Beyond Self-Care for Helping Professionals is an innovative guide to professional self-care focused not just on avoiding the consequences of failing to take care of oneself, but on optimal health and positive psychology. This new volume builds upon the Expressive Therapies Continuum to introduce the Life Enrichment Model, a strengths-based model that encourages mindful participation in a broad array of enriching experiences. By enabling therapists and other Helping Professionals to develop a rich emotional, intellectual, and creative foundation to their lives and clinical practices, this guide sets a new standard for self-care in the helping professions.
Why are so many in the helping professions perceived as lacking idealism or commitment? Beyond Burnout, based on a unique, in-depth, longitudinal study, explores the source of this problem. Professionals describe in their own words what happened to them when their idealism collided with the realities of their work.
Despite what you might have been told, the feelings of sadness and hopelessness you may be struggling with are probably not "just a phase" or "something you'll grow out of." As many as 20 percent of people your age have symptoms of serious depression, yet many teens and even many adults don't recognize the signs. Only half of depressed teens get the help they need to overcome these feelings. If you're feeling depressed, this workbook offers things you can do, both on your own and with a counselor, to feel better.
Social workers encounter a number of unique forms of occupational stress on a daily basis. The more thoroughly they understand the stressors they face, the better-prepared social workers will be able to manage them successfully. Self-Care in Social Work is a guide to promote effective self-care tailored to the needs of social workers, including both individual and organizational approaches. On a personal level, it goes beyond the typical prescriptions to exercise, eat well, sleep more, and get a massage or meditate. In fact, the book is based on the premise that self-care should not be an add-on activity only happening in the rare instance there is some free time. Instead, it is conceptualized as a state of mind and considered an integral part of a social worker's training. In Self-Care in Social Work, the reader is taught how to approach individually oriented self-care through the development of self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-efficacy. At the organizational level, readers are guided through a process of learning about areas of match and mismatch between themselves and their agency structure and culture. The book is timely in that the economic downturn has put pressure on agencies to do more with less, which ultimately leads to stress. Burnout, compassion fatigue, and vicarious trauma are topics that students, instructors, practitioners, and administrators are concerned about. A practical guide to stress management and approaches to self-care, this book includes narratives gathered from both students and practitioners in the field. It is an excellent resource for social workers, counselors, and mental health professionals in education.--Back cover.
Moving Beyond Assessment: A Practical Guide for Beginning Helping Professionals is a text designed to help beginning professionals from social work, nursing, psychology, counseling, and other related disciplines navigate the early stages of working with clients in a variety of settings. The authors are experienced clinicians, supervisors, and professors who have trained hundreds of graduate students to learn how to assess, intervene, and evaluate their work with clients. In addition to the direct practice focus of the book, the authors address issues such as self-care, the basics of neurobiology, working with multi-disciplinary teams, evidence-based practice, and supervision. The text has a user-friendly tone and the authors have included numerous practice vignettes and their own personal and professional experiences to exhibit how the content can be applied to real life settings. Beginning practitioners will find tips, tools, resources, and concrete examples they can use to enhance their work with clients and normalize their experiences in the helping field, while learning how to take care of themselves as professionals. This text is an essential guide for anyone who is seeking to become a helping professional.
Nearly half of all mental health providers have histories of abuse and family dysfunction, and almost one in five has experienced suicidal ideation. Many therapists and counselors suffer under the weight of their clients' mental health struggles. All practitioners must learn to practice self-care. Mental health providers are mindful listeners, problem-solvers, curious inquisitors, supporters, perspective-shifters, consultants, diagnosticians, body regulators, cheerleaders, coaches, guides, and healers. To do all this requires considerable personal reserves. Caring for themselves, as people and professionals, is imperative. This book addresses the dearth in today's self-care training by presenting a sustainable approach that is integrative, holistic, and developmentally flexible. When therapists feel deserving of self-care, when their values orient and shape their self-care behaviors and mindset, when mindful awareness of their needs comes frequently and with relative ease, and when their routines, practices, and activities are integrated rather than sporadic and fragmented, they can begin to practice sustainable self-care.
