How Childhood Trauma Can Shape Helpers And Fuels Burnout

A lot of us hit adulthood thinking our childhood is “over,” then we watch ourselves react like a younger version of us just grabbed the steering wheel. Dr. Adam McCormick joins us to unpack why that happens, especially for people in service roles, and why the helping professions are full of high-functioning survivors who look fine on the outside while carrying heavy inner pressure. 

We get practical about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and a distinction that changes everything: ACEs are what happened, but trauma is the wound and the meaning we made. From there we talk about the scripts and “personal commandments” we inherit or create, how we keep corroborating them, and why the familiar can feel safer than the healthy. If you’ve ever wondered why boundaries feel risky, why self-care feels impossible, or why you pour yourself out for others but resist care for yourself, this conversation puts language around it. 

We also connect childhood survival adaptations to real workplace outcomes like secondary trauma, burnout, compassion fatigue, and moral injury. Adam explains how the same emotional attunement that makes a social worker, therapist, counselor, teacher, or chaplain exceptional can also lead them to absorb others’ pain without realizing it. We close with Gabor Maté’s lens on attachment versus authenticity, plus slow, realistic ways to reclaim a healed and authentic self. 

If this resonates, subscribe, share the episode with a colleague who carries a lot, and leave a review so more helping professionals can find it. What old script are you ready to question?

Find Dr. McCormick's book at: https://www.stedwards.edu/directory/sociology-social-work/adam-mccormick

Transcript

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Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi, welcome to the Moral Injury Support Network Podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Roberts, President and CEO of Moral Injury Support Network for Service Women, a nonprofit organization based in North Carolina, and our main purpose is to help women veterans, military women recover from trauma suffered while uh serving in the military and to help them uh not just survive but thrive. Um, today we have a great guest with us, Adam McCormick, Dr. Adam McCormick. He's a professor of social work at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas, where he teaches both the social work and master of counseling programs. His work focuses on childhood trauma, emotional survival adaptations, authenticity, burnout, masculinity, and the inner lives of helping professionals. Dr. McCormick is the recipient of the 2026 Minnie Stevens Piper Professor Award, Texas's highest teaching honor for university faculty, and the 2025 Distinguished Teaching Award at St. Edwards University. He was also the recipient of the 2025 Distinguished Teaching Award. He's the author of the NASW Press book Healing the Helping Professional, the Unfinished Business of Business of Childhood, which explores how childhood trauma and emotional survival roles continue shaping the lives and work of therapists, social workers, counselors, and other helping professionals. So welcome to the show, Adam. It's great to have you today.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

Thank you so much, Daniel. I'm really, really excited to join you.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Yeah, so uh it's I'm really excited about this subject because we we don't realize how much our childhood really in those childhood experiences often dictate the way we behave, the way we feel now. I mean, we can change that, right? That's the good news, but you have to first like identify those um those things, right? So you can understand like why do I respond this way or react this way? I'm an adult, I sh I should know better. That's because little Dan inside is going, right?

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, that's exactly why I picked that title, The Unfinished Business of Childhood. Um uh yeah, oftentimes the person doing the needing, but also the experiencing is is not so much the grown professional, strong adult, it's the scared, overwhelmed, or threatened child. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Yeah.

Adam’s Path Into Trauma Work

SPEAKER_01 2:30

So I want to get into that uh work, but before I do, I want to get a little background about yourself, how you got into this work, how long you've been doing doing this work, because now you're guiding counselors, but I'm guessing you did a good bit of social work or counseling early on, right?

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Yeah, I did. In fact, uh 25 years ago, my wife and I, at very, very young age, fresh out of college, um, moved in to be live-in caregivers um at a at a boys' home for boys in foster care who had endured some of the most unimaginable traumas of abuse and neglect and family separation. Um, and lived with them for a couple of years and did that work, but developed a really, really strong passion for working with survivors of childhood trauma and did that for a long time as a social worker and as a as a trauma therapist. Um, and then became an academic about 15 uh years ago. But all of my work as a researcher and teacher um is really kind of on some element related to childhood trauma. And of course, most recently doing a lot of work on the childhood traumas of helping professionals and frontline workers.

unknown 3:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:36

Okay. What motivated you to come at it from a childhood trauma angle?

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. Um, in in in our professions, and I would imagine it's it's very similar in the populations that you work with. When it comes to kind of talking about childhood stuff, we don't have good answers for folks. Uh, you know, and and and so it actually, and I and I think you can probably appreciate this given the work that you do, um, you know, I've I was became really, really curious about the the ways that social workers and helping professionals and teachers and educators and other frontline workers experience the secondary trauma that comes in their work when they're exposed to so much injustice, so much trauma, so much heavy stuff, how it affects them. And in the course of doing that work, I came across a lot of the research of combat soldiers. And in in just study after study that found that soldiers who went into combat who had experiences of childhood trauma were so much more likely to have PTSD, but also the wounds of that were so much more pervasive and intense. And I thought, well, surely that's gotta be the same case for us as well, that those of us who carry a lot of wounds and trauma from childhood who come in to heal those wounds and experience, you know, witness and observe things like child abuse and you know, domestic violence and all of these things that we're exposed to every single day, we're gonna experience that in an entirely different way. And so that's kind of where my work kind of took that focus towards how does that grow up with us? How does those experiences from childhood, especially those experiences of trauma, kind of shape the how we do our work, uh, but also how the work affects us.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

Um yeah, it's uh it's very important.

