3.3 Trauma and the Human Service Professional: Resilience
Human service professionals are often exposed to trauma during their work. Even this secondhand exposure to trauma can have significant physical and psychological impacts if human service workers do not have the tools to prevent and address its impact. When thinking about the trauma that human services professionals are exposed to, it seems that many think of resilience as the complete opposite of trauma. However, it is a bit more complex than that.
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from difficult times in life. It comes from the lessons and skills we absorb as we grow and as we face difficulties in life. Part of building resilience is having safety nets and relationships with the community, not just with friends and family.
When considering resilience, it is important to center race, as BIPOC people have been praised for the survival of a system that was not built for them to thrive in or even live in. While some people look or act more resilient, the idea of comparing one person’s experience of resilience to another’s is how resilience has been defined in the past.
Instead of calling people resilient, let us look at solutions for systems of oppression that have forced whole communities to find ways to survive. For an example of critical thinking about the term “resilient,” listen to the trailer of the podcast Don’t Call Me Resilient [Podcast] by host Vinita Srivastava. She has conversations with experts from different fields and real people to make sense of the news from an anti-racist perspective and how the word resilience is used in context to the systems of oppression they exist in.
As human service providers, it is up to us to consider our biases toward experiences we do not share. Even experiences we do share with others, including our clients, may cloud our reasoning as to why we think clients are behaving in certain ways.
Trauma Exposure
Secondary trauma, also called secondary traumatic stress, is an occupational challenge for people working in the human services field due to their continuous exposure to victims of trauma and violence. This work-related trauma exposure can occur from experiences such as:
- Listening to individuals, families, groups, communities, and systems recount their victimization
- Looking at videos of exploited children and families
- Reviewing case files, historical data, and stories
- Hearing about or responding to the aftermath of violence and other traumatic events
- Responding to mass violence incidents that have resulted in numerous injuries and deaths (Office for Victims of Crime, 2013)
Secondary trauma is associated with a sense of confusion, helplessness, and a greater sense of isolation from supporters than is seen with burnout (Administration for Children & Families, 2017). It is preventable and treatable. If unaddressed, the symptoms can result in problems with mental and physical health, strained personal relationships, and poor work performance (Pryce et al., 2007).
Evidence of compassion fatigue can be challenging to recognize in oneself or even in others. Symptoms often include cognitive, behavioral, emotional, and physical changes. They may also involve a spiritual component, such as questioning meaning or losing faith (Pryce et al., 2007). Common examples can be found in figure 3.6.
| Category of symptoms | Examples of symptoms |
|---|---|
| Cognitive | Lowered Concentration Apathy Rigid thinking Perfectionism Preoccupation with trauma |
| Behavioral | Withdrawal Sleep disturbance Appetite change Hypervigilance Elevated startle response |
| Emotional | Guilt Anger Numbness Sadness Helplessness Anxiety |
| Physical | Increased heart rate Difficulty breathing Muscle and joint pain Impaired immune system Increased severity of medical concerns |
Exposure to traumatic and troubling events, sometimes daily, influences one’s personal and professional lives. Staff acquire different coping methods—some are adaptive, others are not (Administration for Children & Families, 2017). Some negative outcomes on the work environment from secondary trauma are increased absenteeism, impaired judgment, low productivity, poorer quality of work, higher staff turnover, and greater staff friction.
But the effect of the trauma we experience in the work we do is not isolated to our work life. It is also in the rest of our life. Our value does not solely come from what or how much we produce, no matter what the nonprofit industrial complex and capitalism may want us to believe. Rest is also productive, but most importantly, rest is resistance. It is an act of self-care and community care. It is a way to continue to push back against secondary trauma exposure and the systemic nature of secondary trauma.
A Holistic Wellness Approach
How can individuals working in human services help decrease the negative impacts of secondary trauma? Wellness and self-care, community care, and system accountability are essential to staying mentally healthy while working in the field.
By being aware that different areas of our lives impact our mental, physical, and spiritual well-being, we can become more aware of how we may be affected by secondary trauma. An essential piece of this is self-awareness of how to balance the different areas of your life.
Below are additional suggestions to help prevent the negative impacts of secondary trauma.
- Life balance: Work to establish and maintain a diversity of interests, activities, and relationships.
- Relaxation techniques: Ensure downtime by practicing meditation or guided imagery and other somatic ways of regulation.
- Contact with nature: Garden or hike to remain connected to the earth and help maintain perspective about the world.
- Creative expression: Draw, cook, dance, play music, or practice photography to expand emotional experiences.
