Taking care of the caregivers—a compassionate guide to healing secondary trauma A traumatic experience can have profound impacts on the people directly involved. However, that trauma can extend to the professionals like first responders and crisis counselors, as well as the friends and family of trauma survivors—even if it wasn't a firsthand experience. Healing Secondary Trauma is the gentle guide to help you identify symptoms, understand the feelings, and begin the healing process of your own secondary trauma. With interactive exercises and cutting-edge strategies for caregivers and professionals, it will help you address the daily realities of compassion fatigue, stress, and anxiety. Your journey to recovery from secondary trauma starts here. Inside this book you'll learn: Find yourself again—Learn how to process and manage your emotional responses so you feel calmer, present, and more in control of yourself. Plan for wellness—Create a path toward healing with a personalized self-care plan and strategies to regenerate empathy when your compassion stores feel low. You're not alone—Stories about everyday people highlight how secondary trauma can affect all of us in different ways. Begin the healing process from your secondary trauma today.

This is a 'must-buy book' for mental-health workers, licensed social workers, licensed professional counselors, and licensed marriage and family therapists, and/or the organizations for who these helpers work. This books' research study focuses on keeping the helping work-force mentally and emotionally stable after encountering second-hand trauma from their clients or patients. First responders, social workers, and mental health professionals encounter experiences directly or indirectly through helping others in emergencies, following trauma care, and/or mental health care treatments. While these workers help others, they may also experience vicarious trauma or 're-experience' past traumas of their own as they are re-lived via their patients or clients. The researcher identifies care of symptoms presented by mental-health workers, licensed social workers, licensed professional counselors, and licensed marriage and family therapists who are exposed to and may suffer VT/STS from their clients. This study documents how some social workers treat their own mental, emotional, and physical VT symptoms with 'self-care,' as well as how their supervisors can acknowledge and provide support directly to the mental health professionals to reduce or alleviate VT/STS.

First published in 1995. Traumatology, or the field of traumatic stress studies, has become a dominant focus of interest in the mental health fields only in the past decade. Yet the origin of the study of human reactions to traumatic events can be traced to the earliest medical writings in Kunus Pyprus, published in 1900 B.C. in Egypt. Many factors account for the recent emergence of this field, including a growing awareness of the long-term consequences of shocking events. Among these consequences are violence toward others, extraordinary depression, dysfunctional behavior, and a plethora of medical maladies associated with emotional stress. This is the latest in a series of books that have focused on the immediate and long-term consequences of highly stressful events. The purposes of the book, then, are (a) to introduce the concept of compassion fatigue as a natural and disruptive by-product of working with traumatized and troubled clients; (b) to provide a theoretical basis for the assessment and treatment of compassion stress and compassion fatigue: (c) to explain the difference between compassion fatigue and PTSD, burnout, and countertransference; (d) to identify innovative methods for treating compassion fatigue in therapists, and (e) to suggest methods for preventing compassion fatigue.

How empathy can jeopardize a therapist's well-being. Therapist burnout is a pressing issue, and self-care is possible only when therapists actively help themselves. The authors examine the literature from neurobiology, social psychology, and folk psychology in order to explain how therapists suffer from an excess of empathy for their clients, and then they present strategies for dealing with burnout and stress.

Reducing Secondary Traumatic Stress presents a model for supporting emotional well-being in workers who are exposed to the effects of secondary trauma. The book provides helping professionals with a portfolio of skills that supports emotion regulation and recovery from secondary trauma exposure and also that enhances the experience of the helping encounter. Each chapter presents evidence-informed skills that allow readers to regulate distressing emotions and to foster increased empathy for those suffering from trauma. Reducing Secondary Traumatic Stress goes beyond the usual discussion of burnout to talk in specific terms about what we do about the very real stress that is produced by this work.

This workbook provides tools for self-assessment, guidelines and activities for addressing vicarious traumatization, and exercises to use with groups of helpers.

This updated edition of From Trauma to Healing is a comprehensive and practical guide to working with trauma survivors in the field of social work. Since September 11th and Hurricane Katrina, social workers have increasingly come together to consider how traumatic events impact practice. This text is designed to support the process, with a focus on evidence-based practice that ensures professionals are fully equipped to work with trauma. Highlights of this new edition include brand new chapters on practitioner bias and vulnerability, standardized assessment methodologies, and crisis management, as well as a focus on topics crucial to social workers such as Trauma Informed Care (TIC) and Adverse Childhood Events (ACES). The text also offers additional resources including chapter practice exercises and a sample trauma course syllabus for educators. With fresh examples and discussion questions to help deal with traumatic events in practice, including interventions that may be applicable to current and future 21st century world events, such as the coronavirus pandemic, From Trauma to Healing, 2nd edition remains an essential publication on trauma for students and social workers alike.

This beloved bestseller—over 180,000 copies sold—has helped caregivers worldwide keep themselves emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, and physically healthy in the face of the sometimes overwhelming traumas they confront every day. A longtime trauma worker, Laura van Dernoot Lipsky offers a deep and empathetic survey of the often-unrecognized toll taken on those working to make the world a better place. We may feel tired, cynical, or numb or like we can never do enough. These, and other symptoms, affect us individually and collectively, sapping the energy and effectiveness we so desperately need if we are to benefit humankind, other living things, and the planet itself. In Trauma Stewardship, we are called to meet these challenges in an intentional way. Lipsky offers a variety of simple and profound practices, drawn from modern psychology and a range of spiritual traditions, that enable us to look carefully at our reactions and motivations and discover new sources of energy and renewal. She includes interviews with successful trauma stewards from different walks of life and even uses New Yorker cartoons to illustrate her points. “We can do meaningful work in a way that works for us and for those we serve,” Lipsky writes. “Taking care of ourselves while taking care of others allows us to contribute to our societies with such impact that we will leave a legacy informed by our deepest wisdom and greatest gifts instead of burdened by our struggles and despair.”

This workbook addresses the vital questions helpers, responders, and organizations have about self-care and its relationship to resilience and sustained effectiveness in the midst of daily exposure to trauma victims and or situations. Packed with activities, worksheets, and interactive learning tools, the text provides neuro-based and trauma-sensitive recommendations for improving the ways clinicians care for themselves. Each ‘session’ helps clinicians identify their personal self-care needs and arrive at an effective self-care plan that promotes resilience in the face of daily exposure to trauma-inducing situations and reduces the effects of compassion fatigue and burnout. Reducing Compassion Fatigue, Secondary Traumatic Stress, and Burnout is an essential workbook for any helper or organization looking to enhance compassionate care.

Vicarious Trauma and Disaster Mental Health focuses on the clinician and the impact of working with disaster survivors. Floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, mass shootings, terrorism and other large-scale catastrophic events have increased in the last decade and disaster resilience has become a national imperative. This book explores vicarious traumatization in mental health providers who respond to massive disasters by choice or by circumstance. What happens when clinicians share the trauma and vulnerability from the toll taken by a disaster with the victims they care for? How can clinicians increase resilience from disaster exposure and provide mental health services effectively? Vicarious Trauma and Disaster Mental Health offers insight and analysis of the research and theory behind vicarious trauma and compares and contrasts with other work-impact concepts such as burnout, compassion fatigue and secondary traumatic stress. It proposes practical evidence-informed personal strategies and organizational approaches that address five cognitive schemas (safety, esteem, trust, control and intimacy) disrupted in vicarious trauma. With an emphasis on the psychological health and safety of mental health providers in the post-disaster workplace, this book represents a shift in perspective and provides a framework for the promotion of worker resilience in the standard of practice in disaster management.