Spring 2025 Issue

Keeping the Balance
By Jamie Santa Cruz
Social Work Today
Vol. 25 No. 2 P. 14

Managing Social Work and Personal Life

It won’t come as a secret to most social workers that the profession of social work has high rates of burnout.1 One survey found that 39% of social workers reported experiencing burnout at the time of the study, and 75% reported that they had been burned out at some point during their careers.2 Turnover, in turn, is high: studies suggest that it could reach 40% in the United States for child welfare workers in particular.3

Although burnout can happen for a variety of reasons, the imbalance between work and personal life is a major factor for many. The pressures of work can be overwhelming, with too many clients to see and not enough time to do it all, leading social workers to sacrifice their personal lives for the sake of their work.

Figuring out how to maintain a healthy balance is critical for social workers to be able to do good work and keep up the motivation to continue in the field, says SaraKay Smullens, LCSW, ACSW, BCD, DCSW, CGP, CFLE, a social worker and consultant with a private and pro bono practice in Philadelphia. “It’s important to know when to quit, when to let go of work responsibilities and call it a day,” she says. “Unless we can learn to set essential boundaries, to say ‘no,’ to protect our personal hours, we will be too exhausted to think creatively as well as to get into the sustaining ‘good trouble’ John Lewis urged us to be involved with.”

Difficult Maintenance
Maintaining work/life balance is obviously difficult in many professions, but there are several factors unique to social work that make it particularly difficult.

The human nature of the work. “When you work with human beings as opposed to a product, there is a lot of pressure that we put on ourselves to please everybody. You want people to get the outcomes they want,” says Meagan Mitchell, MEd, LCSW, a child and adolescent therapist in private practice in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and owner of Agents of Change Social Work Test Prep.

The vulnerability of the people social workers serve. Social workers frequently work with individuals and communities in fragile situations who are facing profoundly difficult problems, many of which stem from structural issues such as poverty, systemic inequality, and lack of access to essential resources. According to Kristen Lee, EdD, LCSW, a behavioral science clinician and researcher at Northeastern University, social workers tend to have a “deep and relentless focus on promoting human rights and helping people flourish,” which is one of their strengths. But when they are serving clients who are living in peril, it can create powerful guilt about stepping away from work and going home to relax. “The people who are doing the most continually and perpetually feel as though they are not doing enough,” says Lee, who is also the author of Clean Slate: How to Make Change Happen and other books on protecting mental health.

Understaffing and unmanageable caseloads. The need for social workers is growing, but there are far too few social workers to meet the demand. One national study predicts a shortfall of 195,000 social workers by 2030.4 This means social workers in casework are often saddled with more cases than they can possibly handle within normal work hours. “We want to do it all, so we’re like, ‘I will figure out a way’—but there’s a cost. You’re doing unpaid work, taking work home, etc.”

Social workers’ history of personal trauma. Social workers are more likely than people in the general population to report personal histories of trauma or adversity.5-7 This background can foster deep empathy and understanding, but when a social worker’s personal experiences resonate too closely with the challenges faced by clients, it can be difficult to maintain professional boundaries.

Signs of Imbalance
A good way to tell if your work/life balance is off is to listen to your own body—literally, the physical pain signals it is sending, says Smullens, who is also the author of the book Burnout and Self-Care in Social Work: A Guidebook for Students and Those in Mental Health and Related Professions.

“The body speaks,” Smullens says. “When we can’t balance what’s necessary in our personal lives and our work, our bodies warn through pain and anxiety. When our work touches buried trauma, our soul never forgets. Once physical illness is ruled out, if our neck hurts for no apparent reason, we are wise to ask ourselves who or what is a pain in our neck, what are we itching for, what is breaking our backs, or what can’t we swallow. Our bodies offer an “emotional sense of direction,” she explains.8

According to Mitchell, there’s another good sign as well: when you no longer feel connected to the reason for which you entered the field of social work. “If you’re dreading going to work, having a hard time getting out of bed, it’s a good sign that you need to do some self-reflection,” she says.

Pillar #1 of Work/Life Balance: Self-Awareness
No doubt about it: Combatting the factors that pull social workers out of balance is no easy task. But certain practices can help, and the most important of those is self-awareness.