- Assertiveness training: Learn to say no and set limits when necessary. Boundary identification can also be part of this work. Finding allies to help can be harder to do for some marginalized and cultural communities.
Decolonized nonviolent communication training (NVC): Take note of how colonization impacts our experience with our bodies and how we disconnect from them.
Nonviolent communication has four components:
- Observations: Without judging, observe what is happening in the context of the conflict that has come up.
- Feelings: Identify the emotions accompanying your observations. Following the decolonizing NVC approach, pay attention to the sensations within your physical body and ask yourself if you are comfortable engaging in the interaction.
- Needs: State your needs. Check in with your body again, and notice whatever sensations arise.
- Requests: Make a request to the person you are communicating with. When expressing a request, know that you must be ready to accept no as a potential response.
Decolonizing NVC invites us to reimagine our bodies as our best friend, to observe where and when we disconnect from ourselves, and to navigate new ways of coming home – both to ourselves and to the communities we love to serve. —Meenadchi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INdKgBPEI-8
Decolonizing nonviolent communication involves thoroughly examining and redefining the core principles and practices of this kind of communication. This requires a recognition of the traumas that have affected every individual raised in the United States. Meenadchi, a skilled facilitator and healer, teaches NVC techniques with a transformative justice and decolonial perspective. She notes that colonialism has distanced us from Indigenous knowledge, communal resources, and a sense of interconnectedness. Through a decolonial lens, we can dismantle the notions of scarcity and “otherness” ingrained in us and instead cultivate genuine, open-hearted empathy for one another while establishing healthy boundaries.
Meenadchi offers three conditions for being able to practice NVC:
- A person experiences themselves as having a choice
- A person experiences an aligned somatic awareness of their own body
- A person experiences an aligned somatic awareness of the collective body
After carefully reviewing Meenadchi’s findings on the three essential conditions, it is pertinent to progress toward practicing and implementing NVC. Many individuals already possess some of these skills as part of their preparation for the human services field, and they are actively integrating them into their professional toolkit. Here is a comprehensive list of skills that advocate for an ongoing and active engagement in NVC practices, emphasizing the cultivation of whole body awareness, collective body awareness, and the empowerment of making conscious choices.
- Interpersonal communication skills: Improve written, auditory, verbal, sign, body, and technology-assisted communication to enhance social support.
- Cognitive restructuring: Regularly evaluate experiences and apply problem-solving techniques to challenges.
- Time management: Set priorities, remain productive and effective, and be open to what productivity could look like in different settings depending on the needs of communities.
- Clinical Supervision: Evaluation. Most providers do this one-on-one, but it is only sometimes a requirement. Students should request this both individually and in a group setting. Supervisors should be trained in trauma-informed, anti-oppressive leadership and supervision styles to support clients’ and supervisees’ wellness and growth.
- Plan for coping: Determine skills and strategies to adopt or enhance when signs of compassion fatigue surface. Every other human needs human connection as much as they need water or food for the body to survive. Let your plan evolve with time, and have the people who help you with these coping skills and strategies change. Build a community as part of your strategy and skill sets. However, this does not mean that alone time is unnecessary; isolation is unnecessary when using your skills.
Sometimes one area of your life takes up more physical, mental, or spiritual energy. This may be the case if you find yourself starting to experience symptoms of vicarious trauma. If you have experienced the adverse effects of vicarious trauma, there are a variety of treatment strategies to consider:
- Focus on self-care and community care: Make food choices that meet your nutritional needs, move in a way that fuels mind and body connection, establish a regular practice of saying no to people or spaces that don’t feed your health, and prioritize daily outdoor and regular sleep to reduce adverse stress effects.
- Journal: Write about feelings related to helping or caregiving, as well as about anything that has helped or been comforting to help make meaning out of negative experiences.
- Seek professional support: Work with a counselor who specializes in trauma to process distressing symptoms and experiences. If further support is needed, such as medication, this conversation can happen with a referral to a prescribing provider, such as a PsyNP or an MD.
- Join a support group: Talk through experiences and coping strategies with others who have similar circumstances to enhance feelings of optimism and hope.
- Learn new self-care strategies: Adopt a new stress management technique, such as yoga or progressive muscle relaxation, to reduce adverse physical stress symptoms.
- Ask for help: Ask social supports or coworkers to assist with tasks or responsibilities.
- Cultural connection: Active practice in your life. These can be expansive and include spiritual practices, language, food, music, family or racial/ethnic history, and stories or other things that connect you to your cultural experiences.
