-
A New Way of Understanding Compassion Fatigue
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
A NEW WAY OF UNDERSTANDING COMPASSION FATIGUE Research is a step into the unknown. Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Tri-Council Policy Statement Faced with limited knowledge of what compassion fatigue is, we wanted a way to study it that would allow us to understand it in its most fundamental form: as it is experienced in everyday life. Rather than theorize, conceptualize , or develop instruments to measure it, we were driven by a simple PHOTO BY ERIKA GOBLE 54 A New Way of Understanding Compassion Fatigue question: What is it like to have compassion fatigue? Understanding the way it is experienced by health professionals—how it affects their interactions with others, how it affects their relationship to their work, and how it changes their everyday experience of the world—could provide the muchneeded basic understanding of the concept we found lacking in the research. Though the question of what it is like to have compassion fatigue as a health professional is apparently a simple one, it could not easily be answered from a natural science perspective, which involves hypotheses , measurement, control of variables, and the search for verifiable truth. Rather, we adopted the human science approach of hermeneutic phenomenology , which allowed for an in-depth exploration of compassion fatigue as a human phenomenon. Hermeneutic phenomenology was ideal because it allowed for space to explore the messiness of life. Participants were not expected to assign their experiences to tidy categories or predetermined fixed choices, nor were we limited by preset methods or theoretical frameworks. Further, this method enabled us to deal with the muddle of the concept of compassion fatigue itself. Phenomenological researchers acknowledge that some people may experience a phenomenon while others may not, and that not all experiences of a phenomenon are identical. However, this variance does not negate the possible existence of a phenomenon, nor researchers’ ability to come to some essential understanding of it. Any given phenomenon is approached as a potential human experience that can provide insight into a human being’s most basic relationship with the world. Study of a phenomenon, therefore, does not require that researchers prove its existence. This was particularly useful to us because we were faced with a situation in which the research literature clearly indicated that researchers, despite the certainty with which they presented their work, did not know what compassion fatigue was. It seemed it might be secondary traumatic stress disorder, vicarious trauma, compassion stress, emotional contagion, or burnout under another name. Despite the confusion surrounding it, however, health professionals were self-identifying as experiencing it.1 Coming from a human science research perspective, we were able to study this little understood concept by asking the question: What is the human phenomenon of compassion fatigue? Our goal became simply to describe what it is like to have compassion fatigue, in all of its complexity and ambiguity, as a Canadian health professional. We pursued this goal in the hope of gaining some understanding of its essential aspects. [3.236.57.1] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:05 GMT) A New Way of Understanding Compassion Fatigue 55 Hermeneutic Phenomenology Hermeneutic phenomenology is a philosophical movement arising from the work of such scholars as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Emmanuel Levinas. It is also a human science research method that attempts to achieve a reflective grasp of pre-reflective lived experienced. More simply put: it attempts to understand through description and interpretation what an experience is like as it is lived before it is thought about or interpreted. To do so, we explore concrete , specific, everyday examples of the phenomenon. Phenomenological research offers no theories, no explanations, no causal relations, and no abstractions or analyses about a particular subject.2 In fact, this type of research often actively avoids engaging the theories, explanations, causal relationships, abstractions, and analyses offered by disciplines about a particular phenomenon, because, by their very nature (i.e., being abstract), these cover over and prevent us from seeing certain aspects of a phenomenon that may reveal themselves in concrete instances. For example, psychological theories of love—and the paper-and-pencil scales developed to test or measure them—seem to tell us more about psychology than they do about love. The mystery of love disappears. A phenomenological approach, however, can capture the way such mystery is experienced by lovers.3 With no explanation or theory provided at the conclusion of a hermeneutic phenomenological study, one might wonder to what end the...