What Poets Can Tell Social Workers About Resilience

Straddling National Social Work Month (March) and National Poetry Month (April), on April 1, 2025, Wayne Scott, MA, LCSW, MFA, writer and psychotherapist, is offering a webinar to fortify and inspire all mental health practitioners in the age of overwhelm. It's free.

So often for social workers helping vulnerable clients, our bodies, minds, and spirits experience a range of troubling feelings-- numbness, dissociation, anger, and sadness. When they are not named and shared, the feelings can lead to an emotional flatness, somatic shut down, and burnout. Helping professionals are accustomed to seek guidance through clinical research and the social sciences, which speak analytically and deterministically from the left hemisphere of our brains, but what if we turned also to the wisdom of poets, who draw from the right hemisphere of the brain?

The poet Audre Lorde wrote, “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.” The act of listening to our body’s wisdom--feelings, gut senses, and intuitions--and pushing that visceral awareness into words that can be shared with others describes one of the primary drivers for many writers. This impulse to connect what we experience in our bodies to language that is fresh and creative and beautiful has relevance for social workers, too. 

OBJECTIVES

By the end of this 1.5-hour webinar, participants will be able to:

1. Explore the ways right hemisphere functions like art, intuition, and creativity can address the “co-suffering” endemic to social work practice;
2. Become familiar with the wisdom traditions of marginalized and historically oppressed communities, through poets who speak to issues of survival, adaptation, thriving, and resilience; 
3. Draw on the wisdom traditions of specific writers making meaning out of dangerous and oppressive circumstances, naming truths to ensure their survival, for them and their communities; and
4. Use journaling and reflection to tap their whole-body and right brain wisdom.

1.5 CONTINUING EDUCATION UNITS through the National Association of Social Workers (Oregon).

Contact the EVENT ORGANIZER at the bottom of the page with questions.

Host or Publisher Wayne Scott, MA, LCSW