Elizabeth LaMotte:
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 sciences 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, Elizabeth Lamotte. And as social workers, most of us are quite familiar with the term that 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:
Thank you so much, Elizabeth. I'm really excited to be here.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
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:
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. And about five or six years ago, I really started to study emotional and relational trauma and teach that. And inevitably, 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, 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.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
Pretty good at it how? 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:
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, 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.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
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.
Adam McCormick:
Yeah, which is interesting because it's two groups of people who are surrounded by people all the time, but there's a difference between belonging and being surrounded by people. And I realized very early on working with young people in the foster care system and then with social workers. Bessel van d Kolk says trauma makes the world feel like a gathering of aliens. And I say social work can make it feel that way too. In that you're surrounded by people, but in order to belong, you have to be seen and known and understood for who you are. And for many social workers, that's not the case. It's tough for people to see us and know us and understand us for who we are and what we see every day and what we're feeling. It's really hard for us to make room for ourselves in this work when the needs of our clients and the communities and families that we serve are just so acute in many ways.
So, yeah, especially in the conversations that I had in writing this book, there were just so many parallels, so many similarities that I saw with the social workers that I talked to and the kids in the foster care system that I've been working with for decades.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
What's one parallel that really stands out to you in this moment as we talk about it?
Adam McCormick:
Yeah. I think for kids in foster care, it's nobody really kind of understanding what they're going through, what they've been through to know them for who they are. And then for social workers to really understand the pain and the trauma and the struggle and the injustice that they're exposed to on an everyday and the ways that that's impacting them. They kind of mask that or engage in this dynamic of wound comparison, how dare I kind of address my own stuff if the families and the kids or the clients that I'm working with are so robust and so acute for them. So yeah, I think that's just one of many similarities that I've noticed. And so, then nobody really does kind of know you for what you're truly going through and what you're really feeling.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
It's such an astute observation and it connects into what is somewhat obvious, but I had not thought about as clearly until delving into your book, which is that we as social workers, if we are driven in any part by our pasts and the way that that then leads us into the profession, it is a tool therefore that helps us be able to meet our clients where they are. It's often how we have more insight, more empathy, more ability to read a room. And yet part of what you're challenging us on is where that can go too far and where empathy or insight professionally can translate into self-sacrifice or even a lack of authenticity. The whole concept of authenticity, I think, is important in your book. Can you talk about that a bit?
Adam McCormick:
Absolutely. I love the work of an author and physician, Gabor Mate, who many social workers are probably familiar with. But one of the many brilliant things that he teaches is what he refers to as this traumatic tension, the tension between the two most irreducible needs that we have in childhood. The first, of course, is attachment and everyone in your audience knows a whole bunch of attachment, although I've never met a social worker who's told me they feel like they know enough or too much about attachment. But the reason for that is it's really, really important. We don't survive without it. I couldn't send a one-year-old child out in the world on their own to make it. They wouldn't last two seconds. So, they need me and they're going to do everything that they can to keep me, to secure me, not just to take care of them or to love them, but as they get a little bit older, to delight in them, pride, joy, attention, attunement.
So that's attachment. It's what keeps us alive. Authenticity is probably the next most important drive that we have in childhood and in life. And that's what allows us to feel alive. That's the you that you were made to be, your authentic emotions, your needs, your personality, identity. This is just the you that you were made to be. And for a lot of us growing up, there was this tension between these that if I were authentic, if I authentically showed my emotions or expressed boundaries or took up space or expressed needs or whatever it was, it would've threatened my attachment. So, like any child, we're brilliant, our nervous systems are brilliant, and we do exactly what we have to do, which oftentimes means that I have to disconnect from my authentic self in order to keep my sense of belonging, my attachment here. And so, we disconnect from those parts.
We disconnect from ourselves. Then we get into a profession like social work where at least nowadays we'll say, "Do self-care, take care of yourself, prioritize your needs." And the simple reality is you cannot take care of a self that you don't know. You can't care for a self that in an act of brilliance and strategy had to die back maybe decades ago. That's teaching trigonometry to a kindergartner. It's just not going to work. And in fact, what we're seeing with social workers is sometimes it does a little bit more harm because now I think there's one more thing that's inherently wrong with me. Why the heck can't I just take care of myself? Or how do I need to grow or change or fix this when in reality it's not so much about growing and changing and fixing, it's about reconnecting with those parts that we had to disconnect from.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
And so, could you give an example of the process of that reconnection either through your own story or an observation connected to the book?