According to Mitchell, lack of self-reflection is the key problem that pulls social workers out of balance. “This field is about advocating for those in need, those who are on the margins of society,” Mitchell says. But “if we’re not reflecting on our own needs, that’s going to cause burnout, overcommitment, boundary issues.” By the same token, practicing regular self-reflection is the single biggest key to restoring that balance.

Self-awareness can be approached from several different angles:

• Awareness of your own needs. Again, as a social worker, you can’t fill clients’ cups if you yourself are running on empty. It’s critical to honestly examine your own needs and the people and activities that are essential in your life in order for you to feel energized, creative, and ready to pour into others.

• Awareness of your own limitations. Social workers often have a deep sense of compassion and a deep desire to ameliorate the problems clients are experiencing. But “We can’t do everything, and we can’t fix everything all at once,” Lee says. Social workers have to consider what they can realistically do considering the limits of their time and their own personality traits and how deeply entrenched some of the problems are that they’re attempting to address. “Our job is to help advocate for humane/just conditions and help clients navigate inhumane/unjust conditions. But we are helping mitigate the situation, not solve the entire thing.”

• Awareness of why “no” is hard. If you struggle saying “no,” consider why. For some social workers, it might be a deep desire to please clients, Mitchell suggests. For others, it might be overidentification with clients’ problems, fear of letting down a boss, or other reasons. “If we don’t step back and process why we’re making the decisions we’re making, that’s when we get into trouble,” Mitchell says.

• Awareness of what clients’ trauma is touching in you. When social workers feel guilty about setting boundaries, it’s often because of their own past traumatic experiences. “Often that guilt goes back to people we loved in our formative years who suffered and we couldn’t help,” Smullens says. Maybe it’s a mother, a sister, or a childhood friend, but whoever it is, sometimes social workers are subconsciously trying to overcome their inability to help a loved one in the past by helping a client in the present. “The best way I know how to set boundaries is … to constantly reevaluate what our clients are touching in us,” Smullens says.

Pillar #2 of Work/Life Balance: Role Clarity
A huge part of maintaining equilibrium between work life and personal life for social workers is holding in mind the distinction between the social worker and the client and keeping clear on the role of each one in solving problems. What does this mean, exactly?

Recognize that clients are ultimately responsible for solving their own problems. The job of the social worker is to provide all the resources they can muster to help clients work through their conflicts, self-doubts, and obstacles. But ultimately, the social worker is there to provide a relational context in which clients can develop their own capacities, not solve clients’ problems on their behalf. “The client solves his or her or their own problems,” Smullens says.

Reject overidentification with clients. Compassion and empathy are essential traits for social workers. “However, when compassion takes a turn, and it becomes overidentification that we are taking on the experiences and emotions of someone (maybe based on our own past challenging events and our own hurts, etc), that can really be corrosive to us,” Lee says. Again, the social worker’s role is to provide the relational support and tools clients need to address their problems, not take on those problems as their own.

Don’t allow—either in yourself or in your client—the belief that the client is dependent on you. “When we are working with clients, the goal is self-sufficiency,” says Michelle Ratcliff, MSS, DMFT, LSW, an assistant professor in the social work department at Delaware State University. When social workers fail to maintain boundaries, take on clients’ problems as their own, and make themselves overly available, they impede that goal. “If we go against our own boundaries, […] we are showing them to continue depending on us.” Ratcliff knows how hard it is to set boundaries with clients who really do need help. But her attitude in these situations is, “They have lived all these years without me, they can do it now again.”

Social workers are sometimes afraid of setting limits on their availability because they recognize that the client might experience “back-steps” if left to their own devices. However, “coddling impedes progress,” Smullens says. “Back and forth motion is part of the complex process of growth and change.” Her advice is to let go and respect the client’s process and their individual road toward autonomy and fulfillment. In her words, “A client may not reach his/her/their goals with us, but with the tincture of time, they will often get there. Later, on their own or working with another social worker, the work we have done together, all that has been planted, may find direction. I have seen this happen again and again.”

Pillar #3 of Work/Life Balance: Quality Supervision
The last pillar of good work/life balance is supervision—meaning, an open, trusting relationship with a perceptive, engaged supervisor who can help you in your efforts to maintain clear boundaries between work and personal life.

