Transcription
Have you ever had a friend who went through the world's longest ever breakup? And the first time, or two, or three, you are totally there for them. You're like, "You call me anytime. Forget about that guy, that girl, forget about that person. I got you."
And then they went back five, six, seven times. And then something shifted inside of you. And instead of being like, "I got you, you call me," you notice that something changed. And all of a sudden, you started screening their calls and kind of having this shift in your ability to feel empathy or compassion for them. Can you relate to this?
Now, the truth is that we're all compassionate in a different way. Some of us have a huge pool of compassion. We are the go-to for our loved ones or friends. And some of us have quite a small tank of compassion. And most people maybe don't go to us very often. So it's not kind of a metric that everyone has in the same way.
But I became really interested in this idea of emotional depletion towards people who are experiencing pain or suffering or chronic illness. And I became interested in this in my profession and also as a result of working at Queen's University. So I was a crisis counselor at Queen's University for about seven years. And I also worked with the military for ten years. And I'm a trauma specialist. And I'm a psychotherapist. And I started noticing a shift in people's energy and ability to be present for other people. But first of all, in their personal lives, and also in our professional lives, if that's what we do for a living.
And so I started asking myself some years ago, is there a sweet spot between caring just the right amount, not caring at all? So I started researching this. I've been in the field of crisis and trauma for over 20-some years. And about 15 or 16 years ago, something happened that made me kind of pause. As I was working at Queen's University at the time, and I was starting to see a lot of burnt-out students, a lot of burnt-out residents. Daws. I had a couple of residents, Daws, that at some point lost their entire year because they were helping so many students who were suicidal or in crisis.
And I started to think, where is it that we fail to teach people about boundaries and limits? And how do we get kind of swallowed up into other people's pain and suffering? And is there a different way to do that? I also started seeing a lot of housemates. And maybe you've been through this, where one person in the house is suffering from a mental illness or a legitimate crisis. And the entire house becomes consumed with this person's problem or issue, at the cost of their own suffering.
So that's the first thing that made me pause was basically watching students burn out. The second thing I became a little concerned about when I was working at Queens is how service providers, such as myself, nurses, cops, social workers, what-have-you, were not always the most compassionate towards my clients. And I'll never forget one day, I took a very distressed young man to the hospital emergency ward. And don't get me wrong, I love nurses. I work with nurses all the time. But in this instance, the nurse we saw at the triage in the emergency ward was quite frankly an... And I'm not beating up on nurses. There's lots of good nurses. And even maybe this nurse is usually great. But on that day, she had nothing. She had nothing to offer him. She had no compassion. She was impatient. She kind of profiled him. She said to me, "Oh, I'm sure he's got a lot of money, or he's rich." She knew nothing about him. But she had nothing to offer him.
And I kind of asked myself, as I was kind of interacting with this one nurse, I thought to myself, "Surely to goodness, you didn't go into nursing because you hated human beings, right?" And I started having the same experience with some teachers, some law enforcement people, a variety of people I was working with. And I do, I work with people who do what we call high trauma, high stress, trauma-exposed work. So I work with the victims of trafficking unit, child pornography investigators, you get the idea. Like, I work with people who do really challenging work. And some of them seem to do a really good job. And other people, it ends up costing them their marriages, their health, and their ability to be empathic towards other people.
And that's what, by the way, we call compassion fatigue. I kind of prefer the term empathic strain. This emotional and physical exhaustion that develops over time when you're either faced with one person's intractable chronic problem or a very large volume of very similar issues. Can you imagine when I worked at Queen's University, how many first-year students came to me saying that their long-distance relationship was gonna last? Do you think after the fifth hundredth person, let's call her Miffy, all right? And Miffy's going out with Chip, and Chip's at Laurier, and they're gonna make it last? Do you think after the four hundredth person who says that to me, do you think I'm still listening to her? Or I'm just scheduling her for after Thanksgiving, when you know what happens then, right? It's so common. It's got a name because, by the way, 95% of long-distance relationships at university don't last. I'm sorry if that's you.
