How to Cultivate Emotional Resilience as a Social Worker
There are few roles as emotionally demanding as social work. It's a role which requires vast amounts of compassion and empathy, as well as the ability to tolerate elevated levels of stress and distress.
In a profession where caseloads pile up sky-high and when 55–60-hour work weeks aren't unusual, it's understandable that burnout is commonplace. As such, social workers must cultivate emotional resilience to be able to withstand the profession's challenges in a way that's both healthy and sustainable.
In this post, we'll be delving into why exactly emotional resilience is so important in social work, exploring what emotional resilience constitutes, and discussing how social workers can better develop this skill.
What is Emotional Resilience?
If you're emotionally resilient, you can ride out adversity and absorb shockwaves of unwanted emotion more easily. If you demonstrate emotional resilience, you can take what life throws at you in your stride. And social work? Well, it can throw a lot at you.
There's no one set way to think about emotional resilience, but for the sake of this article, we're going to consider various factors which can be thought of as promoting emotional resilience. These include psychological flexibility, high self-esteem, positive coping strategies and social support; however, this isn't an exhaustive list.
Why are Social Workers at Risk?
Developing emotional resilience is like strengthening a muscle in our body. Some people might naturally be more resilient than others. However, everybody can still improve their own resilience with practice. The more you practise – the more you work that muscle, the more resilient you'll become.
It goes both ways, though. If you don't work that muscle, then it can struggle to function as effectively. Those curveballs that get thrown your way, the particularly stressful case file or that report that's taking you longer than expected to write, can wear you down more quickly and easily.
Social workers work with people experiencing great personal difficulty day in and day out. They have to be both vulnerable and disciplined, both firm and warm, and this balance can be an exhausting one. The role requires extensive soft, personal skills as well as disciplined organisational skills, too.
It's no wonder that burnout rates are so high amongst social workers, with studies having previously shown that as many as 77% of social workers have experienced moderate to high levels of burnout. The more emotionally resilient you can be as a social worker, the better the chances are of preventing burnout. So, how can you cultivate this skill?
Ways to Develop Emotional Resilience
Positive Coping Strategies
No matter how well-attuned with our inner selves we become, there will still be times when we need to vent, relax or destress somehow. This is where coping strategies come in handy. Notably, there can be healthy and unhealthy coping strategies, and we want to focus on the former rather than unhealthy coping strategies like substance abuse or impulsive, risk-taking behaviours like gambling.
Positive coping strategies include:
Exercise.
Spending time in nature.
Finding new hobbies.
Creating a self-care routine.
Not only do some of these activities have benefits, like the release of endorphins and exposure to sunlight, but they also provide an opportunity to switch off from work.
Social workers can find it challenging to turn off their work brain. However, purposefully engaging in a dedicated activity can help offer a healthy distraction. So, whether it's a weekly Park Run, a board game night or a stroll through the local woodland, try to carve out some time for non-work-related activities, even if it's short.
High Self-Esteem
Building up your self-esteem is a crucial part becoming more emotionally resilient. Why? Because when we have good self-esteem, we're less vulnerable to external influences. When we're more grounded and comfortable with our sense of self, we're less likely to be shaken by things on the outside.
You can bolster your self-esteem in several ways, including challenging negative and unkind thoughts towards yourself, practising self-compassion, avoiding comparison with others, focusing on the present rather than dwelling in the past, and more.
Bouncing Back from Adversity
Let's say, as an example, that the tough work week we mentioned above involved a poor performance review. The person with greater self-esteem will find it easier to bounce back from that adversity than the person who struggles with self-esteem. Bounce-backability is a core part of emotional resilience.
For example, a social worker with high self-esteem might have a particularly tough week at work but know that work doesn't dictate their worth or, ultimately, who they are as a person. Someone with lower self-esteem, by contrast, is more likely to be shaken by that same challenging work week and worry about how it reflects on them as a person.
Setting Boundaries
This doesn't just refer to social workers maintaining clear boundaries with clients, though this is, of course, a big part of it; it also refers to professional boundaries with work and colleagues, too.
Social workers often say "yes" to additional case files and workloads because they don't want to let their team down, and they want to help as many people in tricky situations as possible, even when they haven't got the time to take anything else on.
However, you preserve your time and energy levels by feeling confident enough to say no. You can better apply yourself to your existing caseload while maintaining a better work-life balance. Ultimately, there's only so much you can do as a social worker and recognising that sometimes you can say no, is a big step towards developing emotional resilience.
Social Support
In the same way that sometimes we need coping strategies like lifting heavy weights to vent our frustrations, sometimes it is helpful to have friends and family to vent to, no matter how rock-solid our self-esteem is.
Family and Friends
Social workers who have a tight-knit network of loved ones to whom they can talk are typically able to bear more emotional distress than those who don't, purely because they've got someone to talk to and get things off their chest.
Colleagues
Close bonds with colleagues can also help because they better understand the specifics of the job problems you may be facing as a social worker. There's something to be said for someone who really gets what you're talking about.
It's always worth checking beforehand whether a colleague is in a good place to hear what you have to say; they might also be struggling with burnout or compassion fatigue or simply be having a bad day. In that case, they won't want more piled onto their already-brimming plate.
A quick, "Hey, have you got the emotional bandwidth to talk about [X] at the minute?" would be really appreciated rather than just jumping straight into talking about it.
Psychological Flexibility
Another aspect of emotional resilience is psychological flexibility, defined as "the ability to distance from current mindsets and consider other possible mindsets" (Kashdan, 2010). That's a fancy, science-speak way of saying our ability to cope and reframe our thinking, even under stress and discomfort.
It means that, despite the unpleasant thoughts, urges and sensations we might be experiencing, we stay in touch with the present moment. Then, we choose behavioural decisions based on our values rather than driven by unpleasant feelings.
A Social Work Example
For instance, a social worker might feel overwhelmed and think they can't cope. Without psychological flexibility the person might listen to that thought and avoid the situation or run away from it.
With psychological flexibility, by contrast, the social worker can recognise they're having an unpleasant thought, feeling or sensation, and instead of listening to the content of the thought, reframe it as just a thought.
So, rather than thinking, "I can't cope", they'd reframe it and say, "I'm having the feeling (or the thought)that I can't cope" before committing to a value-led behaviour, which, in this example, might be continuing with the work as planned.
To Recap
To summarise, social workers can develop emotional resilience by encouraging psychological flexibility, working on self-esteem, developing positive coping strategies and using a positive support network. This is just scratching the surface of what can help build emotional resilience, so let this be your starting point and go from here!
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