Adam McCormick:
Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, I have a framework that I can walk readers through. I've found a lot of social workers can really, really identify with. And it's really the strategy of really getting to know these adaptations. When we understand where they started, the origins of them, when we understand at a really deep level why I needed this, what did it do to secure my attachment, what did it do to keep me safe, to continue to endure, adapt, whatever it was? Where did brilliance or the wisdom live in this adaptation for me as a child, recognizing that what was maybe perfectly and absolutely adaptive back then is maybe maladaptive for me now, meaning that some of these adaptations were out there welcome for us. Important for social workers too, how is this adaptation kind of reinforced in my work or expected in my work, especially in just a hyper patriarchal society in a profession that is just so deeply impacted by dynamics of patriarchy.
A lot of these imposterism, the heroism, the one-sided relationships, over-functioning, overworking, selflessness, these—I call these sometimes the virtues of a social worker, even if we don't like to admit it, they get rewarded and reinforced in ways similar to our family systems. And I tell stakeholders all the time, folks who run agencies and organizations, you better make sure that your workforce doesn't rely on the same adaptations to survive in this job that they needed in a family that maybe had some stress in it. So, the idea is to move closer to it, get to know it a little bit more.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
And so over-functioning is a common adaptation. What are some other ones that stand out to you?
Adam McCormick:
Yeah, certainly the over-functioning and recognizing that we oftentimes over-function because at one point in life, somebody under-functioned for us. This is a relative term. I always take my students back to third grade. You can't have an over a bridge without an under. There's a good reason for that, and all of these served a really, really good purpose for us at one point in time. The family hero and then being the hero in the workplace, really trying to create this idea of normalcy by just outworking everyone else, imposterism, carrying all of the weight in relationships. For social workers, this low standard for how we're treated or compensated. I speak at social work conferences all the time, and for a long time, I don't see it as much anymore. There was a t-shirt that half the audience would have on that said social worker in it for the outcome, not the income.
The unpaid placements that we see, that sort of stuff. We're a profession who has a lot of origin work that we have to do as well. We all know the history of social work, these brilliant pioneers and founders who did everything they had to do, almost entirely women, to say, "Hey, we are a valid profession just like anyone else." Well, those dynamics have shifted a lot. We might not need the same adaptations as a profession then that we need now when we are respected and people realize they do need us in the same ways that they need any other profession. Those are just some of the—I call them the one-under adaptations. Hurt people help people. We know a lot about hurt people, hurt people, as you said. Those are the one-over: fight, anger, aggression, coercive control, gaslighting. The one-under—we don't think about as trauma responses, people pleasing, imposterism, doing all the work in relationships, over functioning, that sort of stuff.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
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. Explore thought-provoking books, scholarly journals, and trusted resources that support every stage of your social work career at naswpress.org. Be sure to check out Healing the Helping Professional: The Unfinished Business of Childhood Trauma by Adam McCormick, professor of social work at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, and today's guest on Social Work Talks. At naswpress.org, you'll also find a wealth of titles covering clinical practice, ethics, leadership, policy, mental health, child welfare, and more. I almost always ask guests on social work talks how they chose the field of social work, and yet I had never really thought about this one under concept despite the answers that we hear and how so many of them trace back to family of origin.
Terry Real was a guest, and he talked about a generation of depressed men in his family. Dini Laliotis, who is a pioneer in EMDR therapy, talked about being the daughter of an immigrant and how she was just gifted as a translator for her mother, and then how that led her into the field. And it seems that you do a lot of this at a high level and also though in the classroom. So, I found myself reading the book, being curious, what do you do when you come across a student who may be very, very motivated to learn and yet also lacking insight about themselves? And if you start to have concerns about how that might play out for them, how do you navigate that?
Adam McCormick:
Yeah, and this is a conversation I have quite frequently with students, and I work primarily with undergraduate students who are just getting into this profession, and I always start with really what they're protecting by that lack of insight or by not doing that. And you see it with a host of students. I think we oftentimes will think that this happens oftentimes with students who are not doing the best in class or out in the. But the reality is that introspection and that self-reflection is just as important for those especially high-functioning, really, really overachieving students as well. What we find is many of those students don't do that level of self. They're reflective of an adaptive self in many ways. They're paying really, really close attention to how people perceive them and that sort of stuff. But we want to remember too that self-reflection and self-awareness is the awareness of the authentic self that so many of them really are not.
