Healing the Helping Professional: The Unfinished Business of Childhood

Description

(September 2026)

Every helping professional brings two stories into the room: the story of the child or family they are serving and their own. While training often emphasizes evidence-based interventions, far less attention is given to how our personal histories influence our perceptions, relationships, boundaries, and responses to the children and families we serve.

This engaging and reflective workshop explores how unresolved childhood experiences can quietly shape our professional practice. Participants will examine common adaptations developed in response to early adversity, including over-functioning, people-pleasing, perfectionism, hypervigilance, emotional distancing, and the compulsion to rescue others. Rather than viewing these patterns as personal flaws, participants will learn to understand them as adaptive survival strategies that can both strengthen and complicate their work.

Grounded in neuroscience, attachment theory, and trauma-informed practice, this workshop provides practical strategies for increasing self-awareness, strengthening emotional regulation, and cultivating sustainable, authentic relationships with children and families. Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of how tending to their own unfinished business enhances their capacity to remain present, connected, and effective in the challenging work of foster care.

Participants will learn to:

Recognize how childhood experiences influence professional relationships and decision-making.
Identify common adaptive strategies that can both support and interfere with effective practice.
Understand the neuroscience of trauma and its impact on both helping professionals and the children and families they serve.
Apply practical strategies to strengthen self-awareness, emotional regulation, and resilience.
Develop a framework for sustaining empathy while reducing burnout and compassion fatigue.

Adam McCormick, PhD, is a Professor of Social Work at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, where he teaches in both the Social Work and Master of Counseling programs. His work focuses on childhood trauma, emotional survival adaptations, authenticity, burnout, masculinity, and the inner lives of helping professionals.

Dr. McCormick is the recipient of the 2026 Minnie Stevens Piper Professor Award, Texas’s highest teaching honor for university faculty, and the 2025 Distinguished Teaching Award at St. Edward’s University. He was also the recipient of the 2025 Distinguished Teaching Award.

He is the author of the NASW Press book Healing the Helping Professional: The Unfinished Business of Childhood, which explores how childhood trauma and emotional survival roles continue shaping the lives and work of therapists, social workers, counselors, and other helping professionals. He is the author of LGBTQ Youth in Foster Care: Empowering Approaches to Inclusive Care (Routledge) and is currently authoring a forthcoming book exploring the hidden emotional and developmental costs of boyhood and masculinity.

Over the course of his career, Dr. McCormick has delivered more than 250 lectures, keynote presentations, and workshops around the country on trauma, emotional wellbeing, masculinity, foster care, helping professionals, authenticity, burnout, and trauma-informed practice. His work is known for integrating relational, reflective, and trauma-informed perspectives in ways that help people better understand both themselves and the people they serve.

Watch time: 119 minutes

Eligible Certificate of Completion time: 120 minutes

expires September 30, 2031