Healing the Healer
Those of us in the helping professions are especially prone to putting our own needs aside for the sake of others’. It is part of our calling, to be fully present and available when we are needed. But our heart-driven work can be exhausting, and we might be unaware of the cumulative toll taken on our personal health and well-being.
We may also find that our own moral code is tested by the limits of our profession – that we cannot offer the healing we truly want to give because our jobs limit what we can provide to help. So, we may experience a deeper dilemma that challenges our strength and life-balance.
The stories of our patients, clients, parishioners, and students affect us emotionally, no matter how strong our boundaries are, and we may find we cannot help but re-experience their pain as our own.
As we work to heal others, we must tend to ourselves – and keep our own well filled.
Practices
- Compassion Fatigue for clergy, teachers and counselors
- Moral Distress for nurses, doctors and social workers
- Secondary Stress for therapists, fire fighters and first responders
“Our own experience with loneliness, depression, and fear can become a gift for others, especially when we have received good care. As long as our wounds are open and bleeding, we scare others away. But after someone has carefully tended to our wounds, they no longer frighten us or others…We have to trust that our own bandaged wounds will allow us to listen to others with our whole beings. That is healing.”
- Henri Nouwen,
The Wounded Healer, 1979