From self-care to compassion resilience: Extending the model of protective factors for humanitarian practitioners

Abstract

Humanitarian practitioners, specifically emergency aid and relief workers, disaster responders, social workers, and crisis clinicians, are at elevated risk of experiencing trauma as a result of their professions. Approaches for responding to the silent pandemic of reactive traumatic stress, including secondary traumatic stress and vicarious traumatization among humanitarian practitioners continue to be inadequate. The current model of self-care, emphasizing internal regulation and processes to promote positive health, wellbeing, and the ability to continue to support others, is insufficient to best equip humanitarian practitioners with protective factors to stave off reactive traumatic responses to their work. We therefore propose our theory to extend the current self-care model to include the external focus of compassion resilience and conclude with recommendations.