Vicarious trauma - the hint is in the word "trauma"

Vicarious trauma in short is the trauma that you experience hearing or seeing someone else's trauma.
It shows up with similar symptoms to the original trauma (like PTSD for example).

How can it affect you if you're not the victim of the trauma itself?
I'm hoping the following might give you an answer to that.

We all have some idea of what trauma looks like: you get beaten up. You live in a war zone. You get raped. It happens to you.

But what about if you see as a child your mother being beaten up by your father? Though he's never laid a hand on you, odds are you witnessing it will leave you traumatised. It happens to someone close to you.

Or if you're a soldier, and you witness your mate being literally blown to pieces? Though you may be physically unscathed, you will experience trauma. It happens to someone close to you.

Vicarious trauma is once removed. It doesn't happen to you, you don't witness it - but it still affects you.
If you're a reporter, putting together a documentary on a genocide, you see it on a screen.

If you're a soldier, safe in your home country, whose job it is to deliver the news to parents that their sons have "died for their country", you see it in your mind's eye.

Can you see how being confronted with trauma, first hand or second hand, it then becomes only a short step to imagine what you'd feel like in the same situation, feeling the same fear?

Vicarious trauma is a "disease" of empathy - if you can see other people's pain, and if you care about those people, odds are that you will feel that pain yourself.

In my work as a psychotherapist I am sometimes confronted with stories of unimaginable suffering. They happen in the present or the past of people I care deeply about.
I can never forget them.

If I want to continue working and not to start despairing of the human condition, the worst of which I sometimes hear, I have to find a way to both acknowledge the horrors I hear, and not live them in my mind.

I have to accept that the trauma I hear about can become the trauma I feel, and seek help for it.

In order to do so, I go and see my own therapist. He helps me to find ways to give meaning to the pain I witness, and to take care of my vicarious symptoms of trauma.

The gift we give those whose pain we witness is that they are no longer alone.