The First Step...

Welcome back empowered readers,

For this week’s blog I want to take the opportunity to share the drive and passion behind Empowered Wellness & Solutions and introduce myself.

My name is Exchiela Benusic and I am a dedicated helping professional residing in the field for over 13-years. For a large portion of my career I worked in a hospital setting with nurses, physicians, psychiatrists, clerks, lab technicians – and other helping professionals in the field. Through this experience, both personally and barring witness, I began to reflect on the effects that working in the helping field can have on such individuals. It is a paradox you see, that one devotes their lives to helping others, but may need that same help in return throughout ones career. Through my own personal struggles working in the helping field, I became effected by my own passion and feeling that comes natural to me – helping others and providing compassion.

But how could I need to reach out for help when I am supposed to be strong for others? This left me feeling like a fraud and ashamed, because how could I as a helper, need help too?

It is through this experience that provided the drive to develop Empowered Wellness & Solutions for those dedicated to being strong for others, but might need support of their own from time to time.

I feel that it is important to highlight that compassion, the skill that allows us to get very close to individuals to understand their pain and injury, is a double edge sword. It is this same feeling that also gives us the ability to get close to another that leaves us vulnerable to wounding.

I have come to realize throughout the years that it is not the absence of compassion that creates problems in a professionals work, it is what compassion is replaced with in its absence (Anna B. Baranowsky, 2008). Sometimes we can feel exhausted and portray to our clients or students that we are providing services for that do not have a sense of caring. When simply we do not have anything left ourselves to give. This can become very difficult to offer meaningful support, care and compassion to other people.

My goal for Empowered Wellness & Solutions is to provide an avenue for professionals in the helping field so that you are not left feeling alone, feeling like a fraud, or feeling ashamed that you may need support from time to time. I feel it is important to normalize our experiences to which we so readily reinforce for our clients, patients and students.

To your empowered living,

​Exchiela

“That which is to give light must endure burning” Viktor Frank