Exercising Resilience Muscle
by Sally Pelon, PhD, LMSW
It is common in all social work courses I teach for the topic of professional stress to be raised by students. Graduate and undergraduate students alike routinely express concern about the stresses of the social work profession and question their capacity to cope successfully with these stressors and enjoy an extended career as a professional helper. Social work students, as well as seasoned practitioners, are certainly aware of the potential hazards of our chosen profession. After all, working with human beings in all of their complexity can be messy, challenging, and emotionally demanding. Rachel Naomi Remen, in her book Kitchen Table Wisdom (2006), perhaps says it best: “The expectation that we can be immersed in suffering and loss daily and not be touched by it is as unrealistic as expecting to be able to walk through the water without getting wet.”
When we combine the challenges of working with human beings with increasingly large caseloads and decreasing funding for social service agencies, social workers are indeed at risk for being adversely affected by our work. Although these adverse impacts have been described using various terms, burnout and compassion fatigue are the most common, and they are often used interchangeably. They are, however, different in cause and presentation.
Burnout characteristically presents with exhaustion, irritation, and cynicism and is most often related to issues such as work overload, organizational dysfunction, lack of control, and lack of support. Consequently, burnout may be found in all work environments, not just those in which care for others is a central component (Harrison & Westwood, 2009). Compassion fatigue, on the other hand, typically presents with physical, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion; disconnection from others; and decreased capacity for empathetic attunement with others brought on by ongoing exposure to and empathetic concern for hurting others (Radey & Figley, 2007).
Whereas both burnout and compassion fatigue are professional hazards for social workers, the good news is that we can—and should—be active participants in building our coping and resources to avoid these professional risks and to promote personal and professional well-being and career longevity. Just how we undertake this process may vary based on the personal and professional strengths and vulnerabilities we bring to our work and on the population and field of practice in which we work. However, techniques that build our resilience against these professional risks as social work practitioners can be helpful no matter who we are and where and how we practice.
Building Professional Resilience
Professional resilience as a means to protect ourselves against burnout and compassion fatigue is an important concept to understand as social workers, no matter how long we have been practicing. Resilience may be defined as the ability to overcome stressors or to withstand negative life events in such a way as to recover and find personal meaning within them (Youssef & Luthans, 2007). In other words, resilience is the capacity to utilize both internal and external resources to successfully cope with challenges and stressors we face both as human beings and as social workers.
It may be helpful to think of resilience as a psychological muscle that we can build and strengthen just as we build and strengthen the physical muscles of our body through consistent exercise and exertion. We are aware that if we fail to exercise and challenge the physical muscles of our body, they will atrophy and be unavailable to us when we need them to perform physical tasks. However, we typically don’t apply this principle to psychological muscles such as resilience. We can build our resilience muscle through purposeful and consistent practice to develop and maintain our personal and professional well-being so that we are able to provide high-quality service and care to our clients on a long-term basis.
Recognizing and Accepting Professional Stress
As simple as it sounds, building our resilience muscle begins with the recognition that professional stress is a natural rather than a pathological response to the human caring we engage in as social workers. Rather than berating ourselves as weak or questioning our professional competence or chosen profession, it is helpful to embrace the fact that our work is indeed stressful and that our experience of that stress is simply an indication that we are human beings experiencing reasonable and expected human responses to the pain and distress we are exposed to each workday. Denying or pathologizing our professional stress interferes with our capacity to cope effectively with it and puts us at increased risk for burnout and compassion fatigue. When we normalize both our professional stress and our reactions to it, we are better positioned to build our resilience muscle and to circumvent burnout and compassion fatigue.
Cultivating Accurate Empathy
An additional way we can build our resilience muscle is to develop what Grant and Kinman (2014) describe as accurate empathy. As social workers, we pride ourselves in our ability to empathize with our hurting clients, to understand their perspective, and to express that understanding in a warm and compassionate manner. This empathetic concern is certainly indispensable to our work. It can be helpful, however, to expand our understanding of empathy to include ways in which our perspective-taking may contribute to our own feelings of anxiety and turmoil.
Accurate empathy requires that we employ appropriate empathetic concern in our work with clients while also refraining from over-empathizing in a manner that creates personal distress and anxiety. Maintaining clear emotional boundaries is necessary to assist us in applying accurate empathy in our work. Clues that our emotional boundaries are becoming compromised may include developing “special” relationships or becoming preoccupied with certain clients, being overly protective of clients, doing things with or for them that they could and should be doing for themselves, or engaging in excessive self-disclosure with clients.
We can build our professional resilience muscle through consistent and honest self-reflection regarding the health and stability of our professional emotional boundaries regarding these and similar issues. In so doing, we ensure that our empathetic concern does not develop into empathetic distress, which can contribute to burnout and compassion fatigue.
Enhancing Emotional Intelligence
Another way we can build our professional resilience muscle is through enhancing our emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence, among other features, includes the capacity to understand and tolerate both our own and others’ emotions and to express our emotions productively (Goleman, 1996). Research suggests that social workers who capably recognize, tolerate, and cope with their own and their clients’ strong emotions are better able to withstand the stressors of their work (Grant & Kinman, 2014).