Why Childhood Still Runs The Show

SPEAKER_01 5:34

And last week I was in Kansas um giving a class to some National Guard chaplains um about moral injury, and we early on, I think it was in the first hour, we covered ACEs, um, adverse childhood experiences, and that was all new information for most of them. I think there were maybe one or two that said, Yeah, I've heard a little bit uh about that. But that that um brought about a good discussion about that, and because you could see that the chaplains were starting to make the connections, uh, maybe in their own life or in the lives of some of their some of their clients, of yeah, okay, I can I can see how that uh so we had a good lively discussion about ACEs, and it was just you know, good information as sort of like foundational uh or background information to know about a person. It's I've always said even before I found out about the ACEs research, uh, I've always been kind of a um, you know, as an introvert, we tend to like study other people and that kind of thing. So I've always been an observer of other people and their behavior, why people behave certain ways. And I and I observe that if I could understand anyone's background, I would totally understand why they do what they do and why they make the decisions they make. But we don't like people don't walk around, hey, here's my childhood background. So they do things and you're like, why you know, why do they act that way? Why do they behave that way? Why don't they whatever? That's you know, it's because these early childhood experiences that, in my opinion, I'd love to hear your take on this. If we can examine those, we can heal them, we can fix them. But if they go unexamined, um we're likely to continue to like be driven by them. Is is that correct?

SPEAKER_00 7:36

Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the moves we make as as ski as kids are oftentimes the exact same moves we make as adults, they're just a little bit more polished and we're better at them now as uh as adults. No, I I I agree wholeheartedly uh with you, Daniel. I mean, it's um in in I really view the especially the the wounds of of trauma um really more not as an excuse for our behavior, but as an explanation for it. And oftentimes that's what people need more than anything else. You know, and you can walk and chew gum at the same time. You can still have some level of accountability and you're not excusing their behavior, but it helps to know why at one point in time this behavior uh makes sense. Uh, I teach my students a an adaptation model that, you know, when it comes to uh uh experiences in childhood, we we're we're just adaptive creatures in childhood, right? We just adapt to our environments and we and we take on these behaviors and we kind of develop these stories about ourselves to keep keep connected to our caregivers and our parents and our families or to survive or endure whatever we're we're dealing with. And oftentimes as adults, you know, then we have some of these behaviors or we have these struggles in life that we don't really have a good explanation for. And we think there's something there that we need to change or we need to fix, when in reality, it's oftentimes something more that we need to, we need to heal, and we would have a better luck not saying what's wrong with me, what do I need to fix? But what happened to me and how might this behavior had may have may have made good sense to me at one point in time, not what's wrong with it now, what was what was right about it um back then. And and you referenced the the ACE study. I I mean I've that that research is is I just think been so seminal. Yeah and I think when we think of ACEs, like the the ace is the experience that that you know we have in childhood, uh, you know, our parents get divorced, or we have a parent with addiction or abuse or neglect, or you know, the all the other ones. Right in the trauma, I like to think about as the wound, right? Trauma is not the bad things that happen to us, aces are the bad things that happen to us. Trauma is the wound that we experience. It's the stories that we construct about ourselves, yeah, right? The meaning that we make out of the experience. And when it comes to when we understand trauma not as the bad things that happened to us or the good things that didn't happen for us, but as the wound that we experience because of those things, well, we can heal some wounds, right? We can we can tend to some wounds, right? You know, we can't, you know, the the other stuff's not negotiable. The meaning that we make from those experiences, our sense of value and worth and what we do with the shame and all of that, the pain, that's all that's always negotiable. That's always stuff that we can we can kind of work on, even as adults.

ACEs Versus Trauma As A Wound

SPEAKER_01 10:20

Yeah, I I think that's great. I a few years ago, I don't remember where I read it, but I read where the author was talking about personal commandments, right? And this really made sense to me. It's these things that that we tell ourselves or that others like our parents have given us do's and don'ts of life and etc. that that served a purpose and worked well at a certain point in our life, but many of them are not helping us now, and but we don't examine them, we don't try to change them, um or or we we don't know we if we can and things like that. But our personal commandments are all changeable, and it's just a matter of um sort of like in part recognizing okay, what is this personal commandment? Is it serving me and what do I need to think about now? And and those commandments, like for instance, I after I was shortly after I read about this, I immediately was able to apply it in a counseling session. This young uh soldier, she was um and a non-commissioned officer, so she was just getting going in her career. Um, and she was a reservist, but she wanted to do a lot more active duty stuff. She had a husband who was who was an active duty special operator, um, and he loved his job, he's really good at it, but then he came home and he was sort of like a bump on a log, and he really just sort of controlled the whole marriage, marital environment, and they didn't have a lot of intimacy and that kind of thing. He wasn't very happy, and he didn't seem to be bothered by it. He was like it was benefiting him, but not her. And so when she she told me, so she was coming to me for advice, and she said, Well, my mother told me, and this is one of those personal commandments, that marriage is not about being happy, right? And so, according to my mother, I need to just you know, like almost like I'm being selfish for wanting to have a happy marriage and stuff, and and you could tell obviously this was coming from a woman who probably was unhappy in her marriage and was told to the most important thing is stay married, right? And so, so that was a personal commandment that had been foisted on her. Um, and it really was causing her to think, like, am I wrong for even questioning whether I should want intimacy and happiness in my marriage? And so we that you know, we had a we had a long conversation about that, and the long story short is she was much happier later in the sense that at least she was deciding for herself, was she did she want a happy marriage, was she willing to fight for it or change her husband if he wasn't that kind of thing, instead of just being driven by this commandment that was given to her that that wasn't helping her, you know. So long story, but I mean it it it it really illustrates really easily the kind of thing that many of us are walking around with being told when we were young, having that sink in for lack of better information or or experience or wisdom, and then later on in life feeling guilt or shame or whatever about even considering changing that view. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