But so part of what happened for me as I started noticing that high volume exposure to very similar stories were causing me to become a little bit desensitized and numb. And I wanted to make sure that that didn't happen to me because I actually loved my work with the students. So then I start working with law enforcement. And I work with the FBI, and I work with the LAPD, and I work with all sort of the RCMP Homicide Unit in Edmonton. I'm doing a lot of high trauma work. And I start noticing that they're having some negative impacts on their personal lives. And it's not just PTSD, which is a whole other conversation. This has to do with numbing or desensitization.
The other thing I started noticing in myself, as well as my service providers, is that we might have done a great job at work. But when we went home, we had nothing left. And so maybe we do a tough job, and then we get home, and somewhat home at home has a crisis. And you're thinking, "I'll show your crisis." Right? And so I started noticing that some of us were having a hard time transitioning from one to the other.
So based on all of that, the students I was seeing, the residence Daws, the teachers, the social workers, the nurses, the cops, I started doing some research on the topic of compassion fatigue. We created a think tank a few years ago. And we meet three or four times a year. And we're a combination of researchers, educators, policy people in the field. And we're always meeting and saying, "What works? And what is the sweet spot?" So what is exactly caring the right amount? And we started kind of looking at this and realizing that there is a sweet spot between being so desensitized that I'm doing my grocery list while you're telling me about your problem, or being so over-engaged that I'm crying harder than you when you're telling me that my problem, or your problem.
There was actually a really interesting study that was done on this topic over ten years ago. And it was two researchers at UBC who identified this term that's called, what's not there, anyways, exquisite empathy. An exquisite empathy refers to that exact thing. What is the sweet spot between caring just the right amount? So what I want to offer you today are some strategies that we have found to be really helpful for you as an individual, as someone in a relationship, family, friends, and also as a global citizen. And this is what we do. We travel. My team travels all over North America. We do trainings like this every single week. And we want to provide you with some suggestions of what we call best practices. What does work?
Now, this isn't rocket science. You probably know this already. But I want to kind of reconsolidate it for all of us. So the first thing we've realized is that we all need to understand what your warning signs are. Now, I think you all know what the green zone looks like. Have you ever realized, like, let's say you've just finished your summer holiday, and you get back to school or to work? If you notice how great you feel on the first day you get back, and you're like, "Namaste." [Music] You know, how long does that last? One hour? A week? So the truth is that a lot of us have quite a high level of stress, but we don't really always notice it.
And so what I invite you to start noticing is what we call the big three. What are the top three warning signs that you are starting to exhibit that let you know that you're kind of headed towards the red zone, which is when, of course, you crash and burn? Now, here's your homework for today. I want to invite you to go home and ask your loved ones what your yellow zone warning signs look like. They will be delighted to tell you because they already know. Your dog knows what your yellow zone looks like. Your cat too, but she doesn't care.
So I want to give you a little experiment you can kind of try out right here, right now. All right? I want you to pretend that you have spilled milk all inside of your refrigerator. Those of you who are sitting here right now saying, "What's the problem with that?" Your housemates don't like you. All right? So you expect milk all inside your refrigerator from the very top shelf all the way down. You're still with me? Is it not true that sometimes you react to that in quite a pretty zen way, and other times we lose our mind?
So what we've noticed is the reason that sometimes we're pretty zen about that, and other times we lose our mind, depends on something that is called the window of tolerance. And the window of tolerance, my friend Diana calls it WTF, in case you want to remember that. And the window of tolerance refers to this zone that we live in. And for some of us, that sweet spot, you know, the zone where we have, of course, modulations where we might go up or down a little bit, but that zone for some of us is actually quite wide. So for people who are who do a lot of yoga and exercise and don't have a lot of stress or previous stressors in their life, they tend to be pretty chill about those things. I don't know if you've ever been in a traffic jam with a friend of yours who's always calm, and you're white-knuckling it, and you have white, and you know, kind of road rage, and they go, "What a great opportunity to listen to our favorite radio show." So I'd like to suggest that their window is a little bit wider than yours.
