Healthier Healers: Sustaining Ourselves in the Face of Burnout and Secondary Traumatic Stress

Acknowledging the secondary traumatic stress we experience in our work as mental health professionals can be difficult and uncomfortable, but this is inevitable in our work. If we are connecting with our patients with genuine and accurate empathy and our patients have experienced trauma, we can expect to experience secondary traumatic stress. Normalizing the experience of trauma not just in our patients, but in ourselves as practitioners is integral to sustaining ourselves in the long-haul.

We recognize that caring is essential in creating an effective therapeutic alliance. The strength of such an alliance is the primary factor that determines treatment success. When burn-out and secondary traumatic stress rob us of our ability to care, we lose more than our quality of life; we lose our ability to help our patients effectively. Thus, self-care in this area is not an indulgence, but an ethical imperative. This presentation goes beyond the basics of self-care to delve into the psychological factors that make us as mental health professionals especially vulnerable to burnout and secondary traumatic stress. Participants will learn how to track their level of burnout and secondary traumatic stress over time to develop self-awareness and self-attentiveness. By the end of the presentation, you will create an individual-specific action plan to address the areas that make you most vulnerable and to sustain yourself in your practice