Vicarious Trauma Counselling in Bendigo and Online
Throughline Counselling offers counselling for helping professionals and helpers to make sense of the emotional overwhelm, pain or numbness that can sometimes take hold if you help others who have experienced trauma. This is often referred to as vicarious or secondary trauma. If you are considering counselling with me, the first step is usually a brief phone conversation to see whether working together feels like a good fit.
What is vicarious trauma?
It is not a mental health diagnosis, but the effects of vicarious trauma or secondary trauma are real. As someone with first-hand experience in a frontline service working with clients in crisis, I know vicarious trauma exists. I have seen people feel it and be overwhelmed by it and lose their footing. Safe + Equal describes vicarious trauma as “the cumulative effects of exposure to information about traumatic events and experiences, potentially leading to distress”.
Why do I feel overwhelmed by the trauma of others?
It may be the cumulative effect, but we are individuals with our own experiences of suffering, which can sometimes act as a gateway for us to take in the suffering of others. Even if your own suffering was not overtly violent or seemingly impactful, it may still have shaped you, particularly if you did not receive support and understanding when you needed it. You are also human, and what makes you relate to others can make you feel as though you are in the story of those you help not just listening to it.
Importantly, vicarious trauma does not happen because you are a flawed professional but because you are human and you relate to suffering.
How therapy can help with vicarious trauma
The type of therapy I provide is weekly, goes deep and tends to relational dynamics both between you and me and also between you and other people in your world and the organisation you might work in
Through attending to your thoughts, feelings and stories, we explore the terrain of helping, including your inner landscape. This can help you make sense of yourself, and together we can figure out what is overwhelming.
Weekly therapy provides the consistent space for working through your experiences as they occur at work so that it becomes easier to separate what is yours and what are the thoughts, sensations and feelings of other people.
How to find resilience in caring roles
Finding resilience, working in places where trauma and suffering are part of your role, does not negate feeling with others. Feeling with, and keeping a sense of who you are in relation to those you help, is an important part of developing resilience.
Through therapy, I help people get a sense of agency and inner strength. Not by talking you out of not feeling, but by helping you attend to feelings, thoughts and sensations.
We do not always have a tank filled with ”resilience”, and what resources you have to draw on can vary. For example, you might find it harder to separate what is yours and someone else’s situation if you work with people who are palliative and someone in your own life is terminally ill.
Support for vicarious trauma in Bendigo or online
If you are a helping professional and are finding it difficult to carry the emotional weight of your work alone, therapy can provide a dedicated space to reflect on what you are witnessing, and how it is affecting you.
Throughline Counselling offers vicarious trauma counselling in Bendigo and online for helping professionals, including nurses, doctors, social workers, psychologists, counsellors, teachers, community workers, carers, and others working in helping roles.
If you would like to find out whether therapy with me may be a good fit, you are welcome to get in touch or read more on related pages: