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Caring for Self & Others
Transforming Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Soul Loss
Caring for Self & Others is a self-care manual for people who care for people. Many of us have experienced high levels of stress during the pandemic in health care and education. Add to this the stress of social justice issues, political divisiveness, war, and concerns about our rapidly changing climate and it can all become too much. Burnout is all too common in health care and other caring professions. Compassion fatigue can occur, where we find it difficult to care about ourselves, our jobs, or others. We can think of burnout and compassion fatigue as forms of soul loss - where we lose touch with who we are and what matters most to us.
Building on the nine dimensions of being fully human from Re-humanizing Medicine, this book focuses on caring for: body, emotions, mind, heart, expression, intuition, spirit, context, and time - adding a new dimension of Becoming Caring - Caring for All. The book also draws on David’s work with Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) over the past ten years and brings in the perspectives of the hearts and minds of many leaders in the compassion revolution. Each of the ten chapters includes three practices for caring for different aspects and dimensions of self. Ultimately, the practice of caring shifts our sense of self to a nondual perspective where others are experienced as part of self - to care for others is to care for self and to care for self is to care for others.
David Kopacz, MD
A Student of Change; A Teacher of Transformation
As a student and teacher of change & transformation, David is keenly interested in the growth of individuals and systems. Change is an incremental adjustment that leads to you changing what you do. Transformation, however, requires a total commitment and leads to a change in who you are. As we seek to transform health care systems, and as we seek to shift from states of war to states of peace, transformation must start within each and every one of us.
David and Corbin. Credit: Mary Pat Traxler
Integrating Work, Creativity, Leadership & Collaboration
Doctor and psychiatrist, David Kopacz works with veterans providing holistic mental health in the primary care setting. He has a national VA teaching position as a Whole Health Education Champion — teaching VA staff about Whole Health and person-centered care. David has spoken internationally and developed classes on self-care and well-being for veterans, staff, and health professional students.
Writing about staff wellness, trauma, post-traumatic growth, healing and spirituality, transformation, holistic health, and the healing power of story and creativity, David has authored several books. An ongoing collaboration with co-author, Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) explores a cooperative framework for healing through learning and cultural tradition.
David is a painter, but he also considers the identity of artist more broadly, in that we are all artists looking for the right medium to work in. Art and creativity are often missing from medicine, but are vital dimensions of healing.