Early Childhood Mental Health Treatment: Training Reference Guide

Fact Sheet
Personal Well-Being
Personalizing - interpreting the client’s actions/behaviours as directed at yourself.
For example feeling rejected when a parent does not show up for a session.
Vicarious Trauma - dealing with your personal reactions/affect to tragic events which
may occur in the lives of the children and parents you work with, (death, suicide,
physical abuse, murder).
Flooding - being provided huge amounts of tragic, stressful, and/or intense feelings,
issues through the exploration of past and present experiences which are intruding
on the client’s world. Common signs of this is feeling overwhelmed and paralysed.
over-identification - with either the parent or the child. Strong feelings of anger or
blame toward one or the other partner jeopardizes the capacity to maintain an empathic
connection with both of their experiences
feeling rejected by the parent – when a professional’s gesture to reach out to a
parent is met by lack of response or rejection the temptation is to retaliate or label a
parent as resistant.
containing negative and painful emotions - may be required of the professional as the
parent relives memories and intense feeling of sorrow, rage, fear through the exploration
of past experiences that are intruding on the present parenting experience.
clarity of clinical judgement - may be impaired when parents having experienced
extreme deprivation in their own upbringing carry these unmet needs into a therapeutic
relationship.
Feeling “stuck” as no positive change seems to be happening
Tragic result , e.g., suicide, physical abuse
Resources
Figley, C.R. (1999). Compassion Fatigue: Toward a New Understanding of the Costs of
Caring, in Stamm, B.H., (ed.). Secondary Traumatic Stress: Self-Care Issues for Clinicians,
Researchers and Educators. 2 nd edition. Maryland: Sidram Press.
Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. (1997). The Truth About Burnout. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Publishers.
Yassen, Janet. (1995). Preventing Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder, in Figley, C.R.,
ed. Compassion Fatigue: Coping with Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder in Those Who
Treat the Traumatized. NY: Brunner/Mazel Publishers.
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