Guiding the Dark and Secondary Trauma Syndrome: Tour Guides’ Coping Mechanisms for Guiding in Dark Tourism Sites

Abstract

This research is a part of PhD research exploring how tour guides interpret the dark chapters of Berlin’s history. The theoretical framework brings together the strands of dark