Yeah, I mean, what was uh uh adaptive then can be maladaptive for us now. Yeah, and oftentimes those scripts, it sounds like for her, that script was kind of given to her in probably in some variation, even long before her her marriage, I would imagine. Uh and then two, and you know, we we also kind of construct scripts and stories about ourselves. And once we've once we kind of get these scripts, whether they're handed to us or we construct them ourselves, then we kind of roll up our sleeves and do the busy work of of corroborating them and making them real. And in in, you know, then you know what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna kind of create dynamics because I'm getting a sense of control from that, or maybe even a sense of belonging from making this story or this script kind of come true, even if, or especially if uh it's destructive for me or it's unfair for me in some sort of way. Um in, you know, and if somebody carries some trauma from childhood, you know, we gravitate towards what we know, towards what is familiar. It feels safe and recognizable for us. And as much as we cling to what is safe and familiar and recognizable, we run equally as fast and as far away from what is new. So setting a boundary or taking up space or saying, no, I'm I want something different in this relationship can feel really, really risky and really, really scary, especially if the script is, well, marriage isn't, you know, you're not supposed to be happy in a marriage, right? You're just supposed to kind of endure it. Well, that makes setting a boundary or expecting something different even more risky for me and scary more, you know, scarier for me in some ways. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Yeah, I mean, it explains why so many people stay in unhappy situations, whether it's their job or marriage or whatever, because the fear of the unknown is greater than the the pain of the known. At least I know what this situation is. Um, and I I've counseled and talked to people through a lot of transition of um you know, they haven't all been marital things, but some of them have, of like, hey, my you know, the reality is your husband is abusive. Um but you know, like her, this is a different person. My husband's abusive. Uh I don't the fear of getting divorced, what will I do then? How I take care of the kids, and I don't want to take my kids away from him. And it's like Yeah, but you just said he was abusive, you know. So so like But the but the technique of like getting people to rethink those narratives is tricky, right? How do you how do you get people to examine those narratives? Because you can't say, well, you need to think this way, right? That's incredibly disrespectful, and and I'm not in charge of you.

How To Examine Old Narratives

SPEAKER_01 16:45

Yeah. So I can't tell you what to do. I can just share, you know, I have my own way of going about it, but I'd love to hear how you can help people, you know, do this, unpack those things.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

Yeah, yeah. You know, and I always start with what are they protecting here? And you know, something like that, leaving an abusive relationship. One, two, I gotta be mindful of some of the structural and the systemic stuff that makes it tougher for me to actually, you know, leave the relationship, even if I wanted to, and even if I, you know, that you know, one, I got to be mindful of that. But two, you know, what am I really protecting here? Um, Bessel Vanderkook, who's a well-known trauma author, you know, says scared animals return home. You know, and you know, we we develop kind of a set of adaptations and stories and scripts that become familiar and recognizable for us. Um and in, you know, what happens is is we we do get that control in childhood, in, in, in this, we become really, really good at those strategies in those adaptations. So, so I know how to kind of like you said, right? I I know how to be in this relationship, even if it's unfair, even if it's unsafe for me, I know how to navigate a relationship like this. And I've been preparing for this my my entire life in in many ways, right? I see it with so many of my students who, you know, are kind of the family hero, people pleasers in their family who completely disconnect from their own needs and overfunction and take care of everybody else, uh, never have a need in their childhood, and then they they come to college and they end up with some guy who's just a real jerk and treats them really. Well, I know how to be in that relationship. Not only do I know how to be, I have a whole set of skills for this relationship. And and sometimes what you'll see with them is when they are in a relationship with a healthy partner, um, you know, who wants to be respectful and mutual and all that sort of stuff. Well, I don't have the skills and the stories and the scripts and then in in in the adaptive for that one. So there's a really, really good reason why that feels so so scary. So, yeah, when you say I know what to expect over here, even if it's bad and destructive, uh, that can feel a lot safer for me than the novelty of what's what's on the other side over here, even if that's fair to me, even that's a help, even if that's a healthy relationship over there, right? So I always start with what are you protecting here? And also, you know, what might have been right about some of these things back then, right? Because you're right. I I can't just say as a as a social worker, as a therapist, oh, get out of this relationship. This person's treating you really bad, you deserve something better. One, that's never gonna work, right? We know that. That is never gonna work. It's then it, you know, they have to make those connections. So then our work is really to help kind of foster and facilitate what connections do they need to make? And if we kind of start with, hey, where did this start? Right? Why would this feel safe for you? Why would this feel familiar for you? Why would this feel recognizable? What are you getting out of this relationship here? You know, who's doing the needing? Is it a grown adult right now, or is it a scared, lonely, overwhelmed child, right? Um, you know, then I think we can we can kind of get to the heart of that. Also, who's showing up in this relationship? Is it the adaptive, scared childhood, kind of a child's version of what an adult should be in a in a romantic relationship or a marriage or something like that? Or is it a grown, wise, you know, healthy adult who's making those decisions? And oftentimes, you know, uh, that's why you know relationships more than anything else are kind of the unfinished business of our our childhood in many ways. Yeah. So I start what what are you protecting here?

