April 21, 1999
Chaplain: Caring carries
high cost for caregivers
___By Dan Martin
___Texas Baptist Communications
___SAN ANTONIO--Caring extracts a high cost, a police chaplain who ministered amid the Oklahoma City bombing told Texas Baptists.
___Joe Williams is chaplain to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Oklahoma City. A veteran police and sheriff's department chaplain, he was present on the awful day--April 19, 1995--when the Federal Building in Oklahoma City was blown apart by a fertilizer-and-diesel-fuel bomb.
___For 19 days, he worked as the wounded and the bodies and parts of bodies were recovered from the rubble.
___Hetalked about these experiences at a conference on the church and random violence.
___Williams spoke of the high cost of caring, which comes to "people who observe and listen to experiences of pain, grief, suffering and loss--ministers, emergency responder personnel, therapists and others."
___Those in ministry face the additional issue of listening to "the tears, groans, hysteria ... and the questions," he said.
___"Parents, siblings, friends and the world are waiting for you to give them answers to make a difference in the way they feel," he said. "Ministry people are seen as representatives of God ... are 'supposed' to have the answers ... are expected to be able to make reason out of the unreasonable, understanding out of chaos and to make sweet the bitter."
___But after awhile, he said, caregivers experience an overload of caregiving.
___A new term which has come into use in recent years is "compassion fatigue," Williams said, defining it as similar to burnout, but more focused on the results of the overload of caregiving.
___"When the caregiver takes on too heavy a load of other people's burdens, leaving little time or energy for themselves, they become disillusioned and depressed and often start to show cracks in their professional veneer," he said, noting that compassion fatigue symptoms include anxiety, numbness, shock, deep disturbance, fatigue, headaches, emotional reactions, irritability and anger.
___Compassion fatigue happens when a caregiver becomes so involved in providing care to others that he or she becomes emotionally and spiritually exhausted, Williams said.
___Williams reminded caregivers that "you do not have to give all of your blood, just transfusions."
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