349"I find myself avoiding people socially who are currently pregnant or in emotionally needy
states. I also find myself responding in close ended statements with defensive body lan-
guage when faced with ‘counseling’ type situations outside of work" (Udipi 2007 , p. 138).- Interpersonal symptoms: short temper, irritable reactions, and inability to meet
life’s demands - Example:
"...work stress most negatively impacts my life when I feel I can’t perform home tasks for
being 'wiped out' by work emotions. Especially when it comes to helping my children with
their drama" (Lee 2013 , p. 48).12.3.3 Genetic Counselor Compassion Fatigue Triggers
and Risk Factors
Several studies have identified one or more triggers and risk factors for compassion
fatigue (Benoit et al. 2007 ; Bernhardt et al. 2010 ; Injeyan et al. 2011 ; Lee et al.
2015 ; Miller and Sprang 2017 ; Udipi et al. 2008 ; Zeidner et al. 2013 ). Compassion
fatigue triggers include working with difficult patients, delivering bad news, feeling
responsible for patient suffering, feeling burdened by the information you must con-
vey, being emotionally invested in patients, and feeling helpless. Risk factors
include personality characteristics (high trait anxiety, high compassion satisfaction,
self-blame, desire to be in control, low dispositional optimism, low trait emotional
intelligence, and low emotion management/regulation), ethnicity/race (identifying
as other than Caucasian), experiencing burnout, having a larger caseload and a
greater variety of difficult clinical situations, and high job-related interpersonal
stress.
12.3.4 Coping Strategies for Managing Compassion Fatigue
Compassion fatigue risk is a “by-product” of the services you provide to patients
and their families. Therefore, it’s important that you have a variety of coping strate-
gies for minimizing its impact on your services and on your professional develop-
ment. A growing body of research has identified strategies that vary in their
effectiveness for managing compassion fatigue symptoms. The most ineffective
strategies are (Benoit et al. 2007 ; Miller and Sprang 2017 ; Peters 2010; Udipi et al.
2008 ; Zeidner et al. 2013 ) avoiding engaging empathically with patients, shutting
down/off with patients, ruminating excessively, pretending you are fine, isolating
yourself —not sharing your feelings and thoughts with others—blaming yourself
inappropriately, losing confidence in yourself, and becoming cynical (about patients,
genetic counseling, your role, and responsibilities). These strategies are especially
ineffective if you use them excessively and over a long period.
12.3 Compassion Fatigue