There’s No Book for This

I became a social worker because I wanted to help people through hard things. What no one told me was that sometimes the hard thing would be happening to all of us at once.

It started with COVID. Sitting across from clients, eventually through screens, helping them navigate uncertainty, isolation, and grief while feeling all of it myself. I was not observing suffering from a safe clinical distance. I was in it. We all were.

And it hasn’t stopped.

The pandemic faded from the headlines, but the collective dysregulation didn’t go anywhere. It just shape-shifted. Now it’s the news. ICE raids. People disappearing. The gut-punch of watching cruelty become normalized. The fear that isn’t anxiety anymore — it’s an appropriate response to what’s actually happening.

My clients bring this into the room. Their terror is not irrational. Their grief is not disordered. They are responding correctly to a world that has become genuinely unsafe for them or for people they love.

And then I close my laptop and feel it myself.

We Learn From Those Who Came Before. Except When We Can’t.

Social workers are trained through accumulated wisdom. Supervision. Case studies. Research built on decades of observation. We learn from those who walked the path before us.

But there was no path for this.

There’s no chapter in any textbook called “How to Help Someone Process Collective Trauma While You’re Also Living Through It.”

So we figure it out as we go. We make mistakes. We get it right sometimes. We hold space while our own space feels like it’s shrinking.

I don’t have the map. None of us do. We’re drawing it together, in real time, session by session.

Empathy Heals. Empathy Also Depletes.

Empathy. The ability to feel with someone. To sit in the darkness without rushing toward the light. To let someone’s pain land in your body so they feel less alone in theirs.

Compassion heals. I believe that completely. The experience of being truly seen and felt by another person is one of the most powerful medicines we have.

But empathy has a cost.

When you spend your days feeling with people who are terrified, grieving, traumatized by systems designed to harm them — and then you go home to a world where those same systems keep grinding — there is no clean separation. There is no “leaving work at work.”

The weight accumulates. Not because you’re doing it wrong. Because you’re doing it right. Because you’re actually present. Because you care.

Compassion fatigue isn’t a failure of self-care. It’s the natural result of caring deeply in a world that keeps generating reasons to care.

Sitting in the Hard

I don’t have a tidy ending for this. No five tips for thriving. No silver lining about how the struggle made us stronger.

Some days it just is what it is:

• hard to hold space when your own space feels full.
• hard to model regulation when your nervous system is also on alert.
• hard to help someone find hope when you’re not sure where to find your own.
• hard to do this work in a country that keeps making the work harder.

But we keep showing up. We keep sitting with people in their pain, even when we’re tired, even when we’re scared too, even when we’re not sure we’re doing it right.

Because that’s the job. And because, despite everything, I still believe that being truly seen by another person matters. That presence heals. That bearing witness matters. That none of us were meant to carry this alone.

Not our clients.

And not us.