I havent told my burnout story publicly as yet & I think it is about time. I was just updating my 'about me' page & added a link to this blog post to ensure that I followed through on the disclosure.
As I have said in my 'about me' page I was so blessed to exit uni & land in my chosen area of practice & even more grateful & utterly unaware of just how outstanding the team I landed in was. I had a dedicated supervisor, someone who is still a very dear friend today, along with my highly skilled manager, whom I consider two of the most fierce women on the planet.
After a few years I found myself navigating toward a facilitation & teaching role within a FLO program, the same agency but a different team & leadership structure. I developed this program over the years to combine the dept of educations FLO funding model & a strengths based positive psychology platform, I LOVED it & it was successful & highly celebrated. We had really great outcomes & I have even taught a couple of students from there in teh University foundations studies program years later.
I really & absolutely loved teaching & I was good at it (I think that transition story will be the next blog post). They were some of the most rewarding & happiest times of my career. This team & area of work was outside of the youth justice team & at a time when agency itself was undergoing a lot of changes in leadership & approaches, including shifting from a not-for-profit to a profit based agency.
At around 4 years post graduation I began feeling disappointed in the 'system', I felt injustices weigh heavier than I had before. I found myself 'raging against the machine' so to speak. Now anyone who works in these areas of practice will understand what I mean here. I struggled to make the funding go far enough, the KPI's make sense & the (what felt like) sudden shift toward a business model of practice when for years we had focused on service provision & client outcomes. I found myself arguing with managers, feeling powerless when advocating & weighed down by the oppressive systems & structures. I was unhappy outside of work as well & agitated at my family & a becoming a shouter.
One day after a significant discussion with my team leader about a young persons right to access education I quit. I actually just quit, without a job to go to, without a plan. Just like that. Threw in the towel, flipped a table (metaphorically speaking) & gave notice.
How does a life & career change so drastically over 4 years that you just up & walk out one day? A question I hadn't asked yet but one that was going to frame the next few years & then my practice entirely.
I realise now that I was suffering moral distress & role overload. These 2 things combined meant that I was exhausted & fighting an uphill battle that I didn't even know I was fighting. You see 'burnout' is not that simple. The word "burn-out' is used as a pretty broad umbrella term that doesn't really encapsulate or support awareness or understanding, in fact it is often used as a way to blame the victim. The person with the burn out should be aware & do something about it, should be ever on the look out for the elusive burnout, should have done better at 'self-care' & recognised it when it arrived, slay it like some dragon in a fairy tale. If you cant? Then there you are inherently flawed.......... or 'just need a holiday'.
It was years later that I learned about moral distress, when reading & studying professional resilience. Moral Distress started out in the medical field, it REALLY fits social work! Moral distress is when we must do something that doesn't align with our values or ethical framework; for me was being asked to close young peoples funding & exit them from a safe & reliable program at 17 just because they no longer were 'under the age of compulsion' & therefore schools didnt have to educate them or fund them to be linked in with services. Never mind that these services also linked them to counselling, housing, alcohol & drug supports etc, or that our program was a safe & stable place for these young people & some had been attending every day with us for years, that without our program some of these young people had very little stability. Moral distress showed up as having to turn young people away at 5pm when they were sleeping rough while I went home to sleep in a bed. Moral distress was telling a 15 year old she wasn't eligible for rape counselling because the service began at 16 & the service for children had a wait list of more than 6 months. Moral distress is an agency leaning into profit margins & away from service provision.
On the face of it this is all things I had managed for years, that happens daily in our field & as stand alones are perhaps not 'all that bad'. In fact we are conditioned to see this stuff as 'part of the job', cant take the heat get out of the kitchen. What I have learned however is that over time, as an accumulation, you start to get a picture of the distress felt & how it mounts quietly. A very bad day or a single 'bad' situation don't see you flipping tables. What happens here is more quiet, more insidious. It happens slowly & often before you know it you are actually a different person than the one you started out being.
