As a part of their work, social workers at social work centres, undoubtedly meet many people who have traumatic experiences. Despite a wide range of expertise and work experience, social workers may experience emotional distress, due to frequent exposure to the people’s traumatic experiences. Their distress can manifest itself in the form of various psychophysical changes.
In the first part of the thesis, I present a theory of how social work takes place at social work centres, the role of a social worker, I explain the theoretical framework of trauma and ways of working with people with traumatic experiences. After that, I focus on secondary trauma in the helping professions. I conclude the theoretical review by presenting supervision in social work as one of the possible forms of support and assistance to social workers.
The second part of the thesis refers to a qualitative research, with which I researched how and in what ways social workers at social work centres personally deal with people's traumatic experiences. I was interested in what they define as a traumatic experience, how they personally experience it, do they notice any changes in themselves, due to the impact of people’s traumatic experiences, and if so, what kind of changes they notice. I was also interested in whether social workers ever find themselves in difficult emotional distress, because of people's traumatic experiences and what forms of support and help they receive in such situations. Based on the obtained results, I found that social workers in my research cope well with their own personal experiences, related to the people’s traumatic experiences, they perceive at most mild symptoms of secondary trauma and they use various forms of support and assistance.
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