The Hidden Hazards of Humanitarian Work: Unmasking Vicarious Trauma and Secondary Traumatic Stress
In the spring of 2010 I woke up in a hotel room in Zambia, disoriented, heart racing, my body drenched in sweat. I was in Zambia to interview refugees for resettlement to the US — a job I loved. I’d been interviewing asylum seekers and refugees for over six years and I was good at my job. But this time was different.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw images from the stories I’d heard that day. When sleep did come, it was fitful and for days on end included graphic nightmares that left me with intense guilt, because I couldn’t do more to protect people, and shame because nobody around me seemed to be struggling at all.
This had never happened before. I’d always been able to leave my work at the worksite when I was finished. But something had shifted; I just didn’t know how to put words to it. So I tried to shake it off, chalking things up to a difficult assignment. I told myself it was nothing, that it would pass. But it didn’t and I continued to experience the symptoms of someone else’s horror.
This horror I was experiencing is something known as vicarious trauma — where I was experiencing symptoms of trauma after being repeatedly exposed to other people’s trauma and their stories of traumatic events. The term vicarious trauma is often used interchangeably with secondary traumatic stress, but the two are different. Where vicarious trauma results from the repeated exposure to other people’s trauma, secondary traumatic stress — the emotional duress that arises when a person hears the firsthand trauma experiences of another — can arise after a single experience.
Though these two forms of trauma a common reality for many humanitarians, they don’t exist in a vacuum. Whether we’ll experience this trauma, or to what degree, or how long it will take us to heal is all influenced by our own sense of self-efficacy and whether we operate in psychologically safe cultures where we feel safe sharing our experiences. Unfortunately the “just push through” cultures within which most humanitarians operate makes it challenging to heal, which not only further harms the humanitarian, but the mission as well.
Tomorrow we’ll dive deeper into another form of mission-driven occupational trauma known as post-traumatic stress.
