HESBURGH LECTURE SERIES 2013 Program - Alumni Association ...

Dominic O. Vachon, Ph.D., ’80, ’85 M.Div.
Director, Ruth M. Hillebrand Center for Compassionate Care in
Medicine
Biography
Dominic Vachon is the director of the Ruth M. Hillebrand Center for Compassionate Care
in Medicine in the College of Science which is an endowed teaching professorship dedicated
to providing future health professionals with a foundation in Caring Science and clinical
interprersonal skills. For 10 years, he was the director of Behavioral Medicine and Caring
Science Training for the Saint Joseph’s Regional Medical Center Family Medicine Residency
Program in Mishawaka, Ind. He has also been an adjunct professor in the Department of
Theology teaching pastoral counseling skills for the last 10 years. Vachon graduated from the
University of Notre Dame with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and philosophy in 1980. In
1985, he received a master of divinity degree from Notre Dame. In 1993, he received a Ph.D.
in Counseling Psychology from Loyola University, Chicago. In addition to training and clinical
practice as a psychologist, Vachon does research in the areas of the relationship between
empathy and burnout, the psychology of caring, and the role of spirituality in helping others.
For over 20 years, he has provided consulting for health care and other organizations concerned
about the stress in helping people.
Lectures
Transcending Suffering: Spirituality and Maintaining Compassion in the Encounter with
Human Pain
In the continual encounter with human suffering, those who dedicate themselves to helping others must find ways of responding
to this pain in a way so they do not become demoralized, emotionally detached, and burned out. Relying on a spirituality of caring
provides a very important way anyone who is committed to caring for others can avoid despair and maintain a sense of caring
in their work. In this lecture, Vachon explains how articulating and cultivating your spirituality of caring allows the helper to
“metabolize” the toxic encounter with suffering, provides meaning and energy for the work of compassion, and promotes healing
in those one tries to help.
What Difference Does Caring Make? The Uses and Misuses of Caring Science in Business,
Healthcare, and Ministry
While businesses, healthcare groups, and religious organizations tend to be very concerned with being perceived by the public as
caring about people and the world, the actual practice and intention can be quite different. This lecture discusses how caring is
devalued as a “soft” scientific phenomenon, even as organizations work so hard to be perceived as caring, and also how caring is
sentimentalized and misused. It offers research and reflections on how a more accurate view of caring in your life and work can
have a major impact on what you care about and on your personal psychological and spiritual life.
98 The Hesburgh Lecture Series, 2013 Program
Categories
Ethics, Science, Spirituality