So, they're hyper-aware of the adaptive self, but completely disconnected from the authentic self in many ways. So, when I work with them, I really start with what are you protecting here? You're not setting boundaries. What are you protecting when you don't set a boundary in your internship or in class or something like that? And for most students, especially when it comes to something like boundaries… boundaries were entirely off limits for them and their family system. You learn to set boundaries, you develop boundary wisdom, you set boundaries and you realize, "Oh, my relationships get stronger. I'm treated better. I stand up for myself." There's a payoff that comes, that's that boundary wisdom. Well, for a lot of social workers, a lot of social work students, they have never been in relationships or situations where they've ever been able to actualize the wisdom of a good boundary.
So, I'll start with them too. Let's start working on setting some boundaries, just some little ones. Let's talk about that next week. Let's see what that looked like for you. What happened in your relationships? Did these awful things that you thought would happen actually happen for you? And of course, they never do, right? And so, then we just start there, but they're always protecting something. I always try for students to recognize not what is wrong with the behavior now, what was right about it back then.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
What was right about it and therefore adaptive back then, even if it's no longer working for us. So, then, are you, in these questions, referencing what you describe in the book as small teeth therapy? Could you tell our viewers and listeners a bit about that and how you conceive of that?
Adam McCormick:
Yeah. These are the little interactions that we have. Social workers get into this profession because they want a career with purpose and meaning. They want to make a lasting big imprint impact. They want to heal wounds, and the work delivers in that really, really well so long as we're willing to actualize it. Another reason that I think a lot of us get into this work, or at least another, I think, huge piece of satisfaction in this work is that we get to be surrounded by other people who are equally as passionate about issues of justice and healing the wounds of trauma and all of that sort of stuff. When I talk about the small teeth therapy, these are the little interactions that we have that are actually far more healing and regulating than we might think, small teeth therapy. We all learned this lesson during COVID.
We were miserable because we lost the thing that. I remember getting emails from students and they say, "Adam, I would kill to be in class right now." And sometimes it was from students who wouldn't actually even come to class, but that was kind of the point. We missed the thing that we needed the most, these little connections, these little interactions. And in social work, this is so important for us to have these. It's the happy hour with our colleagues, lunch, coffee, the connections outside of the workplace as well. And you had Terry Real on. I mean, he explains this better than anybody else. At the end of the day, we are relational creatures. We are wired for co-regulation, and self-regulation is great. Running, exercise, knitting, sewing, all that mindfulness, that stuff is fantastic. I encourage social workers to do it all the time, but it doesn't even come close to the regulating effects of co-regulation to do these things.
When I teach my intro class, I tell the students, "You get 50 extra credit points. If you go do something on campus related to your self-care, you go to the recreation center, something like that, but I'll give you a hundred if you take a friend." And the point there is to teach them if you're going to get into this work, the only thing that can counterbalance the effects of secondary trauma and burnout and stress and injustice and all the stuff, all the hazards that you're going to face as a social worker, it is your connections, your relationships. So, let's prioritize those now.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
In the book, you also mentioned Terry Real and this concept of, I won't word it perfectly, but lending or handing your client your cortex or really your degree of emotional maturity as a part of the process of co-regulating. I think that also connects into the underlying reality that our clients can only go so far as we can. It's very difficult for a client to surpass whatever stage of development we're in. So, we are doing this work for ourselves and our authentic selves, but also to be effective.
Adam McCormick:
The greatest gift a social worker can give their client is the gift of authenticity, healing, and regulation. You can't regulate a dysregulated client if you're dysregulated—or at least it's tough to do that. And part of this too is in social work, we got to remind social workers how clients really heal. I think a lot of times, especially in the era that we're in now, we think it's these magic phrases or things that we say or these steps. Those things are great, but how do we really heal? We heal in relationships. We're relationally and socially contagious creatures, Terry real, they quite literally borrow our cortex. We loan them to our patients. We loan them our compassion, our empathy, and the direction of that goes both ways. So, we don't have a bottomless well of that as social workers, and they in turn are also loaning us their stress and their trauma, and we're absorbing that as they're absorbing our compassion and our care and our empathy and our patients in that sort of stuff.
