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.

What do you know about vicarious trauma?

As someone with first-hand experience in a frontline service working with clients in crisis and hearing the telling of trauma every day, I know vicarious trauma exists. I have seen people feel it and be overwhelmed or numbed by it. Vicarious trauma is not a diagnosis. You may find a checklist online to help you find out if you have vicarious trauma, but I also do not think a symptom checklist fits for everyone.

Vicarious trauma can affect anyone

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 suffering was subtle and not violent or abusive physically or psychologically, it may still shape how you relate to others. What makes you able to relate to people can, with too much weight and strain, make you feel as though you are in the story of those you help.

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.

Through attending to your thoughts, feelings and stories, we explore the landscapes of helping but also your inner landscape of how you relate to others. This can help make sense of yourself and how what might be your best quality as a helper can also be what gets you stuck with the feelings of others.
Being in therapy weekly whilst you are working and experiencing the everyday life provides the consistent space for a felt sense to develop that you can separate what is yours and what are the thoughts, sensations and feelings of the people you work with or care for.

It is not about stopping feeling with others

Finding resilience in everyday life, 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 strength and an inner reservoir to draw on. What resources you have to draw on is dynamic and shifts throughout time, also depending on what goes on in your own life. If you work close to people who are in palliative care, for example, and someone close to you becomes chronically ill and there is nowhere for you to talk about how personal and professional life intersect, you are welcome to make contact and ask for an initial consult to explore what therapy might be like and how I work.

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, how it is affecting you, and what support you may need.

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.

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