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My grief process has been a lot of reflection on my childhood and my young adulthood.  Really examining how I got here—to this point in my life.  I will spare you the stories of my youth.  For those of you interested in hearing about my life as a stubborn six-year-old, invite me to coffee, and let’s swap stories.

Coincidently, I have also recently been digging deep into self-care and institutional influences on self-care and taking a new look at the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACES).  Maybe that isn’t a coincidence, it is probably a result of all that self-reflection.

When you have worked in any field very long, you have this historical perspective that can either help you move to the next level or keep you stagnate under the glass ceiling.  I think this is particularly true in child abuse.  I transitioned into strictly a leadership position 9 years ago.  Before that, I was still working in direct services.   My interest in leaving behind working in direct service work that I loved dearly was due to an observation that there was a lack of longevity among professionals in the field of child abuse.  I wanted to figure out how professionals could do this work and stay in the field for a long time.  I wanted to be part of the solution.

All of this intersects I promise.  Loss, self-reflection, ACES, and historical knowledge to make story number ten of 30 Stories from 30 Years.

Sometime in January 1990, I was sitting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in a state training facility in a Public Law 46 or Revised Statue 46 training.  Otherwise known as Core training.  During that time, you received two weeks of training.  Week one was before you could be responsible for performing child abuse investigations or foster care management and then another after you had been working for six months.  I think that the training plan has evolved now into maybe another two or three weeks over three or four years.  I left that training at around 2 on a Friday afternoon.  Returned to my local office on Monday and had three reports sitting in my chair.  This is not unusual at all.  By the time I went to training, I had been observing/shadowing workers for roughly a month.  They had had a vacancy for a while.  This is the story of most child protection offices across the country.  One of those cases was a child with a fairly prominent burn on the outside of their upper arm.  Said child stated to his teacher that his dad had done it.  This young child also told me that Dad did it but said it was an accident.  By the time I reached the home, Dad had been notified by the school that I was on my way.  To answer the unspoken question, yes that was a violation of some rule/law.  But what I will say is that in that moment of stepping out of my car in a literal cow pasture in Pitkin, Louisiana to face a very angry man glaring at me from the front porch my creating genograms in my Core training did not prepare me for this.  I will say that I was probably in my job for six or seven years before I received training in de-escalating angry people and it was because I was selected to go through Mediation training to participate as a Mediator in my local office to help resolve co-worker disputes.  I have always been good at talking to people and finding a middle ground –really one of my favorite things about my job was interacting with angry parents and being able to find a way to work past the anger.  But I can imagine how scary and off-putting that would be to someone who had spent the week drawing genograms and learning system perspectives of childhood abuse.

The other thing none of my core training in Louisiana or when I retook it ten years later in Colorado prepared me for was the amount of paperwork, how to develop a plan to meet that burdensome responsibility promptly and continue to move forward with subsequently assigned cases and to do all of this while still keeping in mind you are working with hurting people.  Add creating court orders for the first time with essentially no training and testifying in court with no training in some pretty intense situations with some pretty high stakes.  And then add in that over time the pressure intensifies because the court doesn’t always care when you need to take a vacation unless it is convenient to the court.  That is not a judgment on those working inside the court system.  People who are accused of crimes have a right to certain things and time frames.  Those timeframes do not generally bend to allow for vacations, maternity leave, or illness of the witnesses.  It isn’t anyone’s fault.  So much of the requirements of the work are out of the hands of the worker.  Things need to move along.  Parents have a right to a hearing or trial to decide if the child is unsafe in their care.  If you think I am advocating for any of that to change, I am not.  Our system may be flawed but it is one of the only ways to have checks and balances.  Everyone deserves to be heard in a fair and neutral setting where only facts are judged.

As crucial as our justice system is to find the facts and act accordingly it is just as crucial to have experienced professionals working to keep children safe, to hold offenders accountable, to educate parents on safe ways to parent children—to give them the tools to care for their children in a way that they grow and thrive.  As crucial as it is for the “system” to have documentation of work being done to assess the safety of children and to respond when they are unsafe, it is as critical to provide support and training to professionals on balancing all the priorities and responsibilities that go along with that work.  It is also important to protect those working in this field from the guilt and secondary trauma that is inherent in this work.

Many people who have experienced childhood abuse or domestic violence are drawn to this work.  We learn so much from those who have lived experience.  But we have not always been good to recognize the trauma can be “triggered” by this work.  We generally in the past have discounted the powerful impact that this work has on those who do the work.  It’s been called Compassion Fatigue, Burnout, and Secondary Trauma among other things.  There has historically been this thought process of you can’t feel those things and continue in the work.  We are getting better about recognizing the importance of allowing for ways to guard against leaving people in their trauma without a “life saver” so to speak but we have a lot of work to do.  This year I had several traumas.  I did not do as much to take care of myself as I should have and I had a hard time letting others help me.  Why?  Because I felt like I should be doing better at this; like I should have had a handle on it.  And why is that?  Because when I was learning how to be a good “worker” this was what I saw and this is what I emulated.