SELF-CARE REVOLUTION: 5 Pillars to Prevent Burnout and Build Sustainable Resilience for Helping Professionals takes you through a step by step system to set up a sustained and sustainable Self-Care practice as a way of life and work. Are you experiencing any of these common experiences? Increased busyness Dwindling motivation and love for your work Disappearing balance of work and life Compassion fatigue or burnout Dis-ease in your life or work Elevated fear If so, you are not alone! We all need to be well to do good work, to raise our families, to learn our important life lessons, to support and love each other, and to bring to the world our unique gifts, talents, and contributions. If you are a social worker, teacher, mental health, or other health care provider, clergy, first responder, coach, leader, or anyone feeling stressed and overwhelmed, this book is for you! Ellen is a licensed master social worker, a certified coach, and a metaphysical minister who teaches, speaks, and writes about wellness, spirituality, and human behavior. She has been doing this work for more than 20 years and has been on her own self-care path since childhood! She had her burnout early when at 16 she found herself unable to get out of bed for a couple of months. This set her on her self-care path and the realization that self-care is for everyone. You do not need to live and work in a state of dis-ease. If you are like many who are seeking a way towards healthy living through self-improvement there is not a moment more to wait. This book is a self-help professional development guide. Helping professionals must value wellness enough to build a life and professional practice around Self-Care and to support one another to do the same. These are all Revolutionary acts! This Revolution is about mindfulness, compassion, intention, and love. Most helping professionals understand that they must practice Self-Care, but don't know where to begin or how to sustain their practice. This book is the why, what, and how for establishing Self-Care as a permanent and important part of your every-day life and work. SELF-CARE REVOLUTION will show you how to move mindfully into hope resilience stability wellness love for ourselves and for others Here are the 5 Pillars I will take you through in this book: Pillar 1 -- Define Self-Care Pillar 2 -- Write a Values Statement Pillar 3 -- Make a Self-Care Plan Pillar 4 -- Recognize Impairment and Focus on Prevention Pillar 5 -- Support Others in Their Self-Care Plans Self-Care, if revolutionized, means making a fundamental change in our way of relating to ourselves and to one another. It means making a fundamental change in our health care systems and in our legislation and regulations. If we are determined and committed to being well, to loving ourselves and to supporting one another, we can change the course of action. This is a Revolution! Why not use Amazon's "look inside" feature to begin reading Self Care Revolution before you buy? Just click on the book image above and start browsing.
Written by practitioners for practitioners, this empirically-grounded book offers clinicians of all backgrounds a guide to incorporating feedback and self-development strategies that will dramatically enhance their therapeutic abilities. Building on the foundation of Feedback-Informed Treatment (FIT), Beyond Best Practice explores the benefits of practicing therapy using in-the-moment client feedback, with an emphasis on ongoing, typically solitary, deliberate practice. Chapters describe the real-world journey of an established master therapist and her agency, examining each element of FIT in detail through her eyes. Her journey is illustrated through discussions with prominent researchers, authors, former clients, as well as informative experiences outside of psychotherapy. Rich case examples of success, failure and "failing successfully" are also woven throughout, with a focus on the practical applications and skills needed to become an excellent and effective therapist and agency. What becomes clear through the many narratives is that we can improve our services by studying the obvious and subtle forms of feedback that are available to us at all times. Beyond Best Practice emphasizes what each practitioner can do to become more effective, one client at a time. It will be essential reading for all mental health practitioners and agencies working at the front lines of medical care.
Overwhelming empirical evidence indicates that new social workers, particularly those going into child welfare or other trauma-related care, will discover emotional challenges including the indirect or secondary effects of the trauma work itself, professional burnout, and compassion fatigue. However, the newly revised CSWE Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) does not mandate the inclusion of content related to self-care in social work curriculum or field education. In a textbook that bridges the gap between theoretical and pragmatic approaches to this important issue in human service work, Jason M. Newell provides a potential resolution by conceptualizing self-care as an ongoing and holistic set of practice behaviors described as the key to professional resilience. To address the effects of trauma-related care on direct practitioners, Newell provides a comprehensive, competency-based model for professional resilience, examining four key constructs—stress, empathy, resilience, and self-care—from a range of theoretical dimensions. For those who work with vulnerable populations, the tendency to frame self-care solely within organizational context overlooks the importance of self-care in domains beyond the agency setting. Alternatively, he uses a framework grounded in the ecological-systems perspective conceptualizing self-care as a broader set of practice behaviors pertaining to the whole person, including the physical, interpersonal, organizational, familial, and spiritual domains of the psychosocial self. Alongside professional self-care practices at the organizational level, Newell makes a case for the pragmatic role of recreational activities, time with family and friends, physical health, spirituality, and mindfulness. The application of a comprehensive approach to self-care practice has potential to empower practitioners to remain resilient and committed to the values, mission, and spirit of the social work profession in the face of trauma.
