Helping professionals - the bless and the burden of helping

The experimentation of stress, either acute or prolonged, major stressful events or daily annoying and disturbing little facts, is a risk factor in developing psychopathology. The helping professionals, dealing directly with the lives of those in need, are particularly prone to burnout and exhaustion and secondary traumatic stress. When you work directly with those who you help, your compassion affects you both in positive and negative ways. Also, in educational, therapeutic and remedial settings, there are often crisis situations which could escalate into a conflict rapidly. Though the existence of a conflict is not always a bad things, while solving it effectively could bring personal and professional growth, the stress also cause many psychological and interpersonal problems. By solving conflict successfully, you may also solve many underlying problems that it has brought to the surface and obtain unexpected benefits for your personal and professional development. Conflict management skills are very important assets for helping professionals and for helped people. A resilient factor for these professionals is theirs conflict management style, theirs ability to express assertively theirs emotions and to solve efficiently the conflictive situations. In this paper we intend to assess the impact of the life stressful events on the ability to cope with adverse circumstances and the relation between conflict management style and job satisfaction and burnout.