitigate the risks associated with the challenges of helping others at the other end: burnout, vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue (empathic strain) moral injury and secondary traumatic stress. So how do we protect ourselves? How do we maintain our healthy selves in relation to helping work? The answer lies in the need for cultural, political and organisational shifts, as well as the need for BOTH individual and collective supports.
