Intervention in a Shared Traumatic Reality: A New Challenge for Social Workers

Abstract

in Israel. She is particularly interested in the study of individuals who have experienced secondary exposure to traumatic events. Her research has examined spouses of former veterans and prisoners of war, children of fathers with PTSD and therapists who have treated victims of terrorism. In addition, Prof. Dekel is interested in exploring the consequences of direct exposure to traumatic events.

Shared Trauma: When the Professional is Personal

“…The term shared traumatic reality has garnered the most interest in Israel where its citizens are chronically exposed to terrorist attacks, particularly in Sderot and areas bordering the Gaza Strip (Nuttmann-Shwartz and Dekel 2009;Dekel and Baum 2009;Shamai and Ron 2009). According to Baum (2010), shared traumatic reality entails several key aspects, including that it is (1) a current, collective event, (2) the clinician and client belong to the same community, and (3) the clinician suffers from the double exposure of being a citizen of the region and working work individuals in the same community.…”

‘I Am in a Constant State of Insecurity Trying to Make Ends Meet, like Our Service Users’: Shared Austerity Reality between Social Workers and Service Users—Towards a Preliminary Conceptualisation

“…In recent years, a small but growing body of scholarly work has been addressing the concept of "shared reality" (Kretsch, et al, 1997), "shared traumatic reality" (Dekel and Baum, 2010;Nuttman-Shwartz et al, 2009) and "shared trauma" (Tosone et al, 2012). The features common to these three interrelated concepts are situations of shared reality in which welfare professionals and service users were exposed to the same collective disaster.…”

Trap of Conflicting Needs: Helping Professionals in the Wake of a Shared Traumatic Reality

“…One distinguishes between emergency work, consisting of short-term, crisis focused intervention in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, and ongoing psychotherapy, which starts before the disaster and continues through it, (Baum 2010), in a shared traumatic reality. The other discusses the challenges faced by social workers in a shared traumatic reality (Dekel and Baum 2010).…”