Many social workers experience high levels of emotional exhaustion (Kim, Ji, & Kao, 2011), directly contributing to poor professional retention, with numbers of social workers leaving the field between 20 and 40% annually in some sectors (Font, 2012). Additionally, social work is a highly gendered field (Sloan, 2012), and expectations of social workers’ emotional labour as well as their prospects for influence and advancement reflect this (Lane & Flowers, 2015). Rather than examining the struggles social workers face (the subject of numerous studies already), this qualitative study examines the experiences of six female social workers, who self-identified as being emotionally healthy, thriving in their job, and who intended to continue as social workers... .