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Yeah, it's that's very true. Um you know, I even at 54 years old, I um you know, discover like new new uh new commandments, new the new narratives that that have been running in the background since childhood that I did I didn't recognize. I I just didn't know they were there. Um and I think what helps me I'm an introspective kind of person um and an avid reader, so so that really helps. Like the the brain is always churning. I'm always trying to improve um you know, that kind of thing. So but i i i it's it's like you think it might be easy to think I'm 54 years old, my childhood I barely remember it, doesn't matter that much. No it might it might really be driving you, you know, but we it's all it's and the other thing is too, it strikes me too, it's like if something's not dysfunctional, you don't need to examine it. It's the dysfunctional stuff. If you're not feeling well or you're having you know problems setting goals and keeping them or whatever, whatever the dysfunction is, that's a good clue in my in my thinking that there's something there to analyze. Especially if it's like, well, I seem to be doing all this stuff. I seem to be, you know, doing all the things, but I I just I don't feel Good about this, or I'm walking around for you, I have a lot of anxiety or whatever. Umes that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 22:07

Is that about what not to mention the fact that a lot of our our adaptations from from childhood trauma are kind of rewarded and reinforced and kind of viewed in a in a positive way. The way

People Pleasing And Going One Under

SPEAKER_00 22:18

that I look at it, you know, working 25 years with with kids in foster care is when a kid is experiencing some form of threat or trauma or threats to their relationship or you know, dynamics in their relationships with their parents or their families that kind of threaten their sense of value or worth, you go, you you adapt in one of two ways. You either go one over, uh, and that's oftentimes anger, fight, aggression, power, control, grandiosity, narcissism, you know, all that sort of stuff. We know that's that's the this is the idea that hurt people, hurt people, right? Which happens, we know that. But there's a whole, a much larger segment of folks who go one under, meaning I got to go one under the people, I gotta go one under the shame and the fear and the pain. And the way that I go one under is I people please, I'm really hyper successful, I overfunction, I'm the family hero. Uh and and and then as an adult, I you know, I keep doing those things because the moves we make in childhood are the same moves that we make in adulthood in in many ways, but nobody's gonna recognize that as uh, you know, that I'm in crisis or that I have to know, it's I really, really like this person. Uh wow, they're so nice, they're so helpful, they're so kind, which they are, but oftentimes it's it's as a survival strategy, right? It's the only way that they know how to be in relationship is to go one under everyone. Yeah. Um, and then I, you know, if I need to set a boundary or I need to take care of myself or I need to set a standard for how I'm going to be treated, well, I can't do that here because I feel like these people only like me, or somebody only wants to be in a relationship with me, or my boss, or my command, you know, only values me for how I perform and not for who I am.

SPEAKER_01 24:04

Yeah, I think it's really true. And I I find that self-image, I think, is one of the really difficult things to change um in the way you see yourself. It's just because um it's it's it's almost like you see these untruths as being objective, and I try to tell people there's no such thing as objective opinion about you or someone else. It it's like you can decide what who you are and what you are at any time, right? There's some work that has to go into like transforming if you want to be something different, um, or someone different. Um, and you know, there's some aspects of our personality or who we are that we may not be able to change. I'm never gonna be taller than five foot five, but but I mean that's not really the stuff that matters, just the way we think about ourselves, who we are, our value, and so on and so forth. Um there's no objectivity to that, but people almost feel you know, if somebody says, Well, you know, you're not you don't have any real, you don't have common sense. You're I've heard this before. It really irritates me, really pissed me off, to be honest with you. But I've heard this before, like uh, you know, you have all that academic sense. You have all the academic smarts, you got all those degrees, but do you have any common sense, right? And so for a long time I sort of bought that as like truth, like, yeah, I don't really have any common sense because I struggled to do mechanical things or do uh carpentry stuff, even though Patty always has me in some kind of home project. And so so, but at but I eventually realized, you know, that's BS. The reason why I'm not really good at that stuff is because I don't have a lot of practice and I haven't been trained. I didn't have a dad who said, Hey, you you know, whatever. I said there's nothing inherently wrong with my mind where I can't I can learn anything if I watch enough YouTube videos, read enough books, try enough whatever. Uh, so it's not objectively true that I don't have common sense. What was objectively true is that I didn't have a lot of knowledge about how to do certain carpentry things, yeah. But that can be learned, right? But but I find that's just an example for myself. But I find there's a lot of people that that make that same mistake where they'll say, Well, I'm not very smart. BS. Like, unless you actually have some kind of diagnosed mental disability, research shows that we're all very near the same level of intelligence, might give or take a couple of percentage points. It's just you've been telling yourself that that garbage for so long, you think it's subjectively true, it's not. Yeah, it's yeah, probably objectively untrue.

