Becoming a child welfare professional should come with a warning: "beware - this may change you forever and can be dangerous." The change, however, may be good if you can learn to cope with the stress of the work and grow from the experience. Secondary Traumatic Stress and the Child Welfare Professional, a first-of-its kind book, presents the tools to help child welfare practitioners and agency managers identify and provide practical and appropriate interventions. This book is based on the authors' ten-year study of over 600 child welfare practitioners' experience with traumatic stress and child welfare.
This comprehensive reference offers a robust framework for introducing and sustaining trauma-responsive services and culture in child welfare systems. Organized around concepts of safety, permanency, and well-being, chapters describe innovations in child protection, violence prevention, foster care, and adoption services to reduce immediate effects of trauma on children and improve long-term development and maturation. Foundations and interventions for practice include collaborations with families and community entities, cultural competency, trauma-responsive assessment and treatment, promoting trauma-informed parenting, and, when appropriate, working toward reunification of families. The book’s chapters on agency culture also address staffing, supervisory, and training issues, planning and implementation, and developing a competent, committed, and sturdy workforce. Among the topics covered: Trauma-informed family engagement with resistant clients. Introducing evidence-based trauma treatment in preventive services. Working with resource parents for trauma-informed foster care. Use of implementation science principles in program development for sustainability. Trauma informed and secondary traumatic stress informed organizational readiness assessments. Caseworker training for trauma practice and building worker resiliency. Trauma Responsive Child Welfare Systems ably assists psychology professionals of varied disciplines, social workers, and mental health professionals applying trauma theory and trauma-informed family engagement to clinical practice and/or research seeking to gain strategies for creating trauma-informed agency practice and agency culture. It also makes a worthwhile text for a child welfare training curriculum.
This workbook provides tools for self-assessment, guidelines and activities for addressing vicarious traumatization, and exercises to use with groups of helpers.
Within a historical and contemporary context, this book examines major policy practice and research issues as they jointly shape child welfare practice and its future. In addition to describing the major problems facing the field, the book highlights service innovations that have been developed in recent years. The resulting picture is encouraging, especially if certain major program reforms I are implemented and agencies are able to concentrate resources in a focused manner. The volume emphasizes families and children whose primary recourse to services has been through publicly funded child welfare agencies. The book considers historical areas of service—foster care and adoptions, in-home family-centered services, child-protective services, and residential services—where social work has an important role. Authors address the many fields of practice in which child and family services are provided or that involve substantial numbers of social work programs, such as services to adolescent parents, child mental health, education, and juvenile justice agencies. This new edition will continue to serve as a fundamental introduction for new practitioners, as well as summary of recent developments for experienced practitioners.
This book is a practical guide to developing resilient learners by equipping educators with trauma informed practices and behaviour support strategies.
The Compassion Fatigue Workbook is a lifeline for any helping professional facing the physical and emotional exhaustion that can shadow work in the helping professions. Since 2001 the activities in this Workbook have helped thousands of helpers in the fields of healthcare, community mental health, correctional services, education, and the military. In addition to a comprehensive description of compassion fatigue and vicarious traumatization, The Compassion Fatigue Workbook leads the reader through experiential activities designed to target specific areas in their personal and professional lives. It provides concrete strategies to help the reader develop a personalized plan for identifying and transforming compassion fatigue and vicarious traumatization. Topics covered include: understanding compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma symptom checklist targeting areas for strategic planning understanding warning signs assessing contributing factors evaluating self-care identifying triggers solutions: personal, professional and organizational strategies.
Provides the foundation for supervisory practice in Child Protective Services (CPS). It describes the roles & responsibilities of the CPS supervisor, & provides practice-oriented advice on how to carry out supervisory responsibilities. Designed for CPS supervisors & administrators, but it also may be helpful to child welfare agency staff who provide training for supervisory personnel & to schools of social work as they prepare new social workers for the child welfare field. Also includes a glossary of terms & a bibliography.
This book explores the role and experience of the therapist in the therapeutic relationship by examining countertransference (the therapist's response to the client) and vicarious traumatization (the therapist's response to the stories of abuse told by client after client). The authors address specific issues that arise in treatment of incest survivors.
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.”
First Published in 1983. All families experience stress: the adjustment period when an infant is born; the many problems engendered by adolescents; role, dual-career, and work demands; environmental and societal problems; sexuality; divorce; marital tension; and the stress inherent in single parenting and stepparenting. In addition, families are frequently confronted by unexpected, stress-causing catastrophes: chronic illness and death addiction; abandonment by a spouse; unemployment; rape; national and international political crises; and natural disasters. Stress and the Family, Volume II: Coping With Catastrophe shows how the family produces and reacts to stress-causing situations and problems, and identifies a wide range of stress sources-those "normal," gradual, and cumulative life stressors commonly related to intimate family interaction and development, and those sudden, unpredictable, and often overwhelming stress-causing events or circumstances arising outside the family microsystem. The volume provides a blueprint for understanding the intricate patterns of individual and family reactions to catastrophes, showing how profoundly a disaster which strikes one family member can affect the entire family. Clinicians and family researchers discuss catastrophes that impact families infrequently, but without warning and with devastating consequences. Each chapter opens with a brief case study of a family struggling with the aftermath of a particular catastrophe.Coping With Catastrophe, and its companion volume, Coping With Normative Transitions, are based upon research, theories, and techniques in this area from both family therapy and sociology. The clear, practical intervention methods described and meticulous structural organization make both volumes pioneering textbooks for students and professionals interested not only in a comprehensive understanding of stress and the family, but also in strategies for helping families develop effective coping styles.