It's so important as social workers that we understand how that dynamic works and that we do everything that we have to do to be as regulated and take as good care of ourselves as possible because one, we deserve it, but I find with social workers, it's an easier sell to say, "Hey, as good as you might be as an adaptive social worker, you're going to be a whole heck of a lot better as an authentic social worker."
Elizabeth LaMotte:
So, along those lines, there are more and more social workers who eventually find themselves in private practice or in lanes of work that are less relational than how I am envisioning what I'm hearing about a typical day for you, let's say, with your students, with colleagues on campus. In the book, you write about trauma-informed supervision. So, I'm asking this question related to that, but just generally, honestly, do you think that we social workers should always remain in some form of supervision?
Adam McCormick:
I do, in some capacity. I'm also a huge advocate for social workers doing their own mental health treatment as well, but certainly supervision or even if somebody, not so much supervision, but even, and I see this with some of the best social workers out there, they just have their team of people that they can go to that really get them, and it's so hard for social workers to have that person or those people who really get it. I remember years ago, my wife and I, at a very young age, lived as live-in caretakers at a children's home in West Texas, and we lived with teenage boys who had endured such heavy trauma, and we could be with friends and we could be out with, but nobody could really understand what this was like for us, and it was so isolating, it was so lonely. And so, for social workers, if it's a supervisor, that's great, but if it's a colleague, a peer, a friend, somebody who just really can understand what this is like, where I can be very, very vulnerable, where I don't have to worry about hiding these parts, I don't have to worry about comparing wounds, that I can just be as authentic and as vulnerable as I can be, absolutely.
And there's a lot too that we can be doing, especially with new social workers and social work students, that really doesn't go beyond, I think, what we typically address in even trauma-informed supervision.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
Define trauma-informed supervision.
Adam McCormick:
Yeah, I think oftentimes we look at trauma-informed supervision as you're exposed to the trauma of this work, and the trauma-informed supervision is supervision that is very mindful and very sensitive to those issues of trust and safety and that sort of stuff. I kind of take it a step further in the book to say it is all of those things, but it also has to be very, very mindful of the trauma that a social worker that I'm supervising or a student carries into this space, and the trauma that I carry into this space as a supervisor as well. I think for a lot of supervisors, we see this dynamic where they want to go out and kind of fall on the sword to take care of their people.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
And intuitive on some level, you can see how that happens.
Adam McCormick:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. The issue is new social workers, social work students, don't pay just like anybody else, they're not paying so much attention to what we say, they're looking at what we model for them as supervisors. And so, if I see a supervisor who tells me to take care of yourself, I used to do this with students and new social workers, I would tell them all day, take care of yourself, do self-care, that sort of stuff. I'd go home to my kids when they were small, love yourselves, take care of yourselves. I couldn't identify my authentic self if you asked me to pick it out in a lineup. It just wasn't going to happen. And so, for a lot of supervisors, they're doing that. So, their students or their social work staff are looking at this and they're saying, "Wait a second. In order to be someone who is successful in this place, there's really not room for me." And I think trauma-informed supervision is about helping students, helping new social workers to recognize, "Oh, there's room in this work for you too. Room for your story, room for your adaptations, room for your pain and vulnerability as well."
Elizabeth LaMotte:
So how have you changed through writing this book and the process that led you to decide to write it?
Adam McCormick:
Yeah. I do a lot of things much different now. I think for me, the biggest one has just been really recognizing what those adaptations are for me and how they show up in my work. Like many kids in homes with a raging alcoholic, I was a peacekeeper and my entire identity was rooted around avoiding conflict, putting out fires, preventing it, doing all of that sort of stuff, which in many ways can be a great skill in social work. But oftentimes for the students that I serve, clients that I work with, the communities that I advocate for, they don't need a peacemaker. They need somebody to stand up, to speak out, somebody to call things out, to hold folks accountable.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
To be willing to go there, to go to that uncomfortable place.
Adam McCormick:
Yeah. Yeah. They don't always need somebody who. I think of one young person in particular when I was a social worker as a 14-year-old boy, and he was just being treated really unfairly in a foster home. And he was a Black teenager, and his foster parents were white, and he had a CPS worker who was white, and they would triangulate against him. And he and I had a really, really close relationship, and he trusted me. Again, that childhood adaptation, and a lot of what I learned in social work too, was all about compromise and coming together, which again can be wonderful social work skills in the right context.
