Title: What I Wish I Had Known: Burnout and Self-Care in Our Social Work Profession - SocialWorker.com
Headings: What I Wish I Had Known: Burnout and Self-Care in Our Social Work Profession
What I Wish I Had Known: Burnout and Self-Care in Our Social Work Profession
by SaraKay Smullens, MSW, LCSW, CGP, CFLE, BCD
The Problem of Burnout
Compassion Fatigue
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Content: However, as we all know, common sense and clear thinking can be eroded when our own unfinished emotional business propels us. Although there are many therapists who describe fulfilling childhoods that are secure and stable, research indicates that the majority who come into our field have known profound pain and loss during their formative years (Elliott & Guy, 1993). Most have experienced one or a combination of five patterns of emotional abuse, which has led to the relentless need to give to others what we wish we had received, coupled by an inability to care for oneself and set limits in order to counteract exhaustion (Smullens, 2010). Social workers, therefore, are especially prone to compassion fatigue, not only because of the nature of our work, but often because our own natures have inspired us to enter this precise field. Vicarious Trauma and Secondary Traumatic Stress
Vicarious trauma (also known by the closely related term “secondary traumatic stress”) results from a social worker’s direct exposure to victims of trauma. Unlike compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma may have a more immediate onset (Newell & MacNeil, 2010), as such exposure triggers the immediate re-experiencing of painful occasions from the practitioner’s personal history. As mentioned above, social workers are far more likely to have painful personal histories than those working in other professions or vocations. Elliott & Guy (1993) found, for example, that women working in the mental health professions were more frequently traumatized as children by physical abuse, alcoholism, emotional and sexual abuse, and familial conflict than were women working in other fields. Additionally, women therapists appear to come from more chaotic families of origin, with significantly lesser experiences of familial cohesion, moral emphasis, and achievement orientation. Although I have separated vicarious trauma from compassion fatigue for ease of categorization, it is quite likely that they influence each other—that is, vicarious trauma provokes and promotes compassion fatigue, while the origins of compassion fatigue—an inability to establish proper boundaries—can be found in the social worker’s trauma history.