Workplace Hazards in Trauma-Informed Practice: Ensuring Helping Provider Health and Well-being

Helping professionals support clients who experience high stress and trauma. The role of the professional helper includes professional hazards or experiences in a workplace or profession that can negatively impact the practitioner. For helping professionals, these hazards include but are not limited to exposure to client trauma narratives, reexperienced trauma, the impact of trauma on the client’s life, and maladaptive cognitive and emotional effects of stress and trauma. These exposures compounded over time may create disruptions in the practitioner’s personal and professional life and can lead to a diminished capacity to maintain healthy boundaries, engage in ethical decision-making practices, and provide effective services to clients. Helping professionals have an ethical responsibility to prioritize their mental and emotional well-being and integrate self-sustaining practices into their work. In this chapter, readers will learn about helping professionals’ workplace hazards associated with exposure to trauma and stress and their potential consequences (including but not limited to secondary trauma, vicarious trauma, and burnout). Ethical codes focused on professional wellness will be reviewed, and strategies for professional self-sustainability will be identified. Finally, a case study will be presented demonstrating the role of professional wellness in applying an ethical decision-making model.