The use of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (Linehan, 2015) techniques may be helpful in cultivating this piece of our emotional intelligence. Engaging with DBT mindfulness techniques that help us to recognize and embrace our emotions is an important first step. Distress tolerance and emotion regulation techniques may be beneficial in building our acceptance of strong emotion and in strengthening our capacity to tolerate and cope successfully with both our own and our clients’ shifting emotional states.
For example, we can practice observing and attending to strong feelings we experience about our clients or our demanding workplace without judging ourselves for those feelings or attempting to dismiss or deny them. We can also engage distraction and self-soothing techniques by picturing places we feel safe, happy, and relaxed; by practicing deep or paced breathing; by engaging our senses through music, nature, aromatherapy, or favorite foods; or by visualizing ourselves dealing successfully with client and workplace related negative feelings and situations. Just as we assist clients in utilizing these helpful DBT techniques, we can apply and practice them in our own lives to build our professional resilience muscle through enhanced emotional intelligence.
Focusing on Compassion Satisfaction
An increased focus on compassion satisfaction in our work may also be helpful in building our professional resilience muscle. Compassion satisfaction is the pleasure and sense of fulfillment we derive from doing our work well and contributing to the well-being of others (Stamm, 2010). When we think back on our reasons for social work as our chosen profession, we likely recall a desire to help others and to do our part to make the world a better place. Yet, when we are working with hurting clients day after day, juggling large caseloads, and facing budget cuts and lack of resources, we often connect more to the challenging, stressful, and difficult aspects of our work as helpers. While not denying these challenges and stressors, consciously and intentionally working to connect to the meaningful and satisfying aspects of our work can assist us in building our resilience muscle and keeping burnout and compassion fatigue at bay.
In fact, research has demonstrated that there is an inverse relationship between compassion satisfaction and compassion fatigue. As compassion satisfaction increases, compassion fatigue decreases (Harr, Brice, Riley, & Moore, 2014).
Techniques to assist us in connecting to compassion satisfaction in our work may include spending time at the end of each work day or week reflecting on meaningful interactions with clients, successful or helpful interventions employed, and lessons gleaned from our work. Journaling or maintaining a list of these interactions, successes, and lessons can also be helpful, as it allows us on our most difficult and challenging days to look back and reconnect with the positive, affirming, and successful aspects of our work.
Combating Organizational Stress
Building our resilience muscle to manage client-related stressors in our work is imperative. So, too, is developing our resilience muscle to manage the ubiquitous social work pressures of large caseloads, low wages, and agency politics. Although many of the techniques discussed above may be applied to this distinctive social work stress, there are additional ways we can work to successfully manage this systemic stress and avoid burnout.
Strengthening our capacity to advocate for ourselves within our organizations may be helpful. The advocacy and communication skills we employ to assist our clients in accessing services and resources are the same skills we may use to advocate on our own behalf regarding pay, benefits, and access to supervision. We might also collaborate with co-workers to collectively advocate with our organizations on behalf of all agency social workers. We may coordinate and participate in periodic meetings with trusted co-workers for the purpose of confidentially sharing positive and meaningful work experiences that can sustain us in our more difficult moments and help to build a “we’re all in this together” feeling of camaraderie and support that is so important in combating burnout (Fleury, Grenier, Bamvita, & Farand, 2018). It may also be helpful to refrain from participating in office gossip or complaints, as this typically acts to fuel anger and frustration rather than relieve stress.
Finally, our chosen profession provides diverse opportunities in various fields of practice within both public and private agencies. Working with an agency whose organizational culture most closely aligns with our personal values and professional goals and offers opportunities for advancement and autonomy is beneficial. Giving ourselves permission to make a job change or two to locate an agency and field of practice that meets these requisites is essential for our personal and professional well-being.
Conclusion
Social work students, as well as new and experienced social work practitioners, have long recognized the stress associated with our chosen profession. The good news is that there is much we can do to help ourselves cope successfully with that stress. The techniques reviewed above together with more traditional professional stress relief skills such as physical activity, leisure time, supportive relationships, and work-life balance, can position us to build our resilience muscle and enjoy long and meaningful careers as social work practitioners.
References
Fleury, M., Grenier, G., Bamvita, J., & Farand, L. (2018). Variables associated with job
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Goleman, D. (1996). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. Bantam Books.
Grant, L. & Kinman, G. (2014). Developing resilience for social work practice. Palgrave Press.
Harr, C.R., Brice, T.S., Riley, K., & Moore, B. (2014). The impact of compassion fatigue and compassion satisfaction on social work students. Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research, 5 (2), 233-251.
Harrison, R.L. & Westwood, M.J. (2009). Preventing vicarious traumatization of mental health therapists: Identifying protective practices. Psychotherapy Theory, Research, Practice, and Training, 46 (2), 203-219.
Linehan, M. L. (2015). DBT skills training manual. Guilford Press.
Radey, M., & Figley, C.R. (2007). The social psychology of compassion. Clinical Social Work Journal, 35, 207-214.
Remen, R.N. (2006). Kitchen table wisdom: Stories that heal. Berkley Publishing.
Stamm, B.H. (2010). The concise ProQOL manual (2nd ed.). ProQOL.org.
Youssef, Y., & Luthans, F. (2007). Positive organizational behavior in the workplace: The
impact of hope, optimism and resilience. Journal of Management, 33, 774–800.
Sally Pelon, PhD, LMSW, is an assistant professor of social work at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, MI.