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 that nourishes you physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It is vitally important in the human services field. Because our work can be emotionally draining, burnout and compassion fatigue are unfortunately all too common. Your internship allows you to put self-care practices into place before you fall victim to either of these.
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
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 on the client’s behalf. Documentation often exists as part of an agency’s official records and may 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, or 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 is often unrelated to the actual professional, but it is due to a previous issue in the client’s life.
Chapter Overview Licenses and Attributions
“Chapter Overview” is adapted by Yvonne Smith LCSW from Succeeding at Your Internship: A Handbook Written for and with Students by Christopher J. Mruk and John C. Moor, Bowling Green State University Libraries. This work is licensed under CC BY NC SA 4.0.
A credit class in which students apply theory to practice by using what you have learned in coursework in a real-world setting with a supervisor/mentor who is invested in your growth and development (often also referred to as fieldwork or practicum).
any activity you participate in whose function is to nourish you either physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
the feeling of emotional and/or physical exhaustion brought on by work-related stress.
the feeling of being unable to respond with empathy or compassion to client issues, usually accompanied by feelings of exhaustion or being overwhelmed.
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
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.
the inability to differentiate between one’s own life, work and challenges and those of a client (or clients).
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.
the practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, etc. that may or may not intersect with each other.
the quality of being fair and impartial and providing equitable access to different perspectives and resources to all students.
the practice or quality of providing equal access to opportunities and resources for people who might otherwise systemically be excluded or marginalized, such as those who have physical or mental disabilities and members of other minority groups.