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Secondary Trauma: Using Personal Strengths

Dan Thorne • Apr 20, 2022

Through using personal strengths, the professional and their agency engage employees more in the work they love. 

Although behavioral health professionals can suffer from secondary trauma, their personal strengths may also combat their work fatigue. Professionals working in the child welfare arena hear frequent stories of a youth’s trauma, which can affect their mental well-being and leave them wanting to avoid work. The current stress of COVID, as a crossover trauma, has had long-lasting effects on professionals due to changing work conditions and hybrid vs. in-person settings. Finally, the impact of greater demands to “do more with less” leaves workers wanting to leave the field. 


For employers, training employees to evaluate their work-life balance and make changes leads to healthy work engagement. According to a 2017 article by Don-Jin Lee and M. Joseph Sirgy, workers can develop balance in their workplace and personal life by integrating using personal strengths from one area and placing them in the other. This concept is called spillover versus compensation. The idea is that the “work-life balance is achieved when “individuals experience spillover (positive affect from one life domain contributes to positive affect in another and vice versa) and compensation (negative affect in one domain may cause the individual to enhance positive affect in another domain and vice versa).” For example, take the concept of conflict resolution. Suppose a worker has expertise in their professional life handling conflicts. They are a therapist who deals with managing family conflicts throughout the day with their clients. Their ability to view both sides of the problem gives them a picture of how to do the same in their personal life. Thus, they can provide their professional perspective at home as a positive contributor to disagreements. This can reduce the stress and secondary trauma occurring at work.


Another area of difficulty Lee and Sirgy discussed is social relationships. It is common for workers to be socially interactive at work yet have difficulty making connections with others in their personal life. Sometimes this is due to their fears of meeting people and being hurt or manipulated. However, the skill of assertion (i.e., treating others with respect and as equals) as a personal strength at work also translates to the same skills in their private interactions with friends, family, and relationships. 


Most importantly, the professional needs to increase those parts of their life that they find enriching personally and professionally. As an example, the electronic health record was supposed to reduce documentation for professionals, but this technology has not decreased the paperwork drain. Clinicians came into behavioral health to be with clients, not spend time on “paperwork.” Although it is necessary to document the details between client and clinician, the agency needs to find ways to assist the clinician in balancing their time through training, reducing forms, and simplifying the documentation process. Even paperwork can impact an employee's secondary trauma.


These techniques taken together can improve the quality of life for employees and lead to higher retention. Through using personal strengths, the professional and their agency engage employees more in the work they love. 

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