Psychologist Lyudmila Petranovskaya - On The Emotional Burnout Of Benefactors And Readers

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Author: Natalia Morozova Source:

Almost everyone who works in the field of charity is familiar with the feeling of professional burnout, when you start to hate your seemingly favorite job, you cannot offer a single new idea and you want everyone to leave you behind. And it's not just fatigue that is treated with sleep, an extra day off, or a week off. The TD talked to the psychologist Lyudmila Petranovskaya about why it is the philanthropists who are "covered" and how to deal with it.

How is burnout different from just fatigue?

- Differs in the feeling that you should. There is a large share of fatigue in burnout, but why do they talk about emotional burnout primarily in the "helper" spheres? There, when you don't do something, you start to feel like a bastard. When you don’t do something in some less significant area - well, you didn’t do it and didn’t, didn’t answer and didn’t answer. But when you have letters in your mail: “Help, please, I urgently need a consultation! What should I do? I really need your help!" - here it is already very difficult to allow yourself not to answer.

Burnout begins where a person begins to feel that he is participating in some significant cause, that there are suffering, helpless people whom he helps. And all he does is contribute to getting rid of suffering, to solving a difficult and painful problem. As a matter of fact, this spins the burnout mechanism, because if it were banal fatigue, the person would have stopped much earlier.

Well, what if you stop?

- Yes, of course, and it is necessary to do so, but, unfortunately, it does not always work out. You have to be able to plan, but this comes with experience. But it is also impossible to completely plan everything, anyway, some force majeure arises.

Is it possible to work in the charitable field without burnout at all?

- No impossible. There will definitely be entered. You can't plan everything perfectly. For example, I do it so often: you plan everything in order to go on vacation not in a state of scraps, but a little tired. And at that moment something happens. A situation that you cannot refuse, when you need to intervene, do something. And you already have a very small resource. It is in such situations that it happens that you go beyond the line beyond which you did not want to go. You know for sure that you don't need to go there. But you come in.

It seems to me that it is not only a matter of planning, but also simply in the number of other people's misfortunes, other people's troubles and grief that fall on you

- Of course, the vulnerability increases from the fact that you work with difficult topics, with people in distress. At first it seems to everyone that they can do everything. And there is such a state: there is so much unhappiness around, you never know that I'm tired, I don't want to. Children get sick, orphans suffer, disabled people die …

Lyudmila Petranovskaya at the presentation of her book "If it's difficult with a child"

Photo: Vasily Kolotilov for TD

And then at some point you realize that you hate all these people, orphans, invalids - you saw them all in the coffin, and what do they all want from you ?! This is a state of emotional burnout: when you realize that you have given everything and you cannot give anything else. You have an empty inside, and everyone who comes and again says: "Give!" - begins to be perceived as an enemy, because he encroaches on the resource that you have left only to support your own life.

THE TASK IS NOT TO NEVER EMOTIONALLY BURN OUT, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE

How do you recover from emotional burnout?

- It depends on how far the person has gone. The goal is not never to burn out emotionally, it’s impossible. The challenge is to notice the process at the earliest possible stages. If you feel like this has just begun, a two-week vacation with your phone turned off and no work mail may be enough.

I always say that in no case should you give up your vacation, in no case should you have a seven-day work week, in no case should you pick up the phone at any time of the day or night. If you have to answer calls around the clock, then there must be periods when you don't. This is a safety technique.

That is, just a vacation is enough?

- This is the first thing to do, immediately. Make every possible effort to get out of the traumatic situation. If your knee is ripped off, you don't need to sprinkle it with salt, you don't also need to poke it with a nail.

But if you ignore the first bells, ignore the second, ignore the third and come to the point where all your nerves are bared and sore, and you can no longer hear and see people - in this situation, a two-week vacation will not be enough for you. You need to go into some other sphere, into isolation, for a long time and recover, lick wounds and grow new skin. This is a lengthy process.

And often after that people even return sometimes to the "social sphere", but return to other positions. For example, if earlier they worked a lot directly with clients, then they return to some managerial roles, where they do not pull so much.

What if burnout happens more and more often?

- If you understand that this is not the first time you go and go beyond the line, although you already know where it is, then something needs to be corrected at the conservatory.

Maybe your technologies are not built, and you work with each case as with a unique one, and then a lot of energy is spent on unnecessary, on the constant invention of bicycles.

Maybe the boundaries are not drawn - clients can call you with every trifle at eleven o'clock in the evening, because they wanted to.

Maybe your relationships in the team are not built, and you have such a dysfunctional system in which it is believed that everyone should burn at work and give themselves to serving people. And every time you want to leave early to celebrate your wedding anniversary with your husband, you feel like a bastard and a traitor to your family. Such dysfunctional organizations, in which everyone is fighting the world's evil, and who left half an hour early is a bastard and a traitor, are usually created by people with a hypercomplex of a rescuer.

Who is this?

- These are people who have a highly overdeveloped "rescuer" complex, who devote their whole lives to saving someone. But this is not a very good situation.

Why?

- Behind the lifeguard complex there is always a lack of confidence that you have the right to live the way you are, that you are a value in and of itself. You are valuable only insofar as you are useful to others, insofar as you save someone, help someone. Childhood injuries are often behind this. It all usually ends quite sadly - psychosomatics, all sorts of diseases, a rather early departure from life, and so on.

Such people create charitable organizations?

- Organizations that arise around the "fight against evil". These can be educational, medical, charitable organizations. This usually does not happen in auto repair shops.

The rescuer easily turns into a rapist or victim. And then either he leads everyone to happiness - let them just try not to go, or he himself turns out to be used, rejected and thrown out.

It turns out that it is better to do charity, simply donating money

- No. After all, someone has to deal with the infrastructure of charity. If everyone will only donate money, then who will do something about it? It seems to me that you need to do charity work more professionally, that is, pay attention to protocols, professional technologies, prevention of emotional burnout, and so on. And do not imagine too much about yourself - as they say, so that the halo does not crush your head. Understand that this is just a job. An important job for society. But how many people are doing important work for society? Tajik janitors who clean the ice on Moscow streets do as much for the community as any benefactor. Now, if you treat this somehow, more calmly, then there will be less rescuer complex, and there will be less of all these side effects.

We often discuss on editorial boards how to write an emotional text so that the reader is impressed and donates money to a foundation that helps someone, but we could not find the perfect concept that would always work

- It seems to me that the question should be posed more broadly. Actually, why should there be a nerve and unsettling in every material? Perhaps the mistake is in the concept that all charity should constantly take people out of emotional balance and beat them in the solar plexus with their feet? No system can work that way. Any psyche is protected. If you put out punching, emotional material every week, your audience will simply stop pushing through. And the point is not that the journalist did not find the word, but that people simply have mental protection.

Maybe we should not rely on superemotionality, but explain to people what is in their interests, so that some system of life is debugged, so that everything works, and it will work only under such and such conditions. Otherwise, at some point, a person will simply click on the “unsubscribe” button, because he will also experience the same emotional burnout. This is fine. People want to live.