VICARIOUS TRAUMA
“Swimming in a thick soup of trauma”
In the run up to the holidays and time when we all self-reflect and take stock of our current situation, we predictably think about what we want to change and improve and get better for next year.
I wans to share with you some information and food for thought about you, your team, your colleagues and your leaders, your workplace and your mindset.
In today's fast-paced work environment, 'burnout' has become a ubiquitous term, often serving as a catch-all diagnosis for a myriad of workplace stressors and mental fatigue.
While burnout is undeniably a pressing problem, it is crucial to acknowledge that it is not the only mental health issue affecting workplace well-being.
We are seeing mental health issues becoming more prevalent in recent times in a wide range of occupations and workplaces. If you work in, or are responsible for, the wellbeing of your people in any of these industries or sectors, the information in this paper could significantly enhance and empower your organisation in both compliance and performance.
Insurance NDIS Journalism Animal welfare Immigration and refugee services Local Government Courts and Justice Legal Tech Support Customer Service Climate and Environment Human Resources
Tackling and treating conditions like vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, compassion fatigue, moral injury, and even survivor guilt, or empathetic distress requires a dramatically different approach than addressing burnout.
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
This approach often requires a clinical lens for accurate identification and effective intervention. Mislabelling or oversimplifying these complex and often interwoven mental health challenges can lead to inappropriate solutions, perpetuating a cycle of unaddressed issues and declining team performance. This is affecting our efforts to meet our compliance obligations under the new Psychosocial Hazards legislation.
Although research on burnout has been a useful field of exploration, a new concern has arisen about work stresses specifically associated with work with victims of trauma (Bell, H., Kulkarni, S., & Dalton, L., 2003).
So, over the coming weeks I will be sharing some insights into somr of the different, most common mental health challenges we might be seeing in our friends and colleagues.
The reason I am sharing these is because tackling them is different to dealing with burnout, the recovery is different and the prevention can be very different as well.
This is a problem when we merely assume we know what the issues are. The Code of Practice demands that we collaborate with every level of employees (in fact, every employee in our organisations must have a voice).
What happens when even the employees do not know what issues they are facing? Gelett Burgess reputedly said “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like” which has a similarity to our people at work, struggling at different levels with different mental health challenges, and merely assuming it is burnout.
Let’s take a look at:
VICARIOUS TRAUMA
“Swimming in a thick soup of trauma”
Trauma is defined as an experience that is stressful, shocking or dangerous, leaving an emotional injury that affects performance and wellbeing. Vicarious trauma occurs when someone has to endure exposure to ongoing stories and experiences (not of the actual trauma, but the aftermath of others’).
Vicarious trauma is more than just job-related stress; it specifically arises from the emotional residue of interacting with highly emotional and traumatised individuals.
It’s an emotional and psychological toll experienced by professionals who are repeatedly exposed to the trauma of others. It can manifest in various ways, from emotional numbness to heightened anxiety, and if unaddressed requires specialist therapeutic approaches for effective management.
Understanding vicarious trauma is crucial for fostering a truly supportive and psychologically safe work environment.
Organisations do not always take a preventative or proactive approach to addressing vicarious trauma, often assuming the provision of supervision and encouraging worker self-care will be sufficient (Ashley-Bins, S., Cousins, C., 2020).
The research is clear; the primary risk factors are, predictably, workload and trauma caseload, in the main.
The protection factors of changes in organisational culture, workload, group support, supervision, self-care, team-care, education and work environments can all help prevent vicarious trauma in staff.
As part of their self-care practices, social workers need to strengthen and build on their own resilience. Individuals and organizations have a responsibility in this regard to help ameliorate the effects of vicarious trauma (Masson, F., 2019)
From the visual above, you can see the causes, what it looks like, the symptoms people experience, the recovery and, crucially, a glimpse at how to prevent it.
Preventing and Recovering from Vicarious Trauma is a complex undertaking. We need to be preventing it insofar as is possible, but the reality is that we will often be trying to mitigate the problem.
I can help with that. As a Clinical Director, I have developed and delivered programs tackling extreme levels of burnout and mental ill-health in individuals and groups for over a decade.
If this information is important enough for your to read this far, then please share it with anyone you know that needs to read it as well.
Let’s have a discussion around getting this right for our people.