DOMAIN 4: SECONDARY TRAUMATIC STRESS–INFORMED SUPERVISION
Item 9
Strategies for Supervisors:
- Supervisors can use standardized measures and other formal assessment tools to monitor their own level of STS and self-care.
- Informal Assessment: Consider using these reflective practice prompts to increase your awareness of how STS may be impacting you:
- When and how are you most likely to notice STS reactions in yourself?
- What are your particular vulnerabilities or risk factors related to STS?
- What emotions tend to be most difficult for you to feel during the workday?
- How might this relate to the way emotions were handled in your own family of origin (e.g., which emotions were “allowed” or not) or from other key influences, like culture?
- What coping skills are most effective for you in processing or managing these emotions?
- What do you do at the end of a workday to put difficult client stories away before you go home?11
Implementation Resources:
Assessments
STS Assessments
- “Secondary Traumatic Stress Scale,” a brief measure of STS with sub-scales for intrusion, avoidance, arousal, and negative alterations in cognition and mood.6
- “Professional Quality of Life Scale (proQOL),” a 30-item measure with subscales for compassion satisfaction, burnout, and compassion fatigue.
Well-Being Assessments
- “Self-Care in Your Workplace Questionnaire,” measures what individuals are currently doing to promote their own self-care in the workplace, including physically, cognitively, and emotionally.
- “Self-Care Assessment,” a three-page assessment measures individual self-care across five domains: physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual, and workplace/professional.
- Personal Balance Wheel,12 a color-coded self-assessment that is based on indigenous medicine wheels and evaluates balance in spiritual, emotional, physical, and mental domains. For more information or to obtain a copy of this scale, please contact arabideau@umontana.edu or scrossbear@centurytel.net.
Select Action Plan to begin to organize and implement next steps.