Vicarious Trauma, Not Burnout, What Leaders Need to Know

Her first one was really about the definition of vicarious trauma.

She had done her due diligence.

She is on it.

She was in the literature and she landed on something kind of close to this.

She said, so I think that vicarious trauma then is what accumulates when you spend years gathering evidence that the world is cruel and gather none of the opposite.

Yeah, beautiful.

Thank you for that.

After sharing it, she then wanted to know if that was right.

My reaction says yes.

And whether this stuff is only happening to clinicians, those people with the letters behind their name that are doing the evidence-based interventions and therapies and all of that.

And this is such a great question because there are so many people involved in helping and healing that don't necessarily have the credentials to prove it or to legitimize it, right? So coming back, her definition was spot on.

And let's talk about the literature.

The construct of vicarious trauma comes from researchers Lisa McCann and Lorianne Perlman, who coined this in 1990.

And they described it as this change in how the person sees the world as a result of sustained empathic engagement with other people's trauma.

What this means is your sense of whether people are safe, whether the world is basically fair, whether you have any control over what happens changes because of your work.

The changes build slowly, right out of all the ordinary work days, and the person it's happening to is usually the last one to notice.

And it happens to anyone whose job requires that connection and engagement.

So again, the obvious roles here are the therapist, the physicians, right? But also your intake staff, your case managers, your advocates, your allied health professionals, okay? Your crisis line.

And it applies to the person at your front desk who hears the first version of a lot of these stories before anyone else does as they're coming in to check in for their appointments.

or the environmental services person who they so graciously clean the spaces where trauma work is done.

What this means is that if someone on your staff listens to trauma or is exposed to people with trauma for a living, this is happening to them.

And it comes with this work just the same way that getting wet happens when we walk through water.

You cannot avoid it.

And I know that's controversial to say that we can't avoid vicarious trauma because a lot of wellness spending is built on the assumption that you can.

But guess what? That's why so much of that wellness programming disappoints.