In writing this piece, I wanted to offer some hope to those who struggle and don’t know how to deal with it. Perhaps you are wanting to embark on studies in the helping profession, or maybe you are a few months into your first role or in a placement as a social worker, counsellor, psychologist, or nurse and feeling unsure of yourself and your capacity to help others...
I am now a helping professional, both as a registered counsellor in private practice and as a manager in an organisation supporting people who are experiencing trauma, abuse and neglect. However, I remember years ago, when I was an early-career helping professional and pondered, "Can I do this work? And how will this work affect me?"
Supervision in helping work helping us to respond to vicarious trauma
When I first began grappling with the question of “can I do it”, I was not a counsellor but was working in an organisation for the first time with people who had experienced trauma and were living with severe mental health struggles such as schizophrenia and PTSD. I was in a very supportive team, but given I wanted to work with trauma, I became alert to how it might impact me in the longer term, as the job inherently carried risks of vicarious trauma and moral injury.
At that time, I also saw a colleague struggling, affected by a deeply traumatic incident at work that involved a significant moral injury, and I thought they were perhaps being overwhelmed by their own past trauma as well as by a lack of support in the organisational response.
I felt sad about seeing a dedicated and empathetic colleague going downhill, and I decided to get external supervision as I also worked with people who had seriously harmed other people as well as being victims of serious abuse. It was an easy decision for me, as I had good experiences with supervision at Lifeline, where I was volunteering at the time. Their training also emphasised the risk of vicarious trauma and the importance of debriefing after sessions, so I had experienced the value of debriefing.
My advice to any early-career professional (or at any time in your career) is to seek out individual external supervision if the supervision available through your organisation does not adequately meet your needs.
Psychotherapy that increases self-reflection and helps your career longevity
Finally, if you work with others experiencing distress and hardship, I want to say a few words about the benefits of engaging in your own psychotherapy as a helping professional that encourages reflection, curiosity about your own patterns, as well as your ability to draw on an inner reservoir of knowing that the most difficult experiences in life can be sat with without rushing in with solutions.
I am saying this, as we often come to helping work, in particular early in our careers, wanting to help and heal by trying to take people’s emotional pain away immediately and soothe them.
What is sometimes obscured or foreclosed when we rush in, as opposed to slowing down the process a bit, is the opportunity for people to find their own path forward with just enough encouragement to feel increasingly competent. If I am to be pithy here, it’s the difference between fostering curiosity and agency versus us taking over.
My point here is that if we take over, and if we do it in all of our interactions, we may end up not only taking agency away from those we help, but also accumulating the weight of over-responsibility, which can bring on our own overwhelm or burnout.
Karen Maroda, who is a psychologist, wrote a book called The Analyst's Vulnerability, in which she talks about people who go on to become therapists and belong to a certain group of people shaped early by their own family dynamics to become helpers, and who sometimes stretch beyond their own boundaries in their efforts. I think many case workers, nurses and disability support workers, to name a few groups, are no different from therapists in this regard (I have been there early in my career, and know it first-hand).
It is a really difficult thing to change, as it is also what makes us good at our work. Self-care prescriptions may work to a point. However, deeper change takes something different. For some, it may be participating in reflective practice with your peers and ensuring you debrief with colleagues or an external supervisor. Alternatively, you may engage in your own therapy focused on developing self-reflection with the purpose of getting to know yourself better and forming deeper connections to the people you work with.
I don’t think we need to feel less about our work or the pain, suffering and injustice we see as helpers. Rather, it is a matter of ‘sitting with hardship, with people’ and knowing when to rest ourselves.
