Cultivating Self Compassion 26th March 2025

It is well known that those professionals – whether foster carers or social workers – skilled at caring for others, often ignore or discount their own needs.  The more this happens, the less able a person is to go on giving sensitively to others as their emotional resilience diminishes – and isn’t replenished.

A significant additional hazard that foster carers and social workers typically encounter in their work is the risk of secondary trauma – when the traumatised child projects their trauma into the empathic adult and the latter ends up carrying that burden of toxic stress.

This webinar aims to provide attendees with a better understanding of why they lose their sense of positivity after doing their caring work for a few years – and what can be done about it.  It is not burn-out they are suffering from so much as secondary trauma – and the solution lies not in changing careers but in improving  self-compassion.

Those who attend this webinar will come away with a better understanding of

• What secondary trauma is and how it is caused
• Building resilience to combat secondary trauma
• What self-compassion is – and why it is valued. It’s quite different to self-indulgence and tends to promote better mental – and physical – health
• What self-compassion looks like in practice. It is a way of relating to ourselves, involving being caring and supportive to ourselves when we fail, feel inadequate, or struggle in life—extending the same feelings of compassion to ourselves that we typically extend to the children we care for