ABSTRACT
Sass Boucher is a counselor and psychotherapist in private practice and a co-founder of SelfCare Psychology, a blog and training provider focused on supporting frontline practitioners' well-being when they're working with and listening to those who have suffered trauma and pain. The author started off on the frontline working with service users who were living with or fleeing from domestic violence. It wasn't until I'd had attended the session on self-care at university that other ideas started to flow. My research was a very small qualitative study my participants were counselors, social workers, and IDVAs, all listening to experiences around trauma around domestic violence on a very regular, probably daily, basis. We need to have knowledge of how practitioners' own past trauma can impact on them, but if we are to work more safely, we need to know quite categorically what it is first.
