In my last post, I shared a list of books that colleagues from across the country had identified as influential to their practice as mental health providers. In this post, I will provide a brief overview of the book that influenced me, but primarily focus on exploring how a book influenced my practice in multiple ways. This post is all about the book that I think influenced my practice the most, Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others by Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky.
I was first introduced to Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky and her ideas about trauma stewardship over six years ago. A colleague and I attended a conference and where Laura ended up being a surprise keynote speaker as the original speaker was unavailable. She is a dynamic speaker and her subsequent break out sessions were filled to capacity. Although, I think I only heard her speak for an hour, I knew right away I connected with the concepts she was talking about. I promptly ordered the book after the conference.
In Trauma Stewardship, Laura outlines 16 signs of trauma exposure response. As Laura described these signs in her talk, I knew I was experiencing many of them. The second half of the book is Laura’s model for taking care of ourselves as helping professionals, so that we can be there for our clients. Laura’s model is based on what she calls The Five Directions.
How did a book influence my practice and me as a professional?
I can identify several key ways in which listening to Laura speak and then reading her book influenced my work.
- I recognized that I was being affected by my work and experiencing multiple signs of trauma exposure response. At that time, I was working with many children and families who had been affected by abuse. I knew it was intense work, but some how the toll that the work was taking on me wasn’t apparent until I was introduced to the concepts of trauma stewardship. I shifted my focus a bit to make sure I was allowing myself the space needed to take care of myself. The focus of my work has shifted a bit in the last few years, but I am still mindful of the signs that I may not be taking as good care of myself as I should.
- My colleague and I brought the concepts of Trauma Stewardship back to our agency. We collaborated three times to offer workshops focused on this topic for our colleagues and it was energizing to see how much others connected to these concepts as well. Now that I think about it, this may have been my first experience sharing information in workshop format for other professionals.
- I have introduced this book into my work with therapy supervisees. I am guessing about 90% of my supervisees have read this book. I ended up buying myself a second copy because I was loaning out my original copy so often that it was never available when I wanted to reference it. 🙂 My supervisees and I talk about how they are being affected by their work and how they are caring for their own wellbeing. For supervision group, I often have one of Laura’s reflection questions flagged as a possible discussion question.
- I have also modified the concepts from this book to be used with my therapy clients as well. As I became a mother, I recognized many similarities between the signs of trauma exposure response and the the symptoms that my clients and I have experienced as a result of being overwhelmed parents. I’ve thus adapted some of Laura’s exercises to use one on one with therapy clients or in some of my workshops.
So that is my quick run down on how a book influenced my practice. What books have influenced your practice? How have those books influenced you? I’d love to hear from you about what books influenced your practice and why. Please feel free to comment below. If you are interested in writing a guest blog about the book that influenced you the most, please email me at sarah@sarahleitschuhcounseling.com and we can discuss this possibility.
Sarah
P.S. If you have read Trauma Stewardship, you may know why I chose the image that is associated with this post.