I brought everybody together in a room, and I think I'm bringing everybody together and compromise and all sorts of stuff, and I'm walking out of there, my chest, I just did really, really good social work. He and I get in the car, we're going to get a milkshake at the McDonald's, and before we even can pull out of the driveway of the house, he's just flooded with tears, can hardly get the words out, and eventually says, "How could you do that to me? Why didn't you just tell them you don't treat me this way?" As much harm as they may have been doing to him and how they were using power and control and that sort of stuff, I guarantee it didn't come close to the harm that I did to him by trying to be this adaptive, people-pleasing peacemaker from childhood. No, he needed me to call this out.
That's an authentic skill. I've developed that. I'm better at that now than I was back then. Yeah.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
Do you find that as you've become better at that, it is both professionally but also personally meaningful? Can you share a bit about that?
Adam McCormick:
Yeah, absolutely. I think at the core of doing this work is recognizing how much resentment that I built up over the years. When we say yes to something when we want to say no, when we don't set a boundary, what we oftentimes don't realize when we deal with the moral injury of seeing injustice and not saying something or not doing something, that there's a resentment that builds up towards maybe the people who, but also towards ourselves in many ways. And So, for me personally, this work of authenticity has been so helpful in, I think, healing some of the moral injury wounds that I've. And I've worked in the Texas foster care system, which is just notorious for being one of the worst systems of injustice and racism. And so, yeah, this work has really helped me to begin to do the work of tending to some of the moral injuries, not from childhood, but from the work that I've done.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
Right. I mean, it becomes a part of who you are over time. And I'll just be honest, reading your book, there were things I'd never thought about. This is not an easy book to read, but it's an important one. I mean, I genuinely thank you for writing it, and it ties together things that perhaps should be obvious but aren't. So, thank you for that as well. Interestingly, because you write so well about authenticity, and at the same time at NASW and in the field and in the world, there's a lot of conversation right now about artificial intelligence just generally and what that's going to look like, but I also keep hearing about where it could compromise authenticity. And so, I found myself curious reading the book, like what your thoughts are about it, do your students talk about it? Tell me about that.
Adam McCormick:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, these poor young students are getting more conversations about AI or what are healthy. Here are my thoughts on it when it comes to a profession like social work. There are big risks, things that we should all be afraid of, absolutely. But social work, and I've always taught this, is so much more about who we are than what we know, and what we know and the theories that those are great. And I tell my students all the time, "That's not an excuse not to pay attention to what I'm going to teach you when these theories are important and the research is important." But at the end of the day, clients heal and they trust and they regulate stress and trauma and all of that sort of stuff more so because of who we are, the most human parts of us, our kindness, our compassion, our patience, our ability to laugh with them and to fight for them.
These are things you don't learn in a social work classroom and nothing's going to change that. These are just irreducible needs that we have. So, I think right now, as social workers, we just want to take a step back and remember it's the most human parts of us. Who we are is always going to be so much more important than what we say or what we know in the midst of something like AI. And that's not to minimize the threats and the changes that are coming down the pike or that are just happening so fast right now, but it doesn't change what clients need most from us. In fact, these days they probably need those things from us more than ever before.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
That is a really inspiring answer and framing. What else do you want viewers and listeners to know about you and about this excellent book, Healing the Helping Professional?
Adam McCormick:
Yeah, and I really appreciate this conversation. I think it's a great book for anybody in the helping professions. You don't have to have just this big-T trauma from childhood. I think for the book to have some utility for us, I kind of make that case very early on in the book. Anytime anybody tells me they came out of childhood completely unscathed in this culture, I always say, "Let me just have five minutes of your time." …. For many of us, we could have a really, really good childhood and still resonate with some of this to some degree. And then I would just always remind any social workers to remember trauma is a wound. And just like with our clients, trauma's not the bad things that happens to them. Trauma is not the bad things that happen to us.
It is the wound and it's never too late for us to tend to those wounds and to heal those wounds when we understand them as a wound.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
Well, Adam McCormick, thank you so much both for writing the book and for joining us today on Social Work Talks. I hope you will write another book sometime.
Adam McCormick:
I'm writing a book now on trauma and boyhood. It should be out soon.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
Oh, okay.
Adam McCormick:
Yeah. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. I really enjoyed this.
Elizabeth LaMotte:
Well, thank you so much. Likewise.
Adam McCormick:
Take care.