The Weight of Caring
My journey to social work had a curious beginning. I was looking at all the jobs that seemed to be ones I might enjoy, and they all required a degree in social work or a clinical social work license. I had a lifetime of being told “you should be a helper” because of how I interacted with others and my interests in people, or “you should be an attorney” because of my propensity to argue as a child. Turns out, social work is a perfect blending of service, advocacy, social justice and honoring the dignity and worth of all. Pursuing social work professionalized what felt natural for my sense of self.
March is National Social Work Month, a time to recognize professionals who show up during life’s most difficult moments. Each discipline has a month set aside to celebrate and honor our work. I am a social worker, but taking time to consider our own secondary stress applies to all my behavioral health colleagues.
Social workers support communities in child welfare, health care, schools and crisis response, often while carrying emotional weight that goes unseen.
One overlooked challenge is secondary traumatic stress, sometimes called secondary trauma or compassion fatigue. It occurs when helpers repeatedly absorb the trauma of others. This doesn’t only affect social workers. It can also impact journalists, clinicians and first responders.
Secondary trauma is different from burnout. Burnout stems from exhaustion and workload, while secondary trauma is linked to exposure to others’ pain. Many helpers experience both, often without realizing what’s happening.
Signs may include feeling overwhelmed, emotional numbness, sleep difficulties, irritability or feeling constantly on edge. These reactions are not signs of weakness; they are predictable responses to sustained exposure to trauma.
Many who find themselves in a space of burnout or being impacted by secondary trauma may not give enough attention to the signs. I was one of those people. Sure, I was fully attuned despite all the difficulty I was facing personally and professionally. There was a period of my life that was a bit challenging on all fronts: a husband deployed who had faced some critical incidents, one child in elementary school navigating unique needs, one child in high school learning to drive, and long work hours for responding to a disaster within the nonprofit I was serving. And somehow, I believed I was successfully navigating it all. One day, as I was leaving drop-off for my daughter, I heard a voice from the back seat: “Mom, are you going to drop me off?” I had apparently driven through the drop-off line, probably waving at all the greeters and welcomers, and did not stop. Back through drop-off I went —with a state of alertness — and dropped my child at school. Then I pulled into the parking lot, rested my head on the steering wheel and wondered … what else may have happened? Has any of this shown up at work or in my connection of helping others?
For social workers, attention to self-care is part of our ethics for a reason. We have a responsibility for self (and to advocate in the places we serve) to give attention to the stress, trauma and environmental experiences of this work. Not doing so can lead to burnout, but it can also cause harm to those who reach out needing the mental health support that we have to offer. And with a high demand for compassionate mental health care and a scarcity of available professionals, not protecting our investment in our work further decreases the availability of healing resources.
Supporting helpers requires more than individual self-care. It requires organizations to prioritize mental health through supportive leadership, boundaries and access to care.
The Green Shoe Foundation works to make trauma-informed mental health support more accessible, helping adults understand and heal the effects of trauma so they can live and work with greater clarity and resilience. The people we serve at the Green Shoe Foundation come from diverse places and experiences. It is typical that, each week, we have a handful of participants who are helpers — people who make connections between their own work and their ability to cope with and manage the work in the context of their own history. By exploring and healing childhood relational trauma, we are more equipped to manage the impacts of secondary trauma exposure. We sustain our capacity to support others’ healing, we protect our professional and personal investments in the work, and we can show up fully in the places we serve.
When we care for caregivers, communities are stronger.
For those interested in learning more or finding support, visit greenshoe.org.
