The Cost of Caring: Secondary Trauma

The Cost of Caring: An Online Mini-Course

What is The ChildTrauma Academy?

Working with high risk children and families can take a toll. Secondary trauma, burnout, compassion fatigue - all are related to the powerful impact of working in a resource-depleted system with overwhelmed families in overwhelming situations. Dr. Chris Dobson, the Director of Programs at the CTA, has been running our Critical Incident Response Team and the Secondary Trauma Reduction Program with child protective services in Texas for many years. Learn more about secondary trauma in this featured CTA article. Also check out the other articles in this issue to get more resources about secondary trauma.

Each year, millions of children are exposed to some form of severe traumatic event. Many of these children are victims of physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect. Many thousands more have been traumatized by natural disasters (e.g., tornadoes, hurricanes, floods), automobile accidents, drowning, community violence or interpersonal violence they witness in their own homes. The trauma suffered by these children is not benign. It can result in serious and chronic emotional and behavioral problems that are very difficult to treat. And each year, day after day thousands of teachers, caseworkers, police officers, judges, pediatricians and child mental health professionals work with and try to help these children. And each year, parents, grandparents, foster parents care for these children. All too often, the adults are working in difficult, resource-limited situations. The children may present with a host of problems that can confuse or overwhelm their caregivers and treaters. The pain and helplessness of these children can be passed on to those around them. Listening to children talk about the trauma, trying to work in a complicated, frustrating and often "insensitive" system, feeling helpless when trying to heal these children – all can make the adults working with these children vulnerable to develop their own emotional or behavioral problems.

The purpose of this course is to present an overview of the topic of secondary trauma. The goal is to gain a better understanding of how to better serve the children we work with by making sure we are at our best. The better we understand how working with traumatized children affects us both personally and professionally the better able we will be to serve them. In order to remain emotionally healthy ourselves it is critically important that we understand how the elements of a child’s trauma of children can be absorbed. All professionals working with traumatized children can learn approaches and strategies to protect themselves from being emotionally overwhelmed by this work. In the end, the ability to help traumatized children depends upon our ability to stay emotionally healthy and motivated in difficult and often very frustrating situations. To read on click below.

Childhood trauma and maltreatment create complex and multi-dimensional problems which impact every sector of our society. Addressing these problems requires active leadership from a diverse range of professional disciplines. Our current problem-solving organizations – universities, foundations, government and non-governmental organizations – are limited in their capacity to create and sustain a large interdisciplinary pool of expertise within the bounds of their single organizations. Simply stated, the critical mass of experienced professionals needed to create and implement innovative, effective solutions is lacking in most communities. One strategy that the ChildTrauma Academy is using is to build community capacity through teaching key leaders about the core concepts related to child and brain development, trauma, neglect, maltreatment and, key principles related to healthy development and healing. Each of you are involved in this process. The purpose of these updates is to continue to support your work with high risk children. We hope these will be helpful and we look forward to continuing to support your work.