What is vicarious trauma?
Vicarious trauma is described as a transformation in a therapist (or other worker) as a result of working with clients’ traumatic experiences. The full definition, developed by Pearlman and Saakvitne (1995), is as follows: The inner transformation that occurs in the inner experience of the therapist [or other professional] that comes about as a result of empathic engagement with clients’ trauma material.’ (p. 31). It is related to concepts such as ’emotional exhaustion’, ‘burnout’, ‘compassion fatigue’, ‘secondary traumatisation’ and ‘counter-transference’, but some key differences exist between some of these concepts (see Dunkley and Whelan, 2006). It can also be expressed as ‘feeling heavy’, or when the work (or an aspect of the work) ‘gets inside you’.
