Enmeshment, Disconnection & The Zone of Fabulousness
Vicki Reynold’s work offers an alternative approach to understanding the ways in which workers are harmed in the work, and to our collective resistance to these harms. She advocates for a client-centred perspective to be adopted. In doing so, we are invited to consider how we as workers locate ourselves in relationship to the people we serve; and the importance of collective care which holds each other accountable to shared ethics.
Stepping away from a work health & safety perspective on worker burnout and vicarious trauma, Vicki speaks to the relationship that practice ethics have to worker wellbeing and burnout. These ideas are put forward with a recognition of the danger of individualising the problem of staff burnout and over looking the responsibility we have to one another in our work. Reynolds (2019) writes,
“Self-care is often prescribed as the antidote to burnout, but it is individualised, positions workers as damaged and does not respond to the social determinants of health and contexts of injustice in which persons suffer and workers struggle. Collective care invites us to shoulder each other up, work in solidarity, see our sustainability as a collective project and acknowledge that we are not going to stay with sustainability and be useful across the long haul individually. As individual workers, we cannot keep ourselves fabulous: we are meant to do this work together, and our sustainability is inextricably linked to our collective care.”
Dive deeper into these ideas:
Utilise Vicki’s free workbook resource (available on her website, here) as a tool to assist self-reflection, or guide enquiry in supervision.
Resisting ‘Burnout’ &‘Vicarious Trauma’ Collective Care & Justice-Doing
In this video, Vicki speaks further about these ideas in reference to the context of ‘justice doing.’