- Recognize success and create meaning: Identify aspects of helping that have been positive and important to others. (Administration for Children & Families 2017)
Activity: Self-Care and Community-Care Reflection
Review the questions from the following four categories: increasing health and well-being, promoting happiness and reducing stress, getting support from mentors, and developing supportive peer relationships. Choose a category in which you could grow, and answer the questions in that category in a reflective manner. As you answer each question, examine the reasoning or behavior behind your answer. Write about what might help, what might be getting in your way, and how you could move forward in that area.
In human services, we must challenge the notion that healing happens in isolation. We must move into a space of interdependence and look at leaning into each other for healing. This means our care must always be community care, but we can also provide individual care in a community setting. How do we begin to shift practices that we root for, not against, each other and center individual well-being as part of community well-being?
Increasing Health and Well-Being
- What is one thing I did in the past month to support my health?
- What is one thing I can do tomorrow to take a step toward better health? For example, you could call your doctor to schedule a long-overdue appointment, commit to making one healthy food choice, or take a brisk walk to get your heart pumping and boost your energy.
- Do my nutritional choices support my health and well-being? If not, what positive changes can I make?
- What do I need to be happier and healthier?
- What is one phone call I can make or website I can visit to move forward on my journey toward a stronger sense of well-being?
Promoting Happiness and Reducing Stress
- Do I experience stress connected to my work? Are there other sources of stress?
- What tools or resources can I use to help me manage stress?
- In what areas of my life could I use some support?
- What resources are available in my community to help me meet these needs?
- What activities make me feel relaxed and happy?
- When can I schedule some “me” time, even just for a few moments, to do something that will help me feel balanced and reduce my stress?
- How can I say no to unhealthy or unhealthful relationships in my life?
Getting Support from Mentors
- Who do I know and respect that might serve as a strong mentor?
- How can this mentor help me in my work with clients, my secondary trauma, or other stress?
- When can I approach this person to schedule a time to talk about a possible mentoring relationship?
- How do I continue to encourage systems that I work within to become healthier so that the weight of care is not left to individuals but spread across communities?
Developing Supportive Peer Relationships
- Which of my friends or colleagues has professional beliefs and philosophies that are like my own? How can I spend more time with this person?
- In what ways can I confide in, listen to, and develop a mutually supportive relationship with this person?
- How might this person’s positive outlook benefit my work with young children and their families? Or other communities I work with?
- How might I positively influence this person’s work?
Developing a Self-Care and Community-Care Mindset
While it is important to align your behaviors and actions with self-care and community-care skills, it is even more critical that professionals adopt a self-care mindset. This will keep you centered and aware of both what is happening around you and of yourself. In this section we will discuss two concepts: mindfulness and trauma stewardship. Each of these ways of thinking can be used separately, but they are most powerful when used together.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness encompasses several ideas:
- Being aware of our feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, and accepting them
- Staying in the present moment
- Being non-judgemental, curious, gentle, and kind
Mindfulness is different from meditation in that it is a state of mind that can be applied at any time, any place, while doing anything. Meditation is a more formal practice in which one uses a technique to focus the mind on a particular thought or object. This focus helps train the mind to be attentive and aware and to achieve a clear and stable emotional state (Walsh & Shapiro, 2006).
Mindfulness also helps one maintain a clear and stable emotional state, but it is a quality of mind rather than a scheduled practice. Meditations may be focused on learning mindfulness, but there are many other kinds of meditations as well. And mindfulness can be adopted without using the practice of meditation.
Have you ever heard the saying about not being able to control other people’s behavior but being able to control your own response? Mindfulness can help with that. When a stressful situation occurs, whether it is personal, such as having an argument with your partner, or work-related, such as working with a client who has not been able to find a home, being mindful can help you to listen better, be less judgemental, and focus on what is happening in that moment.
It’s not so much about controlling your response. It’s about training yourself to listen more closely to your own feelings and thoughts as well as listening to others’ experiences and viewpoints. Here’s another way to look at it: “Mindfulness is awareness, cultivated by paying attention in a sustained and particular way on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn, 2016).
Think about a stormy day near the ocean. You’re watching big waves form and crash against each other far out at sea. You can see the storm clouds and the possibility of rain. Now imagine deep, deep below the ocean’s surface, where it is quiet and still, with gentle oscillations of water, plants, and fish. Mindfulness is about accessing that deep part of your brain that can sway gently as the storm unleashes its turbulence. You observe the storm, you think about the storm, you have feelings about the storm, but you don’t want you or your mind to become the storm.
