Compatriot Fatigue

I have had a revelation about my work. The periods in which I've experienced Compassion Fatigue have been many and some were quite intense. There were times I drank too much, became so anxious I could not drive or sleep, became impulsive to the point of angry outbursts and cried easily.

Those were the most severe.

These episodes were, in retrospect, episodes of PTSD. I had an awareness of that during them, but the full scope of the disorder was not evident to me until later. Mine has been more of a complex PTSD that I've had to manage since my childhood. As I've progressed in my career--always interested in the most complicated cases and high risk populations--it has, of course, compounded. Since I insisted upon having a personal life as well as a career, there was more trauma to be had naturally.

What I have found is that PTSD is a given in my personal life and Secondary PTSD is a given in my chosen field. There is nothing adverse about choosing a career that will traumatize you, although that sounds ridiculous. It is simple, however, if you are a person that needs intense experiences in order to feel something. In another field that may be a less frightening piece of information because it would be couched in less clinical terms such as "adrenalin junkie". I don't want to jump off a mountain in a wing suit so I talk to people in the psychological abyss. I am a psychological adrenalin junkie.

This is not very different from being a first responder in an immediate disaster or catastrophe. We consider those heroic acts and we are grateful for people who do them. I would not dare claim heroism, but I do understand the motivation of first responders. For some wonderful and perhaps dark reasons, they have the emotional and psychological abilities to go head first into gore. I have the same abilities in psychological gore.

The need for compatriot support in adrenalin careers is crucial. I'll delve into that a little later, but it occurs to me now--almost at the end of my career--that the majority of my own Secondary PTSD experiences in my work have been built upon the failings of my colleagues and supervisory/administrative staff to tend to me adequately when I was falling. I don't mean to blame them, but hope to point out some inherent problems across systems that employ high risk responders.