NAME IT FIRST

Workbook

The Social Worker's Sustainability Workbook

How to Keep Doing This Work Without Letting It Consume Everything You Are

You went into this work because you could not look away. Nobody warned you what you'd carry home.

This is for:

For the social worker whose caseload has become their identity — who went into this work because they could not look away and needs to learn what staying in it sustainably requires.

You'll produce:your Your Sustainability Practice Document

The Name It First Experience

Social work requires proximity to suffering. This workbook addresses what proximity costs: the caseload that follows you home, the identity that fuses with the work, the compassion fatigue that reads as commitment until it does not. Structured exercises on boundaries, vicarious trauma, and staying in the work. The output is not a self-care plan. It is Your Sustainability Practice Map.

You can opt into 30-, 60-, and 90-day check-ins from your account. We recommend you do — the point is to see what changed.

Sample questions

  1. What has doing this work for this long actually cost you — and what has made it possible to keep going?
  2. Where do you feel the line between professional investment and personal depletion most clearly?
  3. What does continuing this work on terms that don't consume everything you are look like?

Research basis

Figley on compassion fatigue in helping professions / Pearlman and Saakvitne on vicarious traumatization / Maslach on burnout dimensions in human services.

Choose your format.

Every format asks the same questions and produces the same document.

Print Paperbackpersonalize

A real book and a pen. Write in the margins. The most permanent version of you on a page.

$22.99

eBook + journal

The full guide on any screen, with a companion journal to write your answers by hand.

Not available

Audiobook

We read every question and every scenario aloud. For the commute, the walk, the dishes.

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Hardcoverpersonalize

The keepsake edition — sewn, ribboned, made to sit on a shelf and be returned to.

Not available

Digital Fill + membership+membership

Answer on screen. Your responses save as you go and assemble into your finished document.

$12.99

Hands-Free Interactive + membership+membership

Listen to each question and speak your answer. We capture it. You never touch a keyboard.

Not available

Everything packages

The Paperback Everything Package

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The Hardcover Everything Package

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The Premium Hardcover Everything Package

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Choose your pace.

The Essential path takes you to your finished document by the questions that matter most. The Full-depth path walks every question, every scenario, every angle. Both produce the same signed document — one just goes deeper on the way there.

Essential path

Shorter sessions. The questions that go directly to the document.

Full depth

Every question. Every scenario, every angle.

Paper doesn’t change its mind.

Thoughts change. Documents don’t. The answers you write are there when you return — unchanged by memory or mood.

You won’t just feel clearer — you’ll have written proof of what you decided.

Writing is the mechanism by which internal clarity becomes external evidence. Evidence you can return to, share, and hold someone — including yourself — accountable to.

Every question is answerable by everyone.

Every question in every title is answerable by the person for whom the assumed experience is true and by the person for whom it is not. No reader is excluded by how a question is built.

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