Dec 2025: Secondary Traumatic Stress and Compassion Fatigue
As clinicians, helpers, and system workers, we often carry the emotional weight of others’ stories. Over time, that exposure can cause secondary trauma or vicarious trauma. These experiences might not be dramatic or crisis-level; they often accumulate slowly, altering our worldview, relationships, and capacity to engage.
In December, we’ll explore:
How secondary/vicarious trauma shows up in our bodies, beliefs, and systems
The interplay of personal history, power, and culture in how we absorb trauma
Strategies for prevention, repair, and resilience — at personal, relational, and organizational levels
How to engage with peritraumatic growth (finding meaning, transformation) rather than just damage control
To Prepare:
Read: Personal Trauma History and Secondary Traumatic Stress in Mental Health Professionals: A Systematic Review
Listen: Managing Traumatic Stress as it Occurs (Peritraumatic Growth) with Dr. Arielle Schwartz (Episode 181)
Watch: Traumatic Stress and the Nervous System — Linda Thai
These resources will help you better understand:
Vicarious trauma often unfolds gradually and invisibly—through fatigue, irritability, numbing, hypervigilance, or worldview shifts.
Our own trauma histories may predispose or sensitize us to carrying others’ trauma.
When we carry strain internally, it subtly affects attunement, pacing, boundaries, responsiveness, and repair capacity.
Trauma exposure does not occur in a vacuum; it is collective, historical, systemic traumas shape how different communities experience suffering.
Peritraumatic growth invites us to lean into meaning, integration, and transformation without weaponizing the term resilience.
Reflection Prompts
What changes (emotional, cognitive, physical) have you noticed in yourself that might be connected to vicarious trauma?
In what ways might your personal trauma history influence how you absorb clients’ narratives?
Which of your “restorative practices” feel truly renewing—and which feel like checking a box?
What relational or structural (team, supervision, organizational) supports do you currently have? What’s missing?
What might it look like to invite peritraumatic growth in your work (for yourself, your clients, your team)?
Review the Secondary Traumatic Stress Scale
Optional Materials
Preventing vicarious traumatization of mental health therapists: identifying protective practices
Compassion Fatigue and Psychological Distress Among Social Workers: A Validation Study
Recognizing & Preventing Therapist Burnout
Coping with Secondary Traumatic Stress
Therapy Chat: Vicarious Trauma and Helping Professionals with Laura van Dernoot Lipsky
