“Who Cares for the Caregiver?”
An audio interview with chaplain Stephen Robinson
By Michelle Dahlenburg, CHERR Faculty Fellow
For our Resiliency Stories project, CHERR has been talking with people in Texas about what they’ve learned about resiliency during Covid times. Today we share an audio story created from our interview with Austin hospital chaplain Stephen Robinson.
As a hospital chaplain, Stephen Robinson’s job is to provide comfort and spiritual guidance to sick patients and their families. He also supports hospital staff.
You can get a sense of what Stephen’s been going through during Covid from an excerpt of a recording of an online sermon he gave as a guest pastor a few months ago:
“When I work at the hospital, I watch nurses work their tails off trying to help folks. It’s their calling, it’s what they do. They’re good at it. They’re tired. Just worn to the nub….And I think I’m just tired. Sick of this pandemic. Sick of watching people die. Sick of suffering. It’s so hard. I feel so spent.”
Health care workers have had some of the most unrelenting, exhausting experiences during the pandemic. Stephen is worn down. But yet, he keeps going back to work every day.
We sat down with him recently to learn how hospital staff like him stay resilient in the face of anger, exhaustion, and at times, despair.
Stephen explained that resilience is something certain folks have more of a knack for than others. “But it can definitely be honed and built in practice, like a muscle.”
During Stephen’s years of chaplain training and working in the hospital, he’s learned a number of lessons for building long-term resilience. He stresses that it’s important to do these proactively, and not wait until you’re in the middle of a crisis. “You can’t build resilience in the moment.”
Lesson #1: Be aware of your own story.
Stephen suggests becoming aware of yourself and your own triggers, so that when you encounter people who are dealing with something similar to you, you don’t enmesh with them.
Lesson #2: Have a ritual when you leave work.
Stephen’s suggestions include things like hanging up your badge, listening to certain music on your drive home, offering a prayer, or taking a walk around. “I water the plants.” He says that anything you can do to create a demarcation between work time and home time will be useful.
Lesson #3: Get centered and get support.
Some days, even with the most practiced emotional boundaries, some cases touch him deeply. “And I’ll go home and I need to cry about it or need to talk to someone about it. Or sometimes I just need to hug my wife. And I can take a big deep breath, and walk the dogs or whatever is going to help me get up, get centered and settled. Come back and do it again.”
Stephen notes that it’s hard for people in caregiving positions to accept care or even recognize when they need to seek it out. The chaplains at his hospital have a weekly time when they gather together.
“We meet and just talk about how hard our day was, or if we need help or something. And when COVID was really bad, chaplains would come in, sit down at the desk and just [heave a] big old sigh. And [I’d ask], “Hey, how’s it going up there?” And we just talk right then. We are all kind of chaplains for each other.”
Lesson #4: Express the big, scary feelings.
Stephen’s recent sermon was about anger. He told the congregation, “My anger is okay. Your anger is okay. It’s our emotional response to how God made us when we see something, or feel something, or experience something that’s wrong. Something’s unjust or unfair, when someone suffers for no reason.”
Writing and preaching that sermon was therapeutic for Stephen. It gave him an opportunity “to sit down and articulate how I’m feeling and how I connect that to my understanding of the gospel or understanding of good human living.”
Lesson #5: Remember your purpose.
Stephen believes that helping people in healing professions reconnect with their mission for their work is crucial for long-term resilience.
Asking questions like, “Why are you here? Why do you do this? Why do you put up with what you have to put up with? Why is your heart in this work? What is your mission?”
We asked Stephen how he would answer that question.
“Some days are harder than others in terms of feeling like your work is really meaningful. And then you knock on someone’s door and they say, ‘you came in exactly when I needed someone to talk to you about this really heavy thing.’ And you have a conversation that exercises all the things that you’ve been trained to do, and how to actively listen, and how to kind of provide spiritual assessment and interventions, and in ways that are really helpful, and you’re like, Ah, this is it.”
What brings Stephen back is knowing that he provides emotional and spiritual comfort and presence on some of the hardest days in people’s lives.
At the end of our conversation, Stephen told me about one more lesson he’s learned about resilience.
Lesson #6: Don’t forget to celebrate the good things.
We asked him if he could think of any success stories over this past year, places where things went better than expected. Stephen introduced us to “Code Sunshine.”
For many weeks, no patients who came in with COVID left the hospital alive. The staff was discouraged. And then one day, a COVID patient recovered and left the hospital. That day, the staff started a ritual. “We would line up at the exit, the staff would come line up the whole hallway. And we’d play, Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles on the overhead [speaker] and wheel them out.”
Stephen doesn’t know who started the practice, but it was a way that the staff could celebrate getting through that struggle together in a public way with the patient.
“It just filled us with hope, that there would be more, and there were tons. You know, lots of people got better. Lots of people went home, that, you know, got to live their lives again and got to be with their family. And there’s so many things we’re celebrating, you know, kind of miracles that we’re able to pull out of our hat. The people that did get to go home, make it worth it.”
Stephen believes that it’s important to celebrate the good things that happen. “Not putting a silver lining around it, but just to celebrate, and be grateful for the things that do go well. That’s an important part of resiliency, too. It’s not just reacting to the tough things, but celebrating the good things too.”
Photo credit: Nadine Latief