Nurse burnout is treatable through counseling, yet despite experiencing toxicity, we tend to feel as though we are able to "fix" ourselves. Stop this madness! Find joy, balance and boundaries by cycling back to determine what led you to want to heal others.
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Alrighty then nurse person, so you cry on your way to work, fantasize about moving to a mountain top with a shaved head while cradling a book titled "How to Obtain Enlightenment in Three Days", and are enjoying your 5th diagnosed bladder infection in the last 6 months. Despite being an avid believer in probiotics you realize if you eat one more lousy spoonful of yogurt you will quite simply toss cookies, so just the idea of slathering this refrigerated dairy food complete with fruit chunks onto your urethra is actually enjoyable at this point. Enter reality. As you take your morning report and begin your rounds, one of your patients replies to your luke warm "good morning" by threatening to choke you if you don't medicate them for their pain. 7:34 AM, but look at the bright side. You only have 11 and half hours to go.
You aren't sure how to accurately describe the zone you just entered, but for some reason, thanks to some form of grace, you are in your car, ready to escape the madness. The minutes turned into hours, the hours melted into some sort of inexplicable space in time. The blisters on your heels are oozing and raw. As always, there is a nagging sense that you forgot to report something, or that something will go wrong as a result of something that you did or didn't do. You fleetingly consider returning to the unit to make sure that you dotted "T's and crossed your "I's. (Yes, I realize that this was reversed, but you are delirious). There is a quickening in your chest as you struggle with the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. You limp aimlessly toward your vehicle. You'd haul *** if you could.
You manage to start the ignition of your car and peel off your shoes and socks that tell the story of the angst and pain that you have witnessed and endured. Hell, if you have breasts your bra may have already been winged into your back seat. As you operate your motor vehicle, the trees that pass you by turn into looming shadows which tell stories of the promise of darkness. For some creepy reason, you find comfort in that. A song comes on the radio that eventually becomes a part of a dream which you will never remember. In your driveway you realize that you do not recall the drive home.
A probably well meaning yet horribly ignorant family member tells you how lousy you look and possibly asks you what's for dinner. Your forehead becomes intimately close with your kitchen counter, and you may even at this point wonder how many bashings it would take in order for you to lose consciousness and at the same time, you cannot possibly endure any more pain. As you weep, the good intentioned sap has an epiphany. The words uttered out of their mouth actually sound something like this:
"Just relax"!
Your exhausted mind bends and twists in an attempt to comprehend. Did this person just tell me to...relax?
Oh, ok.
How on earth can a professional healthcare provider such as a nurse just relax? What that statement actually indicated was that the well meaning idiot cannot deal with how your stress affects them, or is simply at a loss to fully comprehend exactly what it is that a nurse endures during a work shift. Join the club you think, because neither can you. I mean, it's not that you haven't dabbled in aromatherapy, enjoyed some retail therapy or possibly enjoyed a cocktail or ten with your comrades. Did those actions create a period of time when you felt relaxed? Possibly. Yet they were all temporary escapes.
These things are simply fugacious bleeps in time. Look at the trends. They are all extrinsically obtained environmental actions. You may as well have put a Dora the Explorer bandage on a cavernous, extravagating abdominal wound. A 0.009 cc of the blood will be absorbed into Dora, yet the goal is to stop the bleeding. Even more imperative is to determine the cause of the bleeding in the first place.
Nurse focused, integrated transpersonal counseling creates an environment where you will cycle back intrinsically to determine root causes for your authentically personal energetic attraction to healing others. By coming to terms with, and embracing these issues, you will cycle forward with fresh perspectives, learn healthy boundaries and enjoy your profession again. You will heal yourself and others from a place of compassion and despite non-compassionate healthcare work environments, learn how to achieve an incredible work-personal life balance and get that bounce back in your step.
It is imperative that we raise awareness and demolish the stigma that the individual nurse as well as the collective consciousness of the nursing profession largely subscribes to, which is that nurses do not need counseling. This is highly detrimental, however completely reasonable in the manner in which this notion is derived, as the very definition of nursing includes being an expert in the diagnosis of the human response to various conditions. After all, we are fixers of humans. We ourselves are human. Therefore we can fix ourselves.
Guess what my friends? This simply cannot be accomplished independently. If you realize that you are apathetic or experiencing anxiety and dread when you even think about going to work, you need to be carefully and professionally guided back to your authentic joy.
Care to be contagious? What you learn about yourself will be magnetic, and those fortunate enough to be in your company will respond in kind.
Nurse your spirit, because peaceful and cohesive healers create a peaceful and cohesive planet.
