I love social workers. I love their heart for the work. I love their drive and energy. I love how they take responsibility for problems they didn’t create. Social workers are awesome. Yet according to the stats, the average life expectancy of a child protection social worker is only 14 months.
You might be new to the field. Maybe you’re just finishing your degree or have a caseload of families for the first time ever. That’s exciting! I hope you do well and I wish you all the best. Can I share a couple of things? I don’t want to be a vocational buzz-kill, but there are some bumps coming down the road…hard bumps. I think you should know about them.
There’s the stuff we think about…the conscious stuff. But there are also other thoughts that creep just under the surface. Sometimes its the fact that the guy you’re with? He’s not a great long term idea. Probably need to move on. Buying a spanking new Jeep after graduation with a $600 per month payment? Yeah, maybe not the best decision making that’s now got you locked into payments for 36 months. Or 84. Ouch! It’s hard to see that in the moment. It’s the same in social work. There will be some realities that we may not want to be true. Parts of the work we secretly hate that lie just under the surface. Yet we may not be ready to hear those things. Maybe our new identity is wrapped up in social work. Maybe we just finished a four year degree and we’re paying off student loans. Maybe we just thought that THIS was the career for us. When we have those strong drives and motivations to stay in our field, the truth is often unsafe. So it sits there just under the surface. Waiting.
Like I said, I don’t want to mess up your social work mojo or anything. Yet I want to provide a couple guideposts for what may be lurking around in your cranium because at the end of the day knowing and accepting the truth of your experience is the best way to move forward in life. See if any of these secret thoughts and feelings fit your situation or put you at risk for running to the exit:
1) You know that you are not safe
Child protection work is dangerous. I remember racing through a house looking for a missing kid who I thought was hiding in some closet. The problem? Psychopathic dad might have been in the home hiding too. I remember my heart pounding as I went from bedroom to bedroom, quietly pondering the realization, “So this is how I die”. I remember running down the stairs and falling into a mess of police officers who thought I was Psycho Dad. Yikes!
So there’s the physically unsafe thing. That’s real. But that’s not even what I’m talking about. What I mean is that if you work in child protection, unless you are some emotional Adonis and impervious to psychological injury, you will likely sustain a wound in your soul that won’t heal anytime soon. Right now, 70% of all protection workers have at least one PTSD symptom and 15% are diagnosable. Half of PTSD victims will never shake their symptoms. Ever. If I told you that you had a 7.5% chance of losing your arm at this job, you might think twice about your line of work.
2) You secretly hate your clients
What? Sean, I think you’re projecting your crap on me, because I *love* my clients. Let’s explore this shall we? Don’t get me wrong- I care about many of my clients. I want the best for them. Yet I am also routinely subject to the following: I get sworn at, clients lie to my face, and after going above and beyond I routinely get no gratitude and in fact criticism for my efforts. I’ve also been spat on, physically attacked, lied about to my supervisor, and I’ve had things stolen from my office and my car.
On top of that are the things about my clients that I am forced to watch everyday. Abused and traumatized kids. Filthy hoarder houses. Dangerous neighborhoods. I get to sweetly maintain my unconditional positive regard while working with sex-offender dads who might be gratifying themselves with their own children. Yeah “hate” is a good word. Or maybe “profound grief and sadness” works a little better. Let’s just say “bad”. Really, really bad. Bearing witness to this level of human suffering and dysfunction (I’m not allowed to call it dysfunction though, because I’m “strengths-based”) takes its toll on our hearts. We need to acknowledge the honest disdain for the work that usually develops.
3) You have little power but sense that you’re fully responsible anyway
This is the curse of child protection! Through some crazy, twisted warping of reality, if a mom on your caseload decides to bring her 2 year old daughter to a crack shack on the weekend it is your fault. Really, you should have known better. Oh, but if you bring that little girl into foster care you’re a freaking cold-hearted monster who loves to break up families. You can’t win. This is what is classically known as a double-bind. Double-binds are awful on the psyche. Darned if you do, darned if you don’t. They suck so badly, in fact, that people once thought that being subject to a series of brutal double-binds as a child would lead to schizophrenia. This is also a special recipe for high stress. How do you stress a person out? Remove as many forms of control as possible from them and then make them morally culpable for an outcome they cannot possibly guard against. Fun times.
4) You actually became a social worker to fix yourself…and it’s not working
People fight me on this one…at first. It’s easy to deny. But let me tell you a secret. This is my area of doctoral research, and after the social workers who I interviewed realized that they were safe to talk, they all opened up. Of all of the research interviews I conducted, only one participant described her childhood as being free of abuse or neglect. Just one. The rest had endured beatings or sexual abuse from family, friends, and priests. Some were simply abandoned. A few were raised in crazy cults who trapped them. Some grew up “in the system”. But there’s more to this secret: what triggers them now in their work just happens to look EXACTLY like what they went through as kids. Also, what gives them the ultimately sense of meaning in their work is when they provide what just happens to look EXACTLY like the very thing THEY needed as kids. They couldn’t rescue themselves then, but they can spare their clients who are in similar circumstances. Their identification with certain clients just oozes out of them. And when their clients are not spared the same dire fate, they suffer in an especially cruel way. Many secretly hope that if they can sort out their client’s crap, their own crap will magically be sorted out too.
5) Your rescue fantasies have been based on a lie
I have another secret to tell you. We often don’t marry the people we marry. They’re impostors. But you’re an impostor too. What I mean is that the “love of your life” is someone we’ve fallen for, yet don’t even know. Oh we know a few things, like they’re an engineer or that they’re 5’11 or that they really dig us. But we don’t actually *know* them yet. And the way our brains work is like this: When we don’t know someone yet, our hopeful craniums take the liberty of filling in the blanks…with the best possible fantasies. Of course it doesn’t help that our beau-to-be is on his best behaviour too, and so are we.
Child protection is just like that. We learn in school about empathic responding and social justice and making a difference. If we just care about them and do “consciousness raising” with our imaginary too-be clients they will magically “get it” and blossom before our eyes like the clients do on Judging Amy (yes, I’m old). And that’s if you come from the middle class. If you come from crazy-nutso homes or grew up in the system, I know that you know better (but in that case you had better camp out on Number 4).
No, unfortunately our hopes for who our clients are, the effect we can have in their lives, and their capacity to change has been grossly overestimated. It’s what we thought would complete us, but it doesn’t.
So…thanks a bunch Sean for that lovely blog post that has graced my smart phone. Truly, you have inspired me! Okay, so…I am sorry. I didn’t want to burst your bubble. I would love to write posts about pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows. But this is pain with a purpose. I mean, if we don’t acknowledge the sucky, crappy parts about being social workers, how can we get stronger? How can we move on? We cannot change what we will not admit to be true.
So in the spirit of everything that is good, right, and happy, here is my plan. Every week for the next five weeks I will write one short blog post to address each of the the above five secret reasons to quit. I don’t really want you to quit, but I am also sick of seeing you get hurt. I promise to help you find solutions to each of these problems, deal?
Maybe there’s something that wasn’t on this list that you think should be. Let me know in the comments section and let’s talk about it.