This podcast is an exploration of the potential of love to assist social workers and other practitioners in understanding their own wounded hearts. Thus, the focus in on the practitioner and how we can become exhausted and depleted at work. This is typically called burnout. I suggest that while this term is popular and conveys a sense of what is happening, it does not consider the deeper causes of burnout. Broken-heartedness has many causes and ways of being experienced. When feeling burnout because of deep heart wounding it needs a different order of self care and responses from your workplace supervisors.
What I'm particularly interested in discussing with you is if social workers actually experience lovelessness in the workplace, where we're treated unfairly, where we're not recognised and affirmed and properly supported to do the important work we're doing. This deep heart wounding once recognised can be cared for by pivoting on the pain, drawing on the power of love. This pivoting begins the transformation of the pain into heart warming healing. When we refuse to react from our pain by harming others and pay forward with love, this is what mends broken-hearts. The symptoms of burnout ease and our wellbeing improves each time we act drawing on the power of love.
The useful videos on burnout that I mention are by Psych2Go, one example is called “6 signs you’re burnout, not lazy”.
The podcast builds on these other resources to locate the issue of burnout in workplace violence and other factors often beyond the direct responsibility of the practitioner. Self care is important but not always enough to mend broken-heartedness.
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