BY: CHE
All helping professionals are very likely to experience big
stress due to overwhelming emotions they may get from working with clients. "Every therapist needs a therapist." Because it is always important to take care of yourself, I'd like to share
some self-care strategies in this post.
Self-care strategies vary from person to person, but the first step
would be recognizing your stress. Helping professionals absorb lots of emotions
from clients and the work itself that can be hard to handle such as depression,
anger, fear, loneliness, trauma, pain, and more. It's important to acknowledge
that it can cause secondary trauma or compassion fatigue. Secondary trauma can
be developed when the clients' stories are similar to our own issues that we have
had in the past or are having at the moment. Compassion fatigue can be
developed when the clients' issues bring exhaustion to our ability to work
effectively. Symptoms of secondary trauma and compassion fatigue may
include but not limited to the following; flashbacks of our own experiences,
trigger, old-wounds reopened, personal depression, overworking yourself,
nightmares, feeling unfulfilled by your work, and physical symptoms such as
sleeplessness, decrease or increase in appetite, panic or anxiety attacks, and
easily startled etc.
Self-care is very important to not only helping professionals but
to everyone, obviously. We all go through stresses nearly every day
whether it's small or big. I hope this gave some ideas of self-caring methods
and reminded you that you deserve a break because you are important!
info source: Self Care for
Therapists- http://www.nadta.org/membership/selfcare-for-therapists.htm
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