Developing Support and Self-Care Strategies for Volunteers in a Prison Writing Program

Abstract

While there is often great enthusiasm for volunteering in prison and jail education and literacy programs, those interested rarely give thought to the kinds of primary and secondary trauma that result from such work. Yet compassion fatigue is all too real for volunteer writing teachers who encounter difficult disclosures of violence, rape, and loss week after week. Interviews with volunteers revealed anxiety about performance, frustration with the justice system, awareness of privilege, and longing for communities of support. This chapter explores volunteers’ understanding of the impact of their work in one literacy program and offers narrative and writing therapy techniques as appropriate and needed methods for volunteers coping with the burden of cumulative stories of trauma disclosed by incarcerated writers.

Appendices

Appendix 13.1: Assessing Compassion Satisfaction and Fatigue

Appendix 13.2: Creating A Self-Care Plan

Appendix 13.3: Writing-Based Self-Care Technique No. 1

Appendix 13.4: Writing-Based Self-Care Technique No. 2

Adapted from James W. Pennebaker’s Writing To Heal.

The Basic Technique:

• 1. Write for 20 minutes per day for four consecutive days.

• 2. Pick the same topic all 4 days, or write about a different event each day.

• 3. Write without stopping and without worrying about spelling or grammar.

• 4. Write only for yourself. Plan to destroy or hide the exercises once complete.

• 5. If you feel that a particular topic will push you over the edge, do not write about it. Deal with situations you can handle in the present.

• 6. You may feel depressed after writing. This is normal, though reflecting on the process may help.

The Reflection:

Place a number between 0 and 10 by each question, where 0 means “Not At All,” 5 means “Somewhat,” and 10 means “A Great Deal.”

• 7. To what degree did you express your deepest thoughts and feelings? ____

• 8. To what degree do you currently feel sad or upset? ____

• 9. To what degree do you currently feel happy? ____

• 10. To what degree was today’s writing valuable and meaningful for you? ____

• 11. In the space below, briefly describe how your writing went today:

Appendix 13.5: Sample Self-Care Writing Exercises

The previous appendices offer tools for designing a writing-based self-care tool kit for volunteers working in prison. Combining these handouts with exercises like those sampled below can result in self-care practice that provides volunteers with a feasible, structured method for critically reflecting on working with incarcerated people. Below are specific writing exercises that apply ideas presented in Appendices 1–4.

Unsent letters.The technique of Unsent Letters (Adams, 2011) dictates that the volunteer writes a letter to someone with whom they experience conflicting emotions. This technique can help a volunteer understand what they want to communicate to the population they serve, their supervisor, or their peer group. By writing directly to someone with no danger of them reading the words, a space of honesty is created where both negative and positive feelings can be acknowledged and examined. Writing a letter can help identity a frustration, work through a way to communicate an idea, or process lingering feelings of unfinished business.

For those who work with an incarcerated population, with individuals who may leave abruptly without forewarning, writing a letter may provide closure for the volunteer. This tactic may have been useful for Tina, who mentioned that “The most difficult part was not knowing where and what happens to the girls once they leave. We created relationships with the girls and when they leave (at times unannounced), it feels as if there is something lost and it’s upsetting despite the positive potential of moving beyond a halfway house.” Had Tina written a letter to one of the girls she bonded with, she may have identified other feelings or may have seen that the difficulty she felt was because she did not have an opportunity to say goodbye or thank them for the writing they had done.

Dialogue: Creating an imagined Dialogue requires a suspension of belief in order to examine responses to someone not present. Thompson (2010) claims that writing an imagined dialogue “can help us think our way forward, to access different points of view and to hear our own thoughts more clearly” (p. 11). She recommends writing an imagined dialogue with a feeling (such as guilt), with a client, with an internal supervisor (perhaps starting with the question “What could I do better?”), and with our volunteer self (who may be drastically different from one’s personal self).

Switching perspectives: Switching perspectives is based on the notion that writing about a personal experience in the third person creates a greater distance to the situation, from where one can examine it safely and objectively, removing some of the negative power of strong personal feelings. Pennebaker (2004) recommends writing about the same experience four times for five minutes each. The first 5 minutes, write about the situation broadly: Who was there? What happened? What are the effects of the situation as they are currently present? The second time, examine the situation using only your perspective: I felt this…. I think … It has affected me in the following ways. My behavior affected others by … Third, take the perspective of only the other people involved: What did they think or feel? What do they want other people to know about their experience in that situation? Lastly, write about the entire situation again. What didn’t you consider the first time you wrote about it that taking other perspectives allowed you to see? What are values that you and the others can take from the situation?

Identifying the image: Grey, Young, and Holmes (2002) work within the psychological framework of cognitive behavioral therapy to help their patients understand how recurring mental images perpetuate posttraumatic stress. Based on the nature of jail work, volunteers may be exposed to stories that spark mental images of traumatic situations. In order to objectively evaluate and move past the effects of these images, begin by writing, “The image that represents the worst moment of the situation is….” Then, reread the description of the image, and rate your emotional response from 1 to 100. From there, appraise the image by writing responses to these questions: “What does this image mean to me?” “What did I believe in that moment?” Finally, reread everything that you wrote about the situation and answer “What do I understand now about this image or my response to it?” The volunteer perspectives revealed through quotes in this chapter reaffirm the direct application and utility of self-care practices that are situated in a generative writing process.