EP 149 - Healing the Helpers

Elisabeth Joy LaMotte (0:00)

This episode of Social Work Talks is sponsored by NASW Press, a department of the National Association of Social Workers, is a leading scholarly publisher in the social science, serving social workers, educators, clinicians, researchers, and students across the United States and around the world. From the National Association of Social Workers, this is Social Work Talks, and I'm your host, Elisabeth LaMotte. And as social workers, most of us are quite familiar with the term Hurt People, Hurt People.

And today, our guest, Adam McCormick, has a new frame for us, which is really quite compelling, which is that hurt people also help people. He's referencing how so many of us come to this field in large part or small part related to our past adversity or even trauma. He's written a wonderful new book called Healing the Helping Professional. And we're going to be talking about that today. He is using evidence-based research, case studies, and his own experience in the classroom and out to challenge social work professionals so that we show up as our healthiest and most authentic selves.

Adam McCormick is a professor of social work at St. Edwards in Austin, Texas. He's the recipient of many awards. He has given many keynote presentations, and he is a deeply respected and even beloved professor. So Adam McCormick, welcome to Social Work Talks. Thank you for joining us to discuss your new book.

Adam McCormick (1:47)

Thank you so much, Elisabeth. Really excited to be here.

Elisabeth Joy LaMotte (1:50)

So as I often ask our guests and as deeply relates to the topic of your book, could we start out with you sharing with our viewers and our listeners, what led you to choose the social work profession?

Adam McCormick (2:05)

Yeah. For a long time, I probably would not have had a good answer. But about five or six years ago, I started teaching a lot. I've taught childhood trauma out in the community to students in the classroom for a really, really long time. About five or six years ago, I really started to study emotional and relational trauma and teach that. And inevitably, when I would be, whether it was a classroom of students or whether I was out in the community working with even veteran practitioners who've been doing this longer than I have, what would happen was the content kind of resonated with them, maybe even more on a personal basis than it did on a professional basis. And they would come to me and say, I have a lot of these experiences growing up. How might that show up in my work, in my relationships? And what I realized is I didn't have a good answer for them. I didn't like my answer for them. I thought back to the answers that I got when I was a graduate student, kind of these cookie cutter projection transference, that sort of stuff.

And so I realized that that had more to do probably with my own childhood and not doing the work and looking at this through the lens that I probably should have been looking at it. I grew up in a very traumatic home. My father was an alcoholic and a rager. And so I started to look at that and started to just talk to so many social workers about really two things, their childhood and their work.

And in the course of that, realized that I became my father's little social worker when I was about two feet tall and was pretty good at it.

Elisabeth Joy LaMotte (3:32)

Pretty good at it how? Like in the synthesis of what you've uncovered here, how were you pretty good at it then and how does that translate now?

Adam McCormick (3:43)

Oh, I could disarm him like nobody else could. I mean, even as a small child, I could distract him. I could calm him.

I could do things that could kind of control when he started to drink in the evening. You know, just all sorts of stuff. I knew when to be a good athlete and a great student to provide evidence that my family was normal when it wasn't or okay when it wasn't. And so, I could read him unlike anybody else, just very emotionally intuitive. Many of the skills that I just happened to have as I went into the Texas foster care system as a social worker and worked with and my beat was the most traumatized kids and families in the system without ever really making the connection that these skills lived in me long before I ever even learned what a social worker was.

Elisabeth Joy LaMotte (4:34)

You know, Adam, you have a really compelling quotation in the book, a part where you talk about the foster care system and you say something along the lines of the loneliest people in such deep pain are those waiting for a placement in foster care and also the social workers who work with them. That really resonated for me in terms of the messaging in the book.