Building Resilience in Direct Care Staff
Skills to Alleviate Symptoms of Secondary Traumatic Stress
The information on this page comes from EQ2, Lionheart’s interactive training and support program for direct care staff working with trauma-impacted youth. It fills a critical gap in building trauma informed communities. Click here to learn more about the EQ2 Program.
What is Resilience?
Resilience, simply put, is the ability to recover after hardship. Otherwise known as: toughness, ‘bounce back,’ adaptability, or strength, resilience helps us return to baseline after something difficult happens, or to keep going in the face of challenging circumstances. For direct care staff who can encounter incredibly difficult situations every day, building resilience can be a key part of keeping communities safe and trauma-informed.
What is Secondary Trauma?
Working directly with trauma-impacted youth can have profound effects on our well-being. From “holding their emotions” when they’re upset, to bearing witness to the trauma they have been through, it is difficult to not be, in some way, impacted by this work.
There are many common terms that refer to the ways in which we can be impacted by the stress of working with trauma-impacted youth, including:
- Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS)
- Vicarious Trauma
- Compassion Fatigue
- Critical Incident Stress
In EQ2, we use the term Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS) to encompass the emotional, cognitive, behavioral, physical, and interpersonal changes that staff can experience after exposure to youth's trauma.
Building resilience helps everyone not only prevent, but also recover from secondary traumatic stress.
Check out this video, from the EQ2 App, that covers the basics of STS.
5 Signs and Symptoms of Secondary Trauma
Secondary Traumatic Stress can manifest in different ways. Click through each category below to learn more.
6 Resiliency Building Skills
Research shows that people who build their resiliency feel less overwhelmed by the stress of caring for youth who have experienced trauma. Resilient people still experience stress, but they are able to recover more quickly and with less cost to their well-being.
Below are 6 Tips from Lionheart’s EQ2 Program for Building Resiliency. Read through each and download the PDF that follows to learn more and give them a try!
flip the switch
It’s easy to focus on what isn’t working at work. Not enough resources, more and more challenging youth. But there are things we can do to shift this negativity bias in the other direction to feel happier and less stressed. Flipping the switch from what’s wrong to what’s right powerfully changes our world view…but only if we do it!
mindfulness
Mindfulness meditation has been shown to reduce depression, anxiety, pain, insomnia, and help with overeating. Its powers sound magical, but it’s actually very simple. Basically, mindfulness means paying full attention to what is going on in the present moment without getting swept away by the thoughts, judgments or emotions that play a constant soundtrack in our heads.
Click here to access our favorite mindfulness meditation techniques, all recorded by Lionheart staff. Listen to them whenever you need to reset.
connect
Just as building positive relationships with youth helps them become resilient and heal from past trauma, supportive relationships with our co-workers strengthen and protect us. Research shows that high quality connections at work are one of the most powerful ways to prevent burnout and secondary trauma.
lighten up
Helping trauma-exposed youth learn to manage their emotions and behaviors can weigh us down. We may not think of joy and humor as part of the antidote to caregiver fatigue, but research shows it can be. Healing youth requires us to lighten up.
recharge and recover
Being an Emotion Coach requires enormous patience and ongoing compassion. In order to keep showing up in an intentionally good way, we need to actively recharge our batteries. Recovering can mean finding relaxation through cooking, art, friends, exercise or worship or anything else that recharges and restores you. The important thing is that you actually DO IT.
lighten the load
Working with trauma-impacted youth can feel like a “heavy-lift” at times. We are asked to stay calm and grounded in the face of challenging emotions and behavior. We bear witness to the pain trauma has created. That’s why it’s important to lighten our load every day to build our resilience against burnout and secondary trauma.