Mindfulness helps human services professionals handle the varied and unpredictable work that is characteristic of serving other human beings. It also helps us to handle being exposed to the trauma that our clients face and that we may face in our own lives. It lowers our stress response and stress levels. It strengthens our resilience. Developing mindfulness is one of the best things we can do for ourselves and the people we serve.
Trauma Stewardship
Trauma stewardship recognizes that trauma has impacts that can be named and managed. It also acknowledges that the person who is helping someone who is suffering from trauma may also themselves suffer. In other words, this concept acknowledges the secondary trauma that helpers experience and allows you to identify ways to manage the trauma for yourself. This definition comes from the founder and director of the Trauma Stewardship Institute, Laura van Dernoot Lipsky:
A daily practice through which individuals, organizations, and societies tend to the hardship, pain, or trauma experienced by humans, other living beings, or our planet itself. By developing the deep sense of awareness needed to care for ourselves while caring for others and the world around us, we can greatly enhance our potential to work for change, ethically and with integrity, for generations to come (van Dernoot Lipsky & Burk, 2009).
This model, which draws from multiple walks of life, cultural traditions, and spiritual practices, acknowledges multiple kinds of trauma. Trauma stewardship can be applied to
- working with people in crisis-oriented settings such as emergency rooms, domestic violence shelters, or homeless shelters;
- caregiving to someone who is disabled, has a chronic illness, or is in pain;
- working to dismantle systems of oppression such as ageism, racism, sexism, and others;
- being on the frontlines of environmental movements working to combat climate change; or
- caring for animals in veterinary offices and rescue centers, or working with wildlife as a scientist (van Dernoot Lipsky and Burk, 2009).
As you can see from this list, this view of trauma pays attention to the ways that oppression and power limit individuals. In fact, it views trauma stewardship within the context of power, oppression, and liberation.
Trauma stewardship begins with the idea of being present and practicing mindfulness. This involves paying attention to whatever is unfolding in your clients’ lives and around us. Like mindfulness, trauma stewardship involves recognizing our response to trauma rather than trying to push traumatic thoughts away. Abundant thinking and feeling helps foster our compassion, which we need as we do this work.
As trauma stewards, we must first do no harm. In order to care for and with others experiencing trauma, we must be able to respond to humans, animals, and the earth in a sustainable way. In other words, we need to be able to sustain ourselves well enough to continue to work and care.
This Tiny Survival Guide [PDF] from the Trauma Stewardship Institute helps summarize some strategies for achieving these goals. It is important that we not assume others’ problems as our own, at the same time, we must recognize the effects that these problems have on us. All of these actions help us to be true stewards and without adding to our clients’ problems.
What would your Tiny Survival Guide Look Like?
Activity: Beyond the Cliff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOzDGrcvmus
Watch the video in figure 3.10 with Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, then reflect on the following questions.
- Lipsky begins by talking about standing on a cliff. What are a couple of the metaphorical cliffs that she stood on throughout her life?
- Is laughter a part of trauma stewardship? What makes you think so (or not)?
- What are some of the sources of trauma that take a toll on people?
- How is supremacy, oppression, and power related to trauma?
- Lipsky quotes her mentor, “When there is suffering, there is more to do than hold it together.” What do you think she proposes that you do?
- What does this quote mean to you: “Brutality and beauty, pain and pleasure, annihilating moments and sublimating moments”?
Licenses and Attributions
Open Content, Shared Previously
“Trauma and the Human Services Professional” by Alexandra Olsen is adapted from a remix of “Secondary Traumatic Stress” by the Administration of Children and Families, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Revised by Martha Ochoa-Leyva.
Figure 3.7 is adapted from “Secondary Traumatic Stress” by the Administration of Children and Families, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Figure 3.8 Self-Destructive Self-Care by ToonStarterz is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.
Figure 3.9 Mind Full v. Mindful by Heidi Forbes Öste is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being
a professional field focused on helping people solve their problems.
socially created and poorly defined categorization of people into groups on basis of real or perceived physical characteristics that has been used to oppress some groups
the sense of fulfillment you feel for the work you do
action to preserve and improve one’s own physical and mental health.
being able to feel and relate to another’s feelings.
secondary traumatic stress, which is an occupational challenge for people working in the human services field due to their continuous exposure to victims of trauma and violence.
an experienced individual who helps to guide a mentee, the less experienced person in their learning and growth.
a mental state of focusing attention on the present moment, accepting and acknowledging one’s feelings, thoughts, and physical sensations.
recognizes that trauma has impacts that can be named and managed; it acknowledges that the person who is helping someone who is suffering from trauma may also suffer.
a set of fixed beliefs about a specific age group, usually referring to negative beliefs about older adults.