engleski

Personal wounds – a burden or a resource for future professional helpers?

According to our experiences of teaching social work students, there are numerous students who might have chosen to become professional helpers in order to heal some personal traumatic experiences from their childhood. As educators and professional helpers, we have evidenced that during their professional training, some of them became more sensitive and more &laquo ; tuned&raquo ; in responding to a client's pain. On the other hand, some of these wounded students were not capable of participating in and responding to clients’ needs during their field placements. This corresponds to the recent findings about the connections between the helping professionals' private experience with violence and their professional assessments and decision-making in response to situations of family violence and abuse. What role does a personal traumatic history play in choosing a profession? Is it a burden or a resource for a future helper? Certainly, a complex process is involved and in this paper we have tried to explore some aspects of it.. A survey was conducted in order to examine if there are significant differences between future professional helpers (students of social work, social pedagogy, and psychology) and other students (of ‘ non- helping’ professions) concerning presence and characteristics of personal stressful and traumatic histories. Anonymous questioners were used and data collected from 1146 students of the University of Zagreb. The results provided support for the hypotheses about &laquo ; the wounded healer&raquo ; - in comparison with other students, the future professional helpers have reported significantly higher exposure to violence between parents, alcohol abuse by parents, divorce, and experience of having a stepmother or a stepfather living with them as well as higher exposure to some structural stressors such as poverty, unemployment and frequent change of residence. The implications of these findings for the social work practice and education are discussed. The authors raise questions about the impact of personal traumatic histories on professionals' responses: What does that mean for identifying the client’ s problem, creating operational definition of the problem, choosing and planning the intervention and responding to client’ s needs? ; What does that mean for the training program, supervision and social work curriculum in general and how we as educators and supervisors can be of efficient help for our students?

personal traumatic history; professional helpers; professional training

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