“At the end of the day, we’re all only human”: The emotional labour of performing trauma-informed care in a fractured homelessness system

Despite increasing international uptake of trauma-informed care in the homelessness sector, practitioners’ experiences remain underexplored. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 15 staff from homelessness organisations in a London borough, and four national experts, this article is the first to explore how professionals in the homelessness sector manage their own emotions amidst the complexities of a fractured homelessness system and housing crisis. Employing the concept of emotional labour, it asks how staff feel implementing trauma-informed care, while facing reduced funding, heavier workloads, and increasingly complex client needs. While staff attempted to shield themselves through containment of emotion, engagement in riskier practices was evident as staff internalised failings which were inherently structural. The findings provide much-needed knowledge about the implementation of trauma-informed models, disclosing ways in which their endorsement in the homelessness sector demands new forms of highly precarious emotional labour.