Welcome to Issue #204 of the Social Work E-News! Thank you for subscribing to receive this email newsletter, which is brought to you by the publisher of The New Social Worker magazine, SocialWorker.com, SocialWorkJobBank.com, and other social work publications.

 

Veterans Day was observed this past weekend. We appreciate all who have served and continue to serve. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is one of the largest employers of social workers, with more than 8,000 employed throughout the system. Rachel Dietkus Miller wrote a great article about reasons to consider a VA social work career. Read: 11 Excellent Reasons To Consider VA for Your Social Work Career.

 

Thanksgiving is only a week and a half away. I send you good wishes, and I am thankful that you are a part of our social work community. Erlene Grise-Owens wrote about gratitude for her Self-Care A-to-Z blog this month. Read: Gratitude as Focus, Frame, and Fuel for Self-Care. And Danna Bodenheimer has an important perspective on gratitude and forgiveness at the holidays, in her piece from last year. Read: Saying No to Gratitude and Forgiveness.

 

Reminder: Our Fall issue is out! This issue includes some important articles for all social workers summarizing the NEW NASW Code of Ethics (taking effect January 1) and the new standards for technology in social work practice. If you have not yet read these articles and the related documents, please do! Other highlights include articles on interrupting Islamophobia, resilience for social workers, female genital cutting, making the most of your time as a social work student, asking for professional references, and more.

 

Have you subscribed to our mailing lists? You can go to http://www.socialworker.com/Subscribe_to_The_New_Social_Worker and subscribe (free) to receive an email reminder and table of contents of each issue of The New Social Worker magazine when it is available. If you are a subscriber to the E-News (which you are reading now), this does NOT mean that you are automatically subscribed to The New Social Worker magazine. They are two different publications.

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At Loyola University Chicago, you can advance your career while creating change in the lives of those you help. Ranked among the top 25 percent of graduate programs in the country by U.S. News and World Report, Loyola's School of Social Work offers access to more than 300 field placements and countless opportunities to learn from our experienced faculty. 

Graduate students can expect:

 

ON CLINICAL SOCIAL WORK: MEDITATIONS AND TRUTHS FROM THE FIELD is Dr. Danna Bodenheimer's NEW book. Published in July by The New Social Worker Press, it  reached #1 in new social work releases on Amazon.

 

The beautiful, full-color book - now in paperback and hardcover - makes a meaningful gift for you, a student, or a colleague. It is available  now at Amazon and Barnes and Noble (and other bookstores, too).

 

Jonathan Singer of the Social Work Podcast wrote the foreword to this book, and he said, "Danna pays attention to life’s details with a psychotherapist’s insight and writes about them with the passion of a slam poet. She speaks to the soul of social work and inspires us to think about more than just social work."

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The A-to-Z format in this book provides 26 practical strategies for your personal self-care plan. Learn how to make a SMART plan and keep yourself accountable. Easy to read and essential for any social worker or helping professional.

ISBN: 978-1-929109-53-1

 

 

 

 

I arrive at the conference center tired and distracted, aware of the gnawing anxiety that has been with me since starting my new job months earlier. “Who am I—feeling this way—to be teaching about resilience?” I wonder. As I scan the presentation space, taking deep breaths to calm my nerves, I also remember, “Who else?”

 

Resilience is not about eliminating anxiety, fear, or uncertainty. Cultivating resilience allows us to face these and other stressful experiences with greater confidence, so we have the resources to bounce back. This article provides an introduction to tools and resources for building resilience and working with, rather than avoiding or distancing from, the realities that confront us.

 

Social work, practiced conscientiously, is a practice of the head and the heart. Effective social work demands deep engagement at all levels of intervention. To do this work requires presence, self-knowledge, acceptance, and flexibility. One has to be willing to “not know,” even when having practiced for a long time. To do this work demands tenacity in the face of imperfect systems and inadequate funding. Grounded in a commitment to serve often-marginalized individuals, families, and communities, a career as a social worker may also bring a host of challenges, including the increasingly trying conditions within which we work.

 

To address these realities, workshops and articles on stress reduction, avoidance of compassion fatigue, and burnout prevention have proliferated with the promise of teaching social workers how to cut down, manage, or create space from situations that overwhelm us. Within these approaches, however, is a deep and troubling contradiction.

 

Burnout is synonymous with breakdown; compassion fatigue with depletion. Inherent in both is a presumption of finite capacity within each person that, unless carefully guarded, can be used up. The best that can be achieved is to stave off or protect against becoming drained of a precious ability to care, or when nearing a depleted state, to take time away to refill ourselves with purpose and energy. Furthermore, the source of this damage and brokenness, against which social workers are counseled to buttress themselves, is often posited as being the very people we seek to help. Nowhere within this worldview do we find ideas about abilities, or promises of the capacity for growth.

 

 

Resilience, on the other hand, draws from and reinforces a strengths perspective. The concept of resilience springs from a belief that, fundamentally, we have personal wisdom and capacity to persevere and grow from experience. Adopting a resilience mindset helps us to tap into these capacities and to flourish, even in the face of challenge. Rather than seeing our work as ultimately draining, we incorporate the challenges we face into meaning-making. Difficulties are expected as part of the whole of what we do. When resilient, we seek to understand adversities that arise, to continually cultivate attitudes of curiosity, and to formulate actions for solutions and justice.

 

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines resilience as “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte, in their practical book The Resilience Factor (2003), discuss resilience as having to do with the ability to regulate emotions, attention, and behavior. Furthermore, recent research shows that how you interpret and how you respond to stress is related to how much stress you will feel. Early research by Suzanne Kobasa (1979) identified three critical factors for resilience: control, commitment, and challenge. Resilient people believe that they can influence events and situations, are engaged and find work as a source of meaning, and see change and uncertainty as opportunities for growth more than as stressors.

 

Resilient social workers rely on habits of mind and actions to foster attitudes of open curiosity and awareness of judgment that sustain them through the vicissitudes of their often difficult work. A focus on resilience allows us to move from the deficit perspective posited by avoidance of burnout to a sustainable framework based on day-to-day positive practices. With resilience, we are more able to keep our minds free from limiting thoughts, to access courage and creativity, to connect with others rather than withdraw, and ultimately, to find new possibilities for ourselves and the people we serve. Buoyed by resilience, we are more able to confront and work with problems without losing connection to ourselves or engagement with those we serve. At its simplest, working on resilience is about being proactive rather than reactive.