Healthy work environments always have channels for moving anxieties upward and getting them addressed, Smullens says. “Such environments provide social workers opportunities to consult meaningfully and resolve issues. There is someone who will listen deeply to concerns, helping to address them in the best way possible.” By contrast, in dysfunctional settings, anxieties are imposed from the top, and workers may feel alone, isolated, or pitted against each other.

Unfortunately, a lot of social workers don’t have good supervision or mentorship, which can make it more difficult to address and resolve problems of work/life imbalance. Social workers who don’t currently have good mentorship should try to seek it out, Mitchell says. “Isolation is a huge problem. When you are alone, you won’t be able to set those boundaries,” she says. “You need some place where you can process things as they come up.”

Establishing Practical Boundaries
Beyond the fundamental pillars of self-awareness, role clarity, and strong mentorship, there are some practical boundaries that can help support work/life balance.

Here are a few basics:

• Practice calendar blocking. Set aside a block of time once a week or once a month for personal rejuvenation. “Start small with a small chunk of time,” Lee says. “Use it for positive activities—rest, leisure, fun time.” The key is to make this time nonnegotiable: work simply isn’t allowed to take over.

• Shut off work devices and refuse calls and texts outside of work hours. Social workers are often told to practice self-care, Ratcliff says. “That doesn’t mean getting your hair done and getting your nails done. That means, when you get home, do you turn off your work phone? Do you not bring work home? Do you not take any work calls after 6 pm?”

• Communicate your boundaries in advance with clients. “You have to be really clear about this upfront,” Mitchell says. “I am not available after 5 pm. I am not available on the weekends. If your child has an emergency, go to the ER.” When clients do call outside of set work hours, simply remind them that it’s outside work hours and to call back on Monday (or your next scheduled work day). Set up an autoreply for email for your out-of-office hours that communicates the same message. “Be consistent,” Mitchell warns. “Don’t make exceptions, or you’ll be making all kinds of exceptions.”

Guilt over setting boundaries may sometimes creep up, and the pressure to give too much to work may occasionally rear its ugly head. But when it does, recall that setting boundaries and protecting work/life balance is an essential prerequisite for social workers to have the energy to actually do the job well. “You can’t really pour out when you’re empty. You have to fill yourself back up,” Ratcliff says.

— Jamie Santa Cruz is a freelance writer based in Parker, Colorado.

When Personal Life Bleeds Into Work
Most of the focus in discussion of work/life balance centers on how to keep work from overwhelming personal life. But the opposite can happen also: personal concerns and personal baggage can interfere with work.

“The focus today is always what work is doing to us. But it’s not always work that’s the issue,” Smullens explains. “Obviously, the problems that we deal with at work will impact home life, but if home life and personal relationships are troubling us, our work will be affected.”

If you sense that your own personal concerns, personal relationships, or past history of trauma are interfering with your practice as a social worker, Ratcliff recommends pursuing professional counseling. “Don’t bleed on clients. If you’re still working on your own rejection issues, your own abandonment issues, go see a therapist,” she says. “Get the professional help you need first, so you can help someone else.”

References
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2. Siebert DC. Personal and occupational factors in burnout among practicing social workers: implications for researchers, practitioners, and managers. J Soc Serv Res. 2005;32(2):25-44.

3. Lushin V, Katz CC, Julien-Chinn FJ, Lalayants M. A burdened workforce: exploring burnout, job satisfaction and turnover among child welfare caseworkers in the era of COVID-19. Child Youth Serv Rev.

4. Lin VW, Lin J, Zhang X. US social worker workforce report card: forecasting nationwide shortages. Soc Work. 2016;61(1):7-15.

5. Thomas JT. Adverse childhood experiences among MSW students. J Teach Soc Work. 2016;36(3):235-255.

6. Negrete M. Adverse Childhood Experiences of Social Work Students and Implications for Field Specialization and Practice [MSW thesis]. Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations. 2020;1033. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/1033

7. Esaki N, Larkin H, Prevalence of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) among child service providers. Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services. 2013;94(1):31-37.

8. Smullens S. Developing an emotional sense of direction: a therapeutic model for the treatment of emotional abuse. Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association. 2003;6(3):17-21.