This is the kind of burn out that exhibits itself at home, with friends & family, in illness & physical health impacts & is often not linked to work at all. I was tired, like really tired all the time, drag my ass out of bed, call in sick just because I didnt want to get up tired. I was annoyed at a note sent home from my daughters school about a bake sale, I was annoyed at my daughter for forgetting to tell me about her homework. I was cancelling catch ups with mates, or worse I was squeezing a weeks worth of catch ups into a weekend & drinking more alcohol than was good for me in the name of having a good time. I was angry at the stupid things, the small things that other people seemed to care about.
Then there is role overload, another thing that is very prevalent in this field. When we are tasked with a job role & responsibilities that don't actually fit within our FTE. I also was doing too much at work, I was working harder than ever before. I was chasing referrals, writing emails, advocacy letters, I was attending network meetings & arguing for funding reforms & discussions. Not a single person I worked with at that time saw this as burn out, I was achieving more & getting more done. People who are burned out also work too hard, they put too much of themselves into their work & say yes to many things with little reflection of the hours they actually have in a day, often this is the expectation of the agency however & of course this escalates with the employee who continues to do more & be more. This is not necessarily a choice made intentionally by the employee.
The part that really stings upon realising, many years later is that in supervision (which was now with my immediate manage, a different person & not a social worker) I was asked 'are you taking care of yourself' & 'dont go doing too much' as a throw away comment at the end of our meetings or (worse) by way of saying 'calm down' at times & insinuating I was being irrational. These were about the only wellbeing discussions had. This was ticking the box for my manager but not addressing any of the very real warning signs. I was performing & as a result there were no discussions about self-care. When I started to get angry about funding cuts, systemic barriers, unfair policies & turning students away from our program due to their ages I was called unreasonable, aggressive & disrespectful of my leadership team. When I wanted to vent & discuss systemic barriers or inequalities I was shut down & made to feel hysterical. I was also no longer receiving supervision with a social worker & believe in hindsight this absolutely would have been a protective factor. I left the agency I had dedicated many years to, as an angry person, someone who my manger was probably happy to see the back of because I was making her job harder.
Now, let me be clear, I didn't do anything unethical & I didn't destroy my relationships with stakeholders or the agency, luckily. I left prior to this being the fall out. I was not on great terms with my immediate supervisor however. I imagine however had I stayed even a few months longer this would be a different story. I have left jobs since then also 'before', with the awareness that if I don't go now I might ruin my reputation, each time thinking the job, team, position, funding etc were the problem. At times they absolutely were & I stand by not sticking around, but there is also an element of what I like to call the "burn-out bounce around". How many people bounce around in their careers hoping to land in the 'unicorn job'? How many leave the industry altogether?
I didn't find stability in my practice until I started to learn about compassion satisfaction, self compassion, facets of burn-out, the need to unpack & build back resilience. All the time off on the planet wont resolve the burn-out we feel in this field. Yes I am sure you need a holiday, we all do & that is a great thing to look forward to but it will not, cannot change the fundamental principles of social work, human or helping services. In my resilience program I compare it to an electrician-they may get relief from their burn-out by taking a holiday or changing businesses or jobs, the issues we face exist in all jobs in our field. An electrician may have a boss who is unsafe, a work load that is unreasonable & this can be solved by negotiations & role change. When will social workers ever work in a space without vicarious or secondary trauma? Without moral distress or role overload? (which of course also needs to be addressed on a macro level but thats out of the realm of our individual & personal responsibility, for now!).
Ours is a wellbeing & self-care that must be built on evidence, based on knowledge, wisdom & intentional actions.
I have learned so much over the last 6 years. I now run a private practice that hopes to support others facing burnout in all its forms, I consult agencies about staff wellbeing & evidence based resilience, I am running group programs for individuals & agencies alike in an attempt to share the knowledge i have gained. I have recently also applied for safe work funding to deliver these programs in the hopes of getting it out there to a broader audience & scaffolding resilience & wellbeing of support workers & carers as well who are often neglected & do a lot of the heavy lifting in this industry.
This is me on the weekend, unapologetically living my best life. I now have a creative approach to my career, I work on short contracts & casually, I have my private practice & make sure I access supervision & time to rest. I make intentional choices & have set very strong boundaries, I have worked hard to incorporate self-care that is grounded in evidence & actually walk the walk. This has now been 6 years in the making, I still 'practice' every day & will never take for granted or assume I am well, I will check in, I willl measure & I will remain accountable.
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