unknown 27:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:02

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And and and too, and you're 100% right. We you know, we become good at the things we spend our time, especially in childhood, doing. And and for all of those people, right? Like, and I'm much like you too. I just don't have those, you know, a lot of those um you know, more kind of hands-on skills with stuff because I I I grow without a father. Um, nobody taught me those things. I would have been great at them had I learned them. But but they're, you know, I'm a really, really good social worker because I spent my childhood kind of reading this alcoholic father and trying to scan and predict and be really emotionally intuitive. So, you know, oftentimes too, like what we want to ask, you know, even if I if I'm not great at something, right? It's probably because I just didn't get the opportunity to develop that skill. But but two, what am I really, really good at? Every single one of us become good at the things that we spend childhood doing, right? If I have a soccer ball just velcroed to my foot, I'm gonna be the Lionel Messi of of soccer or basketball, I'm gonna be LeBron James, right? Some of us, especially in fields like, you know, you're a therapist and I'm a social worker, we're good at many of the things that we probably, you know, we're just really, you know, emotionally mature and intuitive and and paid close attention to human behavior and that sort of stuff um as well. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:15

So I want to get into the book a little bit, more specifics. Um tell us, like, give us a good sense of what this book is about and uh what you're trying to achieve with it.

Why He Wrote The Book

SPEAKER_00 28:28

Yeah. So, you know, I've been teaching childhood trauma for 25 years. Um, and about five or six years ago, right around COVID time, I you know, and I'm out in the community, I'm in the classroom teaching social workers, teachers, chaplains. Um uh and about five or six years ago, I started to teach about more about like emotional and relational the effects of that on kids and childhood, you know, growing up with a parent with addiction or you know, a parent who's you know emotionally really, really bad or controlling, or you know, that's not so much as kind of the big T, you know, physical abuse, sexual abuse, that kind of stuff. Um, and what I found was a really, really interesting dynamic. It didn't matter who I was talking to, social workers, therapists, teachers, chaplains, overwhelmingly the response was this content resonates with me more on a personal basis than it even does on a professional basis, the families or the clients that I serve. And then inevitably they would ask me, okay, like I had some of these experiences, how might that be impacting me in my professional life? How I take care of myself, my relationships with my how my how the work affects me, um, and that sort of stuff. And what I realized was, despite the fact that I've been studying and teaching childhood trauma for 25 years, I didn't have a good response for them. I didn't have a good answer. And I realized the answer that I was given back as a graduate student was pretty substandard as well. You know, just kind of, you know, this this uh kind of cookie cutter language around transference or counter-transference or projection or, you know, just nothing meaningful. And so I said, okay, I'm gonna my mission the next couple of years, I'm gonna do a big project so I can better answer that question for the people I work with. How does my own childhood stuff impact my work, my relationship with myself, my clients, self-care, all of that sort of stuff? And so I just talked to helping professionals, social workers, therapists, trauma workers, chaplains, teachers. Um, and we talked about their childhoods and we talked about their professional lives, uh, and just so many universal themes that came up over and over and over again that, you know, kind of that's why it led me to that title, that this is very much the unfinished business of our childhood. And and and for many of them, very similar to what we see with military personnel and soldiers, uh-huh, that those who had a lot more trauma in childhood were affected and a lot more vulnerable to the secondary trauma of work when they were helping families or kids who were abused or neglected or dealing with domestic violence or whatever it was. Um and so uh yeah, that that was really kind of the origins of of the book and kind of you, you know, taking those stories and those experiences and creating some frameworks and some interventions for folks and activities for folks to use so that they can begin the work of addressing how how their childhood is kind of showing up in their in their lives and relationships now as adults.

Secondary Trauma Moral Injury And Boundaries

SPEAKER_01 31:24

Okay. Um, so give us a couple of examples maybe or or just talk us through like some of the dangers for a for a provider uh like a social worker or a counselor if they if they have this unexamined, unhealed um childhood trauma and so on.

SPEAKER_00 31:44

Yeah, yeah. You know, one of a big a big one is going to be you know moral injury, burnout, secondary trauma. Uh in childhood, as I said before, we become good at the things we do in childhood. And for a lot of folks who grew up in in traumatic homes or really you know stressful family systems growing up, you know, one of the adaptations that you develop is you become really kind of cued into the inner worlds and the emotions of your parents or your family members, the people around you. Uh, uh, you know, not only to kind of predict and prevent threat, but to look for those opportunities for connection in many ways, and to kind of pay attention, you know, you're paying attention to your little brother and your little sister and how they're feeling and all of that sort of stuff. Uh, it's that kind of that empath in you. You're you just have developed this inner capacity to quite literally absorb the inner experience, the inner worlds, the emotions, the feelings, the fears, the hurts, the pains of the people around you. Now, fast forward 10, 15 years, now this person's a professional provider in some way, a therapist, a trauma worker, a social worker, a teacher, something like that. Well, one, this is gonna make me incredible at my job, right? Because what's gonna make me better at my work then I can quite literally intuit, feel what you're feeling. Maybe oftentimes maybe even better than you can, right? It sounds like Danny, you like you it sounds like you kind of have that capacity as a therapist, right? Where you can kind of say, Adam, I think here's what's going on internally, long before I can recognize that. Oftentimes that we don't realize that comes from childhood for us. Now, when we think about burnout, but more so secondary trauma, moral injury, uh, oftentimes a big component of that is I'm taking in the inner experience of the people around me. I'm working with folks with trauma. I'm quite literally absorbing their trauma, their pain, their shame, their hopelessness, their helplessness, whatever it might be. So the same thing that makes me so good at this work, right, unchecked without realizing it, without putting boundaries on it to take care of myself, to recognize when it's happening, to recognize why I do this or why I'm so good at this. Well, what am I gonna do? I'm just gonna absorb uh the inner worlds of people without taking care of myself. So now there's a good reason that if I have a childhood trauma history, I'm three times more likely to experience the secondary trauma of my work than somebody who doesn't. Moral injury, the same thing. Right. Um and so I think that's one, you know, one kind of classic example. Or if I grew up in a family system where, you know, if I were to set a boundary, it would have been so dangerous for me as a child. Well, then I never learned how to set a boundary. Not only that, but boundaries are not even an option for me. And I come into a profession that might say, oh, do self-care, take care of yourself, prioritize your needs. Well, you'd have better luck getting a kindergartner to solve a trigonometry equation than to just tell somebody with a history like that, take care of, you know, do self-care. It's not gonna happen uh in in many ways. So the book really kind of takes a deeper look at at one why we we in in it develops an appreciation for why we have these adaptations and behaviors and beliefs, but also what what can we do a little bit different here?

