5.1 Chapter Overview
With this chapter, we take a minute to review the experience you have had so far. By now, you should be more familiar with your agency, the population served, and your role. You may feel overwhelmed with how much you have learned, and you also may be eager to learn more. It can be helpful to reflect on your experience, and then use that as a springboard for your goals for the rest of your internship. We also take a moment to talk about how reflection can lead to better self-care. Self-care broadly means any activity you participate in whose function is to nourish you either physically, mentally, emotionally, anr spiritually. It is vitally important in the human services field. Because the work we do can be emotionally draining, burnout and compassion fatigue are unfortunately all too common. Your internship gives you the perfect opportunity to put self-care practices into place before you fall victim to either of these.
5.1.1 Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, you will be able to do the following:
- assess the connection between your experience in your internship setting and your learning outcomes/internship goals and create new learning goals to enhance the learning process
- discuss challenges of working with clients, including transference, countertransference, and overidentification
- identify the possible impact of documentation on diversity, equity, and inclusion
- initiate self-care activities to prevent burnout and compassion fatigue
5.1.2 Preview of Key Terms
- Burnout: the feeling of emotional and/or physical exhaustion brought on by work-related stress.
- Compassion fatigue: the feeling of being unable to respond with empathy or compassion to client issues, usually accompanied by feelings of exhaustion or being overwhelmed.
- Countertransference: a professional’s unconscious feelings and behaviors aroused by a client, patient, consumer of services, or even a supervisor. Countertransference is natural and may be positive or negative in its tone. It is often unrelated to the specific client but brought on by some reminder of a previous relationship.
- Documentation: the written record of the interactions between the client and the agency, as well as work done by the agency for the client’s behalf. Documentation often exists as part of an agency’s official records, and may also be used for billing purposes.
- Overidentification: the inability to differentiate between one’s own life, work and challenges and those of a client (or clients).
- Self-care: any activity you participate in whose function is to nourish you either physically, mentally, emotionally, anr spiritually.
- Toxic Positivity: responding to negative events with a positive or happy affect, regardless of how you actually feel about the situation
- Transference: a client’s unconscious positive or negative feelings or behaviors triggered by another, often the therapist or clinician. The response often is unrelated to the actual professional, but it due to a previous issue in the life of the client
5.1.3 Licenses and Attributions for Chapter Overview
“Chapter Overview” by Yvonne M. Smith LCSW licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Adapted from Mruk, Christopher J. and Moor, John C., “Succeeding at Your Internship: A Handbook Written for and with Students” (2020). Open Educational Resources, Bowling Green State University Libaries. 1. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.