Managing compassion fatigue: a self-care guidebook for helping professionals

Compassion fatigue, a phenomenon observed among helping professionals, is the combination of burnout and secondary traumatic stress (Adams, Figley, & Boscarino, 2008). The literature recommends that helping professionals can prevent or manage compassion fatigue by building resilience through self-care habits (Barnett & Ruiz, 2018; Craigie et al., 2016; Cuartero & Campos-Vidal, 2019; Silver, Caleshu, Casson-Parkin, & Ormond, 2018; Train & Butler, 2013). This guidebook seeks to raise helping professionals’ awareness of compassion fatigue, their risk for it, and self-care strategies to be resilient against it. It contains three main parts: the Preparation Cycle, an educational section about compassion fatigue; the Guided Activity Cycles, interactive activities that introduce users to self-care strategies and guide them to put the strategies into practice; and the Reflection Cycle, an interactive section that prompts users to evaluate their overall experience and create self-care goals for themselves. In essence, this tool teaches a variety of self-care practices and then encourage the user to carry the practices that resonated most with them into their life in an individualized way