SPEAKER_01 34:58

Yeah. Yeah, I remember uh counseling a another a lot of the people I counseled were six to eight to ten years in their career, right? It's really interesting how you can come out of uh uh difficult childhood and when you're young, um, like I I came went straight into the army and I was I did all kinds of cool stuff in the army. I was never really afraid. Um, I I didn't feel fear until later on when I was trying to do like other things outside of the military. It would scare me to death. But anyway, that's a different story. But we we it's it's it's like the point I'm making is often later when these childhood things start to really rear their head. Um, and I think maybe certain experiences or or a certain level of experiences that that do that. But I remember um counseling uh a young NCO who um she had a a really horrible childhood. I mean, it just really, really traumatic. And out of that she developed um a sense of like uh she had extremely low self-esteem, but she was a high achiever, um, which people low self-esteem often can be high achievers because they're running away or trying to prove to themselves they're not a piece of garbage, right? Um so but but she also was very difficult for her to provide any care for herself, and she saw herself as a terrible mother, even though I thought um she was a good mother. Uh she was doing the best she could, and she was doing, you know. But anyway, uh so I I kept trying to try these different ways of getting her to think about herself in a different way, like, and it was really difficult because she objectively saw herself as being a pretty worthless person. So it was really hard to break through that. But I remember at one point asking her because we're trying to not tell her to get help, but encourage her to think about getting some specific, you know, clinical help. And I sort of asked the question, you know, you don't think it's worth it for you to get help? Let's say, let's turn turn the tables. Let's say it was another soldier who was seeking you for help, the same issue. What would you do? What would you say to him? And she was like, I would do anything I could to help them. Um it's like, well, why don't you do that for yourself? Well, because I'm me, you know, kind of thing. So it was like, but but we often do that, right? In helping professionals, we'll do anything and everything for other people. Um, we sacrifice anything and everything for the the goodness of others. For some people, that comes from like a Christian background where they're thinking about Christ's sacrifice for other people, it's other kind of ethics. But when you start talking about them deserving care and needing care, it's typical for me to run into resistance with that. Um and what I've what I what I've always I learned this recently, but I like this approach for me personally, is that because I speak to a lot of chaplains and a lot of people who who are Christians are coming at from religious background, and so I kind of use this with them. I said, Okay, so God created you in the in his image, right? That's what the Bible says, which means you have you have inestimable value, right? Okay, and no one else is more valuable to than you, like we're all the same level of value if we're all created from the same creator, kind of concept. Yeah, okay, I can begin to see that. So then if you're the same value as somebody else, it's wrong in a way for you to sacrifice yourself for someone else because you're trading, you're saying they're more valuable than you are, and that's why you must sacrifice your well-being for them. But if you're on the same level, you deserve that consideration as much as they do, kind of thing. At least it begins to get them thinking about just not realizing, in a sense, that they're they think they're sacrificing so much because they're being loving and compassionate, they really want to help people. That's true, but they're also an underlying like that person is more important to than me, therefore, I must give up myself to help them kind of kind of idea. Do you run into that or does that all the time make sense?

SPEAKER_00 39:52

Yeah, yeah. I mean, one of the things that I try to get across to so many of the social workers that I work is like there's there's got to be room in this work in this world for you too. Um, and and I, you know, again, it always kind of goes back to, you know, where do these messages kind of come from? And for this one, I, you know, I think there's a really, really helpful framework that for me has been just a game changer.

