How do I cope with cases I can't fix in social work?

You have built some boundaries, and that matters, but the cases you cannot fix and the ones that haunt you are stacking up anyway. That is the deep weight of this work. You went in to help, and you keep meeting suffering that no effort of yours can undo. The pile is real, and pretending it is not would only make it heavier. Here is a hard truth that is also a mercy: you were never able to fix all of it, and you were never supposed to. Your job is to bring care, skill, and presence to people in pain, not to guarantee outcomes that depend on forces far beyond you. The cases you could not save were not yours to save alone. Carrying them as personal failures is a burden that was never rightly yours. Start tending the pile instead of just adding to it. Find a way to set the haunting ones down, a trusted colleague, a supervisor, a practice of naming them and releasing them at the end of a day. You cannot hold every case in your body and keep doing this work for years. Honoring the ones you could not fix, then letting them rest, is not giving up. It is how you stay whole enough to help the next one.