When I started this work it was before cell phones.  I had a pager when I was on call but I did not have any way to call for help if I needed it out in the “field”.  In fact, in my office, we had a whiteboard that we signed out on.  90% of the time we signed out “in the field” instead of an address or client’s name.  We could be gone all day.  When I started I was given a black Daytimer calendar, a sheet to track my mileage for reimbursement –because you guessed it in the beginning there were only three state vehicles for the whole office and a stack of forms called ROC notes.  ROC stood for Record of Contacts.  Yep.  We did everything by hand and on paper.  As I write this out, I have to admit I laughed out loud.  It sounds so similar to the “When I was a kid, I had to walk to school in the snow ten miles…. uphill both ways” stories of previous generations.  I type it out, because I have learned to recognize just because I did not have certain protections or guidance, it is not right to force these same practices on those working in the field now.  When we learn better, we should do better.  I am sure I didn’t get that anywhere near the actual quote.

What I want to say is we can do better for the people tasked with keeping our children safe.  We can grow our expertise and experience in the field by retaining our workforce. But it does take a shift in perspectives.

Some things are easy and probably on the menu of self-care options for many employees already.

• You can offer an Employee Assistance Plan that provides for therapeutic interventions when life circumstances are such that we need help processing them.
• You can offer generous leave plans so employees do not need to choose between health and vacation and don’t have to stress about taking care of their family when they are ill.
• You can have an open-door policy to help employees reframe self-expectations and expectations others may have for them.
• Provide relevant training that equips employees to do their job confidently and well.
• Approach your team with an attitude of gratitude. Nothing does more for morale, motivation, or productivity than being genuinely appreciated and receiving validation that their efforts are being seen.

Some things may be things that are more difficult depending on whether or not you work in the private sector, for a government entity, or a nonprofit.

• Pay competitive wages.
• Offer a benefits package that includes good, affordable health care insurance options and retirement options.
• Allow for extra leave for bereavement or work with your staff when life situations arise to do what they need to be able to regroup, recover or heal—physically and mentally. Sometimes it is difficult to find the balance between doing this well and also being able to deliver services or complete work.

Then some things are more along the lines of what I call shared institutional self-care.  This is developing shared values and practices that allow for people to be off work either on vacation, sick, or training without feeling guilt or like they are letting the world down. This is a shared vision of allowing mistakes to be made without also piling on a tremendous amount of shame. This is hard because so much of what we do is high stakes….big things—horrible things can happen when any one of the team is not fully doing their work.  But big things—wonderful things can happen when we allow all of our team to take care of themselves.  Institutional self-care also means that we are all “saving each other from ourselves”.    There is a lot of pressure to get things right.  There is a lot of pressure to do your part.  There is a lot of pressure to accommodate everyone’s needs except your own.  We can help each other remember to extend the same grace to ourselves that we extend to others.  This is a balance.  There is a certain level of self-accountability and maturity that is required to be able to be 120% when someone else can only be 80%.  Or on the other side of the coin, do not consistently give 80% when whoever is taking up the slack may need someone to take up their slack when they are tired.  Balance, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence are required for this shared care to fully be successful.

Shared care is helping someone to recognize when they may need a break.  I can remember one particularly difficult interview I did with a child whose sibling had died as a result of abuse by their foster parent.  It was one of the worst and most impactful cases of my career.  After the interview, I was so angry because there had been so many reports made.  There was an actual audio recording of the abuse that a neighbor had made.  I was so incredibly angry.  I was able to do the interview.  I was able to do the team debrief.  It was a really good interview.  In my supervisor’s office, I held back tears but what showed was my anger.  She looked at me with her hands crossed and very kindly said “I think you need to take tomorrow off”.  I was indignant that she was not angry.  She went on to say “You cannot control what the foster parent did to this child.  Maybe there were missed opportunities or maybe really all the blame falls on this awful person who hurt this child but you did your best and probably your work will help this woman to be held accountable so that she will not be able to hurt another child.  Anger is not going to help you.”  Once I got past my how dare she not be angry and indignant with me; I realized she was correct.  She told me to learn to recognize when I am burnt out—when I reached my limit.  The point is that if she hadn’t helped me to recognize my burnout and encouraged me to take steps to work through my feelings, I would have burned a lot of bridges, damaged a lot of relationships, and probably left the field feeling angry and disgruntled in the name of something I had no control over.

I guess my main point is that self-care is not episodic.  It is a way of managing your work all along so that when the “big ugly” thing happens you can adjust and recover.  Not feeling sadness, or not having an impact made by the trauma we are all working in is not a sign of good self-care.

What if we allowed people to do good work, feel their feelings, recover and redirect after their feelings, and move on to do good work?  What if we appreciated the hard work being done and appreciate how hard it is?  What if we changed what we had control over and trust that others will change what they have control over?  Would that allow our children to have the experienced and skilled professionals they deserve to have to look out for and securing their safety?  Would it allow for accountability for offenders?