Attachment Versus Authenticity

SPEAKER_00 40:11

It actually comes from the work. I don't know if you've ever heard of uh Gabor Mate, um, uh really brilliant trauma uh clinician. Uh, and I'll I'll explain this very briefly, but he really talks about kind of the two most irreducible needs that we have in childhood. The first is, of course, attachment. You and I know both a lot a ton about attachment for good reason, right? It's our strongest drive in life. You know, imagine if I had a one-year-old baby here and I sent him out in the world on his own to make it, you know, he's not gonna last two seconds without me because he needs me and he knows better than anything else. Right. He needs me, right? And he's gonna do everything that he has to do. And my greatest job as a caretaker, as a parent, is to make sure that he knows, hey, you this thing between you and me, you're always gonna have it. There's nothing that you have to do to get more of it. There's nothing you could do to get less of it, right? And that's attachment. It's our strongest drive in life because we don't survive without it. But we have another need that's just as important, but oftentimes much less understood, right? And that is the need to for authenticity to foster our authentic self, right? You're talking here about self-love, self-esteem, self-actualization, all of that sort of stuff, right? And that has to happen for us. And just as a kid has to grow up in an environment where their attachment is non-negotiable, guaranteed, they get it simply because you are you and no other reason, you don't earn it, you don't work for it, you don't get more or less of it. You also have to grow up in an environment where you are fully celebrated and invited to be the you that you were made to be. Authentic emotions, needs, identity, right, all of that sort of stuff makes up that authentic self that we're supposed to take care of and have esteem for and prioritize and all of that sort of stuff. Now, the issue here is, and Mate calls this traumatic tension, is for a lot of us, and it sounds like definitely for this is this person that you were working with, probably at some point there's a tension between these two things. My authentic self, right, the the me that I was made to be that I'm supposed to love and have esteem for, right, threatened my attachment. I couldn't take up space, I couldn't express needs, I couldn't be myself, right? I couldn't, whatever it was. And kids are brilliant in childhood, meaning that they're gonna do exactly what they need to do to keep those attachments. But oftentimes what that means is I have to disconnect from this self. And then they grow up and we say, have some self-esteem, love yourself, take care of yourself, prior and and and and it's like what self are you talking? Like you cannot take care of yourself that you don't know. Um, and so yeah, uh that's it, and and uh for me, I realized this in my 40s, right? I had no idea which were which parts were authentically me and which parts were entirely adaptive, right? That I just kind of pieced together, right? Because when you're not loved for who you are as a child, you spend a whole heck of a lot of time trying to be liked uh in in many ways. And and so yeah, there's this good reason why it's so hard to kind of have that self-esteem and that self-love uh in many ways, because you're so far removed from the self that you're supposed to be taking care of.

SPEAKER_01 43:19

Yeah, it's it's really true. Um in your in your work um with because you're sort of teaching the providers, right? You're you're uh you're enabling them to care for so many other people by helping them understand themselves and and do this these skills. Um what about patience with with yourself as you're trying to work through this? You're trying to like change what feels like you are fundamentally, because you really like deep down inside want to be someone else in a sense, or you Want to, or maybe a better way is to say you want to like actuate in the world in a different way than you have been, you've come to this realization that I really want that. But dang, you know, it's a big mountain to climb. Yeah. And so is that part of the the work that you have with people?

SPEAKER_00 44:20

It's probably the most important part. Yeah.

Grace Small Steps And Getting The Book

SPEAKER_00 44:22

You know, one question that I always ask for somebody, you know, especially if we're making the connections between childhood and adulthood. You know, if they're telling me, hey, I had to fight and scream and yell as a you know to be seen and heard, or this was the only way I could keep safe, or you know, if I had to sabotage relationships because I knew that I was going to be disappointed or hurt or betrayed in some sort of way, or if I had to go under and people please and be a hero and overfunction and make perfect grades or whatever it was. I always start with one question. What would have happened to you had you not done that as a child? And then it's it's so clear to folks, oh my God. Like I did not have a choice. I did not choose any of this as a child. And our most brilliant thing I've ever encountered in my life is a child's nervous system, right? I have seen kids, especially working in the foster care system, do some of the most brilliant strategies in order to survive and detach and to keep enduring life and all sorts of stuff. Uh so then I realized oh, not only did I not have a choice, but at one point in time, this was a brilliant survival strategy or attachment strategy. Now I can have a lot more grace for myself. I can really honor and appreciate why I did those things then and perhaps why continue to do these things now. I can move a little bit closer to it, get to know it, honor it, appreciate, understand it. And now I have a little bit of power and control over what I want to do with it, where it shows up in my life now. Right. I don't want to, I don't have to do this anymore. Right. I've I I don't need the same strat, hopefully, I don't need the same strategies in my relationships now that I've chosen, or my work now that I've chosen, that I needed right in in my family at one point in time. I just don't need them anymore. So the the more we get to know them and honor them and understand them and appreciate the behaviors, the more power and control we have over what we want to do with them.

SPEAKER_01 46:14

Yeah, and you're talking to people who who by nature I would think are pretty introspective. They're they're pretty uh, you know, they're in professions where their job is to think about the mind and how it works and how trauma works and that kind of thing. So uh I would think they would be open to exploring these pretty well once they they understand that. Have you uh what what have been some of the reactions that you've gotten from your students in terms of once they begin to open this up and get opened up for them about this?

