Self-Care and Organizational Practices for SSW Resilience

Sep 3, 2025
7 min read

Updated: Jan 7

In the week that we return to schools from the winter holiday break, many of us may be renewing our commitment to personal wellness. If you’re like me, you are ready to get back into a routine after a long stretch of highly enjoying relaxed eating restrictions and not knowing what day it was in that hazy week between Christmas and New Year’s. While I am ready to be back in a routine, I’m also sliding back into it very slowly and gently!

As I’ve written in a previous blog post, I had the great honor in November to check something off my goals list. In May of 2022, I began the process to write a book and it published right after Thanksgiving! The School Social Work Association of America (SSWAA) and the Oxford University Press partner to publish the SSWAA Workshop Series and my book is a part of that series. The title is Self-Care and Organizational Practices for School Social Worker Resilience. For this blog post, I’ve been invited to share a little bit of what that process was like and I hope you’ll find it beneficial.

What does it feel like to be a published author?

While my overwhelming feelings about writing a book at this point are gratitude and a sense of accomplishment, I also feel somewhat vulnerable. For me, school social worker (SSW) resilience is a very personal topic. I do feel a level of vulnerability at this point from “putting myself out there”. Part of that comes from the fact that while the book is published, it’s still too early to have a lot of feedback on it. As is customary in the publishing process, I won’t have any metrics on the book for a few months. So, other than congratulations from people who know me and one really nice comment on social media, I don’t really know what people THINK about it yet.

What were the lows and highs of the writing and publishing processes?

My main low was feeling like I was racing against the clock. Although I thought I had requested plenty of time to complete the book, I feel like I could have worked on that book for another year or two. I struggled with perfectionism and had to “land the plane” in time to submit my manuscript according to my contract. I also thought that more seasoned authors must have strategies that would make the whole process much easier and that I was probably struggling unnecessarily because I didn’t have that knowledge.

I questioned and second-guessed myself a lot during this process. I tried very hard to think about how my writing would sound to the reader, but it was difficult to step outside of myself to imagine how my thoughts would impact others…especially those who come from different walks of life than I do. Being a person who highly values sincerity, I needed to share my positions honestly while also being very precise to say exactly what I meant and no more. While no book can be perfect, I certainly didn’t want my writing to seem tone deaf or to needlessly offend anyone. My most frequent coping mechanism for those feelings was to dig deeper into the research and ensuring as much as possible that the thoughts I shared were supported by data. While I think that benefited both me and the book in the end, three and a half years is a long time to feel uncertain.

Now for the highs! I love the opportunity to take my writing practice to another level. I’m not sure we always think about reading and writing as essential to SSW practice, but those skills certainly have been central to mine. Writing a book was a stretch goal and it feels amazing to have completed it. It was also exhilarating because it was a goal that I had no way of accomplishing when I set it, but the stars aligned when I let myself dream the dream. It feels amazing for the book to be a real thing in the world now. I see my book a way to support other SSWs that will reach so many more people than I ever thought possible. I adore SSWs and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to provide support to those I may never meet in person. I love that SSW is such a broad field with so many different types of people and so many different strengths. It is wonderful to think that I may be providing support to an SSW that allows them to work in their strengths and help families in ways that I never could.

What do you hope to do with your book?

My biggest goal with this book is to push forward the conversation on SSW resilience. For many years, the recommendations for SSW resilience have largely focused on self-care efforts and have mostly excluded organizational supports. Promoting SSW resilience must be a partnership between individual practitioners and organizations. Some of the barriers to practitioner wellness in our schools can only be overcome by organizational effort. One of the reasons that this book is so heavy on research is that organizational strategies HAVE been identified in the literature even if they haven’t been widely adopted. Some districts may be doing a great job with this and our employers are not our enemies. The conversation on resilience doesn’t need to be a pendulum that swings to hold the organization completely responsible, but I hope that my book will move the needle closer to the middle and a partnership between practitioners and school districts.

To close, I’d like to share a quote from my book to give you more of an introduction to the project. This quote is from the introduction, which is available as a free sample chapter until January 19^th. There will be information at the end of the post regarding how to access it.

The work of a SSW can most definitely be traumatic. Just because the things that we see every day have become common to us does not mean that they are not traumatic. Interacting with students each day who do not have their basic needs met is traumatic. Having the daily experience of parents and family members not making vulnerable children a priority is traumatic. Speaking with students who self-injure or disclose suicidal ideation is traumatic. Providing support to students and staff in the aftermath of the death of a school community member is traumatic. When members of a school staff sit in a meeting during which a parent or community member is verbally attacking the school staff, that is traumatic. Walking down the halls on a daily basis with staff members requesting a mental health support session with the SSW for themselves, either in jest or in all seriousness, and feeling the need to be there for everyone else and the “struggle not to flee emotionally” (Saakvitne, 2002, p. 445) is traumatic. Many of these events come and go and we move onto the next thing we need to accomplish without the thought even crossing our minds that we may be feeling some uncomfortable emotions. If we do realize we are experiencing some difficult feelings, we may not take the next step to debrief or process the uncomfortable emotions we may be feeling. When we do actually recognize the need, there may not be a mechanism in place to help us debrief or process. We help people recognize and regulate their emotions all day, every day, and we often do not engage in the same practice ourselves.

Perhaps because we often need to make others a priority to assist them, there seems to be an epidemic of not properly valuing ourselves as human beings. A survey respondent from Pincus’s 1997 study very clearly expressed this sentiment, saying, “I don’t know any other field of educated people who are so hung up on whether or not they’re professional or worth anything” (p. 92). SSWs are worthy of well-being even if no one else ever benefits. While continued service to others is a result of SSW wellness, we do not practice self-care to continue to pour ourselves out for others. I’m exhausted and hopeless before I even start my self-care journey if it begins with thinking that when I’m filled back up, I’m heading right back out to empty myself again. By suggesting that practitioners think of self-care as breath instead of a mask, Miller and Grise-Owens (2020) recognized it as a necessary aspect of life. One of the principles of the NASW Code of Ethics (COE) is the dignity and worth of the person. While we are all committed to the people we serve and understand that “client interests are primary” (NASW, 2021, p. 8), we need to apply the dignity and worth of the person principle to ourselves, too. As my grandmother used to respond when I said I wanted to help people and she thought I was doing so excessively to my own detriment: “You’re a ‘People,’ too.”

The last high of this process that I’ll share is being asked to autograph my book. I’m probably supposed to act very cool and pretend that doesn’t impact me that much, but in the immortal words of Lawrence from School of Rock, “I’m not cool”! I’ll leave you with the inscription that I chose for my autograph: May you stay well as you do good in the world.

Lou (Scott) Paschall received her Master’s Degree in Social Work from the University of Tennessee and her Bachelor's Degree in Social Work from Middle Tennessee State University. Beginning her 23rd year of School Social Work practice, she is a Licensed School Social Worker and a Licensed Advanced Practice Social Worker (LAPSW). She also completed the process to become a National Certified School Social Worker (NCSSW) in 2022, becoming the first School Social Worker in Tennessee to earn the certification. Most recently, she wrote the book Self-Care and Organizational Practices for School Social Worker Resilience. She attended Manchester City Schools as a child and is honored to provide School Social Work services there. Her research interests are the ethical use of technology, supervision in School Social Work practice, Social Work history, play therapy, bibliotherapy, self-care and organizational supports for practitioner wellness, and animal-assisted interventions.