What is Vicarious Trauma and How Can I Support My Team?

What is vicarious trauma, and how can I support my team?

Vicarious trauma, also known as secondary trauma, is exposure to another person’s trauma. It can have a significant impact on a person’s well-being and levels of distress, especially if we continue to try and “push through” without getting support.

As with our service users, traumatic experiences are very personal. What one person experiences as traumatic might be very different from the next person. It’s important to get to know ourselves and our colleagues well enough to be able to have open conversations when we’re troubled by something. 

Why is this important for homelessness services?

As we talked about in an earlier blog, around 92% of people experiencing homelessness have also experienced a life changing traumatic event (Irving & Harding, 2022). We also know that being homeless in itself is actively traumatising, and the people we work with have often experienced stigma, discrimination, verbal and physical violence, as well as earlier traumas in their life. 

The impact of hearing about, and sometimes witnessing, this repeatedly over time impacts on all of us. Humans are designed to be social creatures; our brains are wired to help us connect with other people. When we are hearing about distressing things which have happened or are happening to others, parts of our brain will be firing as if it was happening to us, activating our stress response and initiating our “fight or flight” response on some level. 

When we add to this the level of personal and societal distress which we are living through or witnessing, it is unsurprising that we need to pay attention to the concept of vicarious trauma. 

Signs of vicarious trauma

So what might be helpful to look out for in ourselves and others? According to the British Medical Association and Freedom from Torture, some of the signs of vicarious trauma are:

• Experiencing lingering feelings of anger, rage and sadness about a service users’ situation

• Becoming overly involved emotionally with a service user

• Experiencing bystander guilt, shame, and feelings of self-doubt

• Being preoccupied with thoughts of service users outside of work

• Over identification with the service user (having horror or rescue fantasies)

• Loss of hope about work

• Emotional distancing or numbing, detaching from service users and avoiding listening to people’s traumatic experiences

• Difficulties in maintaining professional boundaries 

Now, we aren’t suggesting that you get out there with a notepad and pen and start diagnosing all your colleagues with vicarious trauma, but it might be helpful to reflect a little on your own experiences and see if anything from the list above resonates. Are there any experiences which continue to play in your mind? Or any service user’s who you’ve felt like you had to go above and beyond for because their story touched you in some way? Maybe you’ve noticed that you’re feeling a little disconnected from your work recently?

What can we do about it? 

Unfortunately, we can’t be there in our service users’ lives to stop the traumatic experiences ever happening to them in the first place. So it’s likely that a large part of our role is still going to involve hearing about distressing things which have happened to people. It’s important to help people feel heard, but we need to be able to do that from a place of feeling safe and supported ourselves. 

There are a number of things we can do for ourselves, such as looking after our physical and mental well-being, taking annual leave regularly, or switching off our work phone or our laptop when we’re not at work. Anything which you would usually use to support yourself during a difficult time will also help you to reduce the risk of vicarious trauma, however there are also some important things organisations can be doing to support their staff teams. 

The culture of a workplace is very important. Is your team a team where people generally aren’t on leave very often, or are often staying way past their working hours to “just finish this one thing”? It can be helpful to have policies and procedures in place, and used, which support your team members to take time for themselves during the workday. For example, if you usually have back-to-back appointments booked into your diary, that gives no time for your brain to process what you’ve been told before you move onto working with another person. Could your team move to a more flexible diary system, where you have regular breaks in your day to pause, go outside, or debrief with a colleague or manager? 

Facilitated spaces such as reflective practice or team debrief sessions can also be helpful. It’s important that your team feel safe to share their emotional responses to what they’ve heard in these spaces. Does your team have a culture where it’s normal to talk about feelings, or do you just “push through and get on with it”? We are all human, and we are all going to feel something when hearing our service users’ stories, the more we can normalise and talk about that, the lower the risk of experiencing vicarious trauma to an extent where it makes you unwell. 

If you would like some help to understand vicarious trauma more, or to get supportive systems in place, please get in touch to talk about how Matter South Yorkshire CIC could work with your team.