SPEAKER_00 46:49

Yeah, you know, sometimes it takes a little more it uh uh encouragement or patience to, you know, there's it. I always start with there's a good reason why we don't do this work, right? It's scary, it can feel risky, it could be tough. All right. Uh some of these adaptations serve us pretty well, if we're being brutally honest. They make us pretty good at the work that we do. We know that. Um But here's here's the thing that that universally will happen, and whether it's a student, whether it's somebody who's been doing this work for for decades here, is they they they realize that not only are they more fair to themselves, that there's room for them that you you can walk and chew gum at the same time. You can honor your story and take care of yourself and prioritize yourself and all that and in in and not only continue to do good work for the clients or the communities that you work with, but actually do much better work, right? Because as good as these adaptive helpers and frontline providers are, right, they're a whole heck of a lot better at doing that work when they're healed in their authentic there. And I and I always start that this is language that works really well with them because they are very selfless people. Um for good re you know, there's a reason why they're they're in this work for sure, for sure, right? You know, I always remind them that the greatest gift that you know you can give to your your clients that you work with, or your spouse or your partner, or if you're a parent, the greatest gift that you can give your kids is the gift of having a healed and authentic self. It makes you so much better in the work and in your relationships. Um, but also recognizing why why that would be risky uh for a lot of folks to to try that on. And when they do when I do have them try it on, it's in very slow ways. Just set a little boundary, take a little bit of care of yourself. Yeah. Let's see how that goes. Uh, you don't have to do something big and monumental here.

SPEAKER_01 48:40

Yeah, because there's a thing like you try a little bit, and then it's like, oh, I'm pull back. That's scary. And um so yeah, that that's interesting. Who who should get the book?

SPEAKER_00 48:52

You know, I think any I think the book would be helpful for anybody that has a history of childhood adversity, which is a whole a whole lot of us, but I think especially if folks are in leadership roles or service roles, um, they're responsible for for for other people in some capacity, um, and they want to be a little bit more mindful maybe of the stories and the histories of the people that they're they're taking care of or they're working with. Um so it's a pretty broad population that I think the book would appeal to. And like I said, it's full of not only, I think, clinical insights, um, but also, you know, when I wrote the book, I wrote it in such a way that I want people to be able to take it and immediately bring it to life in some sort of way, apply it. There's tons of activities that you can do on your own or with a supervisor or in therapy, whatever you know, it can work in in every capacity there. A lot of frameworks, you know, little things that we can do. Um that we can we can take it with us right into our work and right into our relationships.

SPEAKER_01 49:55

Okay. Um, just if you will, just real quick, take us through kind of the arc of the book, how it how it builds out from the beginning to end.

SPEAKER_00 50:05

Yeah. So I'm I'm a story-based teacher and I'm a story-based writer. So I start with kind of my own story. I grew up with an alcoholic father who was a raging narcissist, who my world was a mind, an emotional minefield in many ways. And I took on the role of his social worker from the time I could walk and talk, um, and was really, really good at it as a small child and didn't realize this for a long time. So I kind of start by talking about my own story. Throughout the book, I write so much about the stories and the experiences of helping professionals and trauma workers and social workers and chaplains who trusted me with their story. So there's a lot, you're going to get a lot of story in it. So we we start by, you know, really kind of understanding childhood trauma, what it is, what it isn't, understanding the wound of it, understanding it not as an excuse, but as an explanation. Then we move into the adaptations and the behaviors and the stories that we construct and why we constructed those and why we took on those adaptations, what they gave us in childhood and what they continue to give us into adulthood. And then the second part of the book is all about okay, what do we do with this now? Right. How do we heal some of these wounds? How do we take better care of ourselves? How do we recognize when these are showing up in our work in our relationships? Uh um, uh, and how do we take really, really good care of the selves that for many of us we might just be getting to know for the first time in a long time?

SPEAKER_01 51:27

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's that's uh fascinating. And uh so where where can people get the book?

SPEAKER_00 51:35

How can they Yeah, so it's on Amazon. You can get it on Amazon or you can get it on NASW, which is National Association of Social Workers Press um uh page. Um, yeah, you can order it. It's pretty pretty affordable. Um, easy to read book. Uh, I think it's a good resource for folks, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 51:52

Okay. Yeah, great. And give us the give us the title one more time.

SPEAKER_00 51:56

Just uh Healing the Helping Professional, The Unfinished Business of Childhood.

SPEAKER_01 52:00

Okay, good. And we'll we'll have like uh we'll have this in the show notes. Um it but for those people are just listening, you know, uh while they're driving or whatever, I want to make sure people are able to get it. Um so uh I I really appreciate uh some time with you today. It's always fun for me to kind of get into these childhood narratives and and these sort of meta what do you call meta narratives, I guess uh people say uh because they're they drive us so much, we don't realize it. I often observe people and I and I uh go, I bet this is half from your background, you know. And and I do enjoy counseling with people and and helping them sort of like unearth these things. Um because once you once you see it it's there, you can much more easily see that go, yeah, that's not really what I want to be now, or that's not really how I think now. Often they're kind of scared to think differently, especially if there's a religious uh connection or connotation to it. Um but you know, as I've gotten older, I'm more and more apt to just say, hey, I'm open to examining everything. E even my theology has changed in a sense, if it's not practical, I don't need it, right? So um because if God is really most really a practical person, so but that's just you know how I how I think because you get to live once and you want to do it as well as you can. Um and some of the things as you get older, it feels like what you want you want more peace, more uh sense of peace with your life and and what you've done, all that. And sometimes you can only really get that by examining those those early those childhood sort of things. So absolutely uh appreciate it. Well, Adam, it's been great talking to you. Um I I hope that everybody that listens to this gets your book. And um uh best of luck to you as you continue to to shape minds and and shape the providers that are taking care of people.

SPEAKER_00 54:31

Thanks so much, Daniel. It's been a real privilege to talk to you.