Resilience Strength Time (ReST)
You've helped others.
Now it's time to care
for yourself.
Resilience Strength Time, or ReST, connects care workers online
with peers who understand.
What is Resilience Strength Time?
VOA | ReST is an online, confidential program for care workers wanting to lighten the emotional toll the pandemic is taking, support their peers, and maintain doing their best for those who need them.
Small group sessions of up to eight peers are scheduled nearly every day and last just one hour. In each meeting, participants will have the opportunity to share experiences and challenges they face. Trained peer facilitators guide the conversation, with the goal of helping participants stay resilient and maintain positive commitments to their work.
Groups are free and confidential.
PEERS WHO WANT
TO HELP
ReST SESSIONS
GROUP SUPPORT WHEN
& WHERE YOU NEED IT
I just wanted to let you know I attended a VOA|ReST support session this past Sunday evening. It was very uplifting, positive, and relaxing. I absolutely loved it! In fact, I’ve signed up for another session next Sunday. We work in stressful times, with stressful participants, stressful environmental situations that we have no control over, or at least, very little control over. So to give yourself one hour to relax, rest, laugh, and support yourself and others is absolutely one thing we can do to feel truly blessed.
It was helpful speaking with other individuals from different parts of the world and share our thoughts and feelings and have a great appreciation for each other. While we are from different backgrounds, cultures and time zones we were able to have a common denominator, humanity.
I learned that during this time in the world, everyone is dealing with a stressful situation and just a simple sentence a person says can help someone.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been the worst crisis faced by frontline workers in a century. It has created great uncertainty and chaos that can leave staff feeling that they have lost control and struggling to find the time, support, and resources required to do their best. Workers can feel confused, frustrated, sad, worried, angry, or defeated. These moral responses are, in fact, signs that they still deeply care, but their inner resources for empathy are at risk of depletion.
Painful moral feelings can be set aside at work, but when they are continually suppressed, empathy and self-confidence are diminished and moral resilience is compromised. Even a vacation or sleep will not relieve that burden. VOA|ReST is a confidential way to share these moral feelings with others and stay resilient.
What is moral distress?
- Unrelenting, unavoidable encounters with an invisible lethal enemy
- Self-serving or uninformed decisions by supervisors or leaders who increase the dangers to frontline workers
- Equipment and supply shortages requiring improvised strategies
- Extreme physical and mental fatigue
- Overwhelming numbers of patients who die without human comfort
- The need to triage the sickest patients, deciding who lives and who dies
What is moral resilience?
Your moral codes reflect what you love most, value most highly, and feel most dedicated to defending in this world. Your moral conscience is grounded in your codes, and it guides how you live out your most deeply held expectations of yourself and others.
Moral resilience is maintained when you process moral distress and are able to respond to ethical challenges, dilemmas, and uncertainty in ways that allow you to continue serving with your moral codes and sense of worth intact. It is accepting limitations about things that you cannot control, finding life-lessons in negative experiences, and remaining grounded in what matters most to you. It involves your finding meaning in life and work, handling complex, confusing, infuriating, and frustrating experiences with courage and determination, and reflecting on moral stresses and ethical challenges in order to restore your integrity and maintain important relationships.
For more information:
Dodd L. White,
DLWhite@voa.org
PARTNERS
Under the extraordinary circumstances of COVID-19, the pace and load of work is relentlessly exhausting and disheartening, and the resilience resources of frontline workers can be seriously depleted. Moral distress happens when things go wrong, and is felt in emotions such as sorrow, frustration, guilt, shame, humiliation, or despair. It can include anger and grief at personal failures, loss, or betrayal by those in authority who fail to do the right thing. If frontline workers lack a safe, confidential, effective way to discharge moral distress, they are at risk of developing moral injury.