On Monday January 23, Wurzweiler Associate Professor Dr. Rozetta Wilmore Schaeffer spoke with 23 staff members at Jewish Family Services in Teaneck about vicarious traumatization, the difficulties associated with working with clients who have experienced traumatic events.  Dr. Schaeffer, who teaches both foundations and concentration  level courses, spoke of the normative nature of trauma and about the need for staff to care for themselves in order to continue to provide professional treatment and prevent burnout.  She described the parallel process involved in creating an environment in which clients can feel safe and empathically ‘heard,’ while at the same time creating space in the lives of the staff in which they can care for themselves. Dr. Schaeffer spoke about the restorative nature of the work that the staff do, as well as the cumulative nature of that work.  “Imagine each of your clients as a backpack,” she said,” in which you carry the ‘stuff’ that is the work that you do with them.  Now imagine that you are carrying all of the stuff that is your clients’ as well as your own ‘stuff’.  It can get pretty heavy.”   When social workers and others working with clients who have experienced trauma are professionally empathically attuned, we care about our clients a great deal, and the result can sometimes be that we feel overwhelmed by the amount of ‘stuff’ we end up carrying around with us.  Everyone in our lives is, in some way, impacted by the work we do.  If we are troubled by a client’s situation, we may come home focused on our clients, we may be less attentive at home, less able to concentrate, more distracted.  Therefore, everyone we come in touch with is touched by the work we do.  The key, said Dr. Schaeffer, is to be able to walk away from the work each day with self efficacy and self esteem.  In order to accomplish this, she recommends identifying those activities which ‘feed’ us and schedule time to do these things.  If we hold on to these activities as conceptually important pieces of who we are, rather than what we do, it will help insure that we build in time for self care. Jewish Family Services and Wurzweiler School of Social Work have a long history of working together.  JFS has long served as a training location for Wurzweiler students completing their first and second year field placements.