So this research came out of some trauma work, actually, that came out of the last two decades. And what we started noticing is that people who had significant childhood or other types of trauma tended to have quite a small window of tolerance. So if you don't mind, I'll give you an example from my clinical practice. Some years ago, we had a soldier who had just come back from a war zone two weeks ago. And he had also early childhood trauma. This guy had a pretty heavy load on him. And he was at the corner of Bath and Princess Street, which some of you know is a big intersection. And instead of stopping at the red light, he panicked and he went right through the red light, almost crashing his car. And his wife said to him, "What are you doing? What are you doing?" He said, "It's not safe. It's not safe. We can't stop." Because what happened is his window of tolerance was this small already. And where he had been in the war zone, you never stopped at an intersection. And what happened is his limbic system actually said to him, "You're actually in a life-and-death situation right now," when he was not.
So what we've learned, which is really interesting, is there ways to widen your zone, widen your window of tolerance, so that you're not lying on the floor raging at the refrigerator, or completely giving up and walking away. Hyper and hypo arousal. So there's some really cool stuff about that. So how do we figure that out in three strategies? Number one, figure out what your big three warning signs are. How does your body let you know that you're headed for trouble? And a lot of people say to me, "I know this stuff." Well, do you really, though? Right? Your eye twitch, your migraines, your neck and shoulder pain, your irritable bowel, your back pain. What is it? How is your body letting you know? And when your body's letting you know that you're headed for trouble, do you ignore it or slow down? How is your body letting you know? Gabor Matta said years ago, "The body does not live in isolation from daily experiences. The immune system does not live in isolation from daily experience."
Number two, what are your behaviors? What's your number one behavior when you're starting to head into the yellow zone? And thirdly, what are some of the emotional reactions you have? So I don't know what it is for you. But I know because I do a very challenging work and I do a lot of trauma work that when I'm in the green zone, I might go home after my work day and exercise and watch one or two episodes of my favorite funny show. And when I'm not in a good place and I'm in the red zone, I may watch seven seasons of Breaking Bad while drinking into our bottle of wine, right? And so I know that those are ways for me to modulate and self-monitor. And we refer to that, of course, as self-awareness on a regular basis.
The other thing that's really interesting, and I'm very, very excited about some of this research, is something that is called equanimity. What equanimity refers to is the ability to engage, be present, especially when there's a stressful event, but also remain calm and return to your baseline more quickly. I can give you an example. I don't know if you're familiar with the interior BC. But last week, I accidentally ended up driving in a tiny little car in the middle of winter in the middle of the night along the Kahala Highway. And if you don't know what that is, it's called Canada's most dangerous road. I almost died. Okay? It was awful. And the thing about it is that you can understand that as I was on that freeway, it did not make sense for me to be super-chill and to be going, "Check you." You know, it makes sense that in that moment, I was in the activated state. But what equanimity means is that you can more rapidly return to baseline.
And how do you learn to do that? Well, we can get a lot of information from folks that we call expert meditators. There's been some really interesting research and last decade where they had, they have taken people who are considered expert meditators. Now, for example, in one of the studies, there were Buddhist monks who have between 10,000 and 50,000 hours of meditation under their belts. And with their consent, obviously, we put them in a scanner and we exposed them to traumatic images or sounds. And we had a control group where we did the very same thing. What was really interesting is that expert meditators had a combination of more compassion towards the pain and suffering, while being much calmer and less agitated or disrupted by it. So they had figured out, figured out a way of having equanimity, having a dual awareness where I can notice what's happening, I can be present for you, but at the same time, it's not actually distressing me. That's the secret with that we're all trying to seek.
Now, you may not want to do 10,000 hours of meditation, or you may not want to do meditation at all. There are some new modalities that are finding that very brief periods of meditation can be very helpful. That's why yoga works. That's why exercise works. And that's why mindfulness is highly effective.
So what's at stake? And why am I so fired up about this? Why do I spend almost two-thirds of my year away from my family traveling and doing education? I realized at some point that if we do not have compassion for each other, we're in trouble as a society, as professionals, and individuals. So I don't think compassion is the problem. I actually think it's the solution. Thank you.