Prioritising Personal Care –
Working in mental health or providing professional services for distressed clients can be as challenging as it is fulfilling. We often hear the message to go for a walk, book a massage, or take a bath to de-stress. These are all good relaxation activities to consider, but taking responsibility for self-care goes beyond this. It is important to take proactive action and think outside the square to build sustainable habits to preserve your mental health and minimise the impact or risk of burnout.
Three Essential Areas for Self-Care in Trauma Work
Over the past 30 + years in my roles as a clinician and clinical supervisor, I have worked with many professionals—especially those in high-stress, trauma-facing roles like mental health professionals, first responders, and lawyers—struggle with burnout and vicarious trauma. In my experience, effective self-care can be broken down into three core strategies:
- Personal strategies
- Group/Team strategies
- Organisational/structural strategies
Each strategy is equally important for maintaining your wellbeing. While personal strategies are essential, if you don’t have good leadership, a healthy team, or a responsive organisation, thriving at work is impossible.
But as everything starts with us, let’s start by exploring some practical personal strategies to safeguard your mental health and address or reduce the likelihood of burnout.
Eight Steps for Personal Self-Care
1. Develop Awareness
How are you responding to your work? Is it bringing your energy and satisfaction, and a sense of meaning and purpose? Do you go home with a sense of pride at a job well done and feel like you are doing something worthwhile for you clients? Did you once feel like that? Or, are you overwhelmed and disconnected from your work?
You may be disengaged, avoidant of clients and focused on efficiency. Or perhaps you’re over-involved, focusing on one client at the expense of others and fighting the good fight to a point of exhaustion. Burnout is inevitable in high pressured work. It is not a personal failing. It can sneak up on you if you’re not attuned to the early warning signs. Take a moment to reflect: where do you fall on the continuum between under-involvement and over-investment? What has changed in your work and home life? Understanding this is the key to taking action before burnout sets in.
2. Commit to Self-Care activities
It’s one thing to know you need self-care; it’s another to commit to it. Start by assessing your physical, mental, and emotional needs and then prioritize nurturing them. While the usual activities—walking, taking a bath, getting enough sleep, journaling mindfulness—are great, think about what genuinely restores you personally. Whether it’s dancing, exercising, forest bathing (my personal favourite), socialising with friends or family, or even cuddling with pets, make it part of your routine. Consistent self-care is important to maintaining balance in high-stress work by turning your focus away from the emotional demands of work. Accept that Friday night invitation. Book that massage now!
3. Recognise your professional strengths
In supervision and coaching, I invite people to reflect on their professional strengths. This goes beyond competencies. What are the tasks that make you feel energized and in ‘flow’? What comes naturally to you, are you good at and gives you a sense of accomplishment and joy? Working to your strengths brings more satisfaction and meaning to your day-to-day work. Sometimes in the rush of increasing caseloads, pressured work deadlines and managing complex cases, there is little time to focus on the tasks that we love (unless your strength is coming alive under pressure). But if we take a moment to stop and spend a little time working to our strengths, it can have a bigger impact on work longevity.
4. Recognise the Values that Drive You
Values shape our choice of work, for example, you may be drawn to organisations that promote social justice, or to a structured and organised environment, or to work flexibility for work life balance. Values also affect how we approach our work. Our personal and professional values also explain why certain tasks or people might feel more challenging than others if there is a values clash. What are the core values that motivate you? In supervision and coaching, we can uncover these values to help you make aligned decisions at work, understand interpersonal conflicts, and reframe difficult situations. When your actions and work culture are aligned with your values, work becomes more meaningful—and manageable.
5. Re-Find Meaning in Your Work
Why did you choose your profession and this organisation? When stress builds up, and overwhelm, helplessness and hopelessness sometimes creeps in, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. Reconnect with your original purpose to reignite your motivation. Sometimes this might mean engaging in activism related to your field, reading literature or watching films that relate to the communities you support, watching documentaries or reading non-fiction accounts of the lives of the communities you work. For example, I have recommended a few African authors over the years for supervisees working with asylum seekers from African countries. It can create a curiosity and interest in people’s lives beyond the problems that they bring to your work together. Finding meaning can also involve stepping back to reflect on the impact your work has on others, looking for and celebrating the (sometimes small) wins in your work.
6. Awaken Joy
While some people benefit from leaning into and expanding their knowledge about client’s lives, others need to focus on work-life balance, and step away from reminders of work on the weekends. Working with trauma and mental health over time can lead us to experience feelings of compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma. For some people, it may be better to reduce the number of movies and books that remind you of work challenges or trigger stress reactions. As a counterbalance you could go in search of what brings you joy and purposeful engagement. This could include involvement in a religious or political group, volunteering for a charity, coaching a youth soccer team, watching an uplifting movie (perhaps like Happy Feet), spending time with friends and family or learning a gratitude practice.
7. Locate your Locus of Control
In high-pressured work environments, it’s important to know what you can and cannot control. There will always be aspects of your job—like government policies or organisational decisions—that are out of your hands. However, focusing on the areas where you do have influence can foster a sense of agency and reduce feelings of helplessness. This could involve advocating for your clients, joining workplace committees, establishing a project to meet a service gap or just focusing on doing your best with the client in front of you. Developing a sense of self agency is a protective factor for continuation in this work.
8. Focus on Self-Management
Time management, decision-making, and stakeholder engagement are key skills that can help you manage, or at least chip away at, overwhelming workloads. Setting boundaries, managing expectations, and building strong professional relationships can make all the difference. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, breaking tasks down into manageable chunks can give you a sense of control. You might also consider the best time of day to tackle harder tasks, how to talk with your team about your needs for quiet time to focus on report writing and/or consider your work hours to maximise time to focus while still being available to colleagues. Ticking tasks off a checklist doesn’t work anymore. We have to get used to the fact that constant busyness is unfortunately the norm. For further reading, I recommend How to be a Productivity Ninja by Graham Alcott.
Moving Forward
Self-care is a necessity, especially for those of us working in high-stress environments with traumatised clients. Consider the ABC of self-care as being Awareness, Balance and Connection. By developing awareness, nurturing ourselves, working to our strengths, connecting with the meaning in our work and connecting with others, we work towards mitigating the risks of burnout and vicarious trauma, to continue to thrive in our professions. If you would like to discuss your responses to working with traumatised clients, feel free to contact me for clinical or professional supervision.
In the next blog of this series, I will explore group and team strategies for addressing burnout, focusing on the importance of team and group support to normalise workplace reactions and share strategies that can protect mental health in the workplace.
About Melinda Austen
Melinda Austen is a clinical supervisor and workplace and leadership coach with over three decades of clinical experience working with refugees, asylum seekers, Defence veterans, Police and couples. She now helps the helpers. Melinda supports colleagues, including social workers, clinicians and other professionals such as lawyers and allied health who work with vulnerable clients. In her supervision and workplace coaching practice at person2person Consulting, she is driven by a desire to help people foster healthy, productive teams and thrive in their work. www.person2personconsulting.com