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 screaming 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 Dawn’s I had a couple of
residents Don’s 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
burnout 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 asshole 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 he
just she knew nothing about him but she
had nothing to offer him and I kind of
asked myself as I was kind
interacting with this one nurse I
thought to myself surely did 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 them 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 chips 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 percent
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 with 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 in 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
Dawn’s 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 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 carrying 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
are you a 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 –
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 spilt
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 Zend
chill way and other times we lose our
mind so what we’ve noticed is the reason
that sometimes we’re pretty done 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 you’re irritable bowel
your back pain what is it how is your
body letting you know and when your
body’s letting you know that your
headed for trouble do you ignore
Medicaid 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 it 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
cade where they had tea 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