The Toll of Working with Trauma: Understanding Self-Care as an Ethical Imperative

Overview

There are few careers that take more of an emotional toll than those of mental health professionals, social workers, first responders, and others on the frontlines of working with our most vulnerable populations.

To ensure their vital work doesn’t result in burnout or compassion fatigue through secondary trauma, we must make sustainable models of support for the direct or vicarious trauma they experience.

In this training, we provide attendees with the tools to sustain themselves in their work by understanding, acknowledging, and responding to the ways they are impacted by the experiences of those with whom they work.

Objectives

During this interactive discussion, we will:

• Explore the toll that working with people who have been through trauma has on human service professionals through vicarious and direct exposures.

• Review advances in the concepts of trauma stewardship and secondary traumatic stress.

• Introduce the framework of the 3Rs of Self-Care: Reflection, Regulation, and Relaxation, and provide examples of safe and healthy coping strategies in each of these domains.

• Create sustainable self-care plans by reflecting together on our understanding and strategies for coping, and consider ways to address the barriers to engaging in self-care on personal, systemic, and societal levels, so that they may remain able to provide optimum levels of intervention.

Details

• Audience: Schools, Human Service Professionals, Care Center
• Length: 2 hours
• CEs: Not Available