In the second chapter of this series, Andrea Carrera calls on schools and teacher trainers to acknowledge that vicarious trauma is a common experience for teachers
Vicarious trauma is a common psychological phenomenon experienced by people who work with victims of trauma or trauma survivors. This work-related trauma exposure in education can occur from such experiences as listening to the person telling their story, supporting their families, putting intervention plans in place, collecting data, reviewing case files, and others.
Research is available about vicarious trauma in first responders (such as doctors, nurses, firefighters, or police), but what about us working in schools?
We are first responders
When working with children, most of the time, we are the ones that first identify difficult situations and manage referrals for professional support or to specific institutions.
Think about all the difficult situations your students have been through as a group and as individuals (the ones you know about). It can be anything from bullying to school shootings and natural disasters, the loss of a parent, extreme poverty, mental illness and many others.
If your students experienced any traumatic experiences and you have been involved in supporting them academically, emotionally, physically, or spiritually, then it is likely that you experienced, are experiencing, or will experience vicarious trauma.
When we were studying, no one told us about vicarious trauma and how to cope with it
But when we were studying, no one told us about this and how to cope with it.
While training to be a teacher, did anyone tell you what’s normal to feel when you have been exposed to other people's traumatic experiences for over three years, non-stop?
I hope someone teaching future teachers, heads, and teacher assistants (but also doctors, nurses, counsellors, psychologists and sports coaches) is reading this and decides to do something about it next time they plan their classes.
This is a call for higher education: it is time to break the silence regarding this critical situation.
How we respond to vicarious trauma
Years of doing this without a healthy way of releasing the pressure could result in secondary stress
Humans usually respond to vicarious trauma in one of three ways.
The first one includes experiencing compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress, critical incident stress and other psychosocial symptoms.
Simply put, compassion fatigue is a combination of emotional, physical and spiritual tiredness linked to the continuous act of caring for other people who are experiencing or experienced trauma.
Secondary stress refers to the mix of behaviours and emotions resulting from acknowledging and helping someone who experienced or is experiencing a traumatic situation. Sometimes this psychological phenomenon looks very similar to the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Let’s think about, for example, a designated child protection lead doing referrals for years to selected government institutions. Each referral involves paperwork, sometimes being in court, investigating, and recollecting testimonies. Each intervention is an action based on the knowledge the CP Lead has. Years of doing this without a healthy way of releasing the pressure could result in secondary stress.
Critical incident stress is related to all those situations that have sufficient power to overwhelm someone’s ability to cope. This is directly connected to our own experience of a traumatic event. How many of us experienced or are experiencing a student’s death? How many of us experienced or are experiencing a natural disaster that affected our school? What about war? Or school shootings? What about drug dealing in school? What about gangs? I could go on and on. These situations are examples of critical incidents that provoke stress. For some of us, some of these situations will drown our ability to cope.
The second response scenario is one in which an individual has enough support available and resilience to deal with the information about the trauma without repercussions.
In the third response scenario, an individual can feel inspired by the victim’s strength or way of dealing with the traumatic experience and embrace that example in their own emotional process. Victims can be transformed by their trauma, and so too can the person experiencing vicarious trauma. This psychosocial dynamic might build a sense of meaning, encouraging the person to keep supporting people.
We are all in this together
It is crucial to break the silence and talk about this with your colleagues or your teams
Vicarious trauma will affect everyone working with trauma victims.
However, certain traits, experiences or situations might make the experience more challenging – for example, prior traumatic experiences, social isolation, a tendency to avoid dealing with feelings and emotions, struggling to express feelings, a lack of training for the job, being new in the job, a lack of support systems in and outside school, work isolation (not having a team to rely on), underlying and untreated mental health conditions such as anxiety or depression, and others.
If you think you are in one of these situations, it is essential to take practical action.
If you are a leader and consider one of these categories or situations to fit any of your team members, it is essential to take action. I will share a variety of practical measures in the next article.
For now, it is crucial to break the silence and talk about this with your colleagues or your teams. Identify and give a name to the experience. This will help you feel more in control. I constantly repeat to the team of teachers and support staff I work with that we are all in this together.
This statement helps me as a reminder that I am not alone in experiencing these and more psychological phenomena. The sense of belonging to a team and a school is one of the best protective factors against psychological distress in all its forms. So, dear reader and colleague, remember: we are all in this together.
Further reading
- Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning;
- The knight in rusty armour by Robert Fisher;
- Emily Esfahani Smith’s TED talk There's more to life than being happy;
These suggestions are not specific to vicarious trauma. However, they delve deeper into understanding the sense of meaning - which is a personal resource, just like the sense of belonging - and can help us build reliable personal resources that can assist us in supporting ourselves and others.
You can find the first article in the series here.
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What support is in place at your school for members of staff who support students through traumatic experiences? Do you have a question for Andrea? Register for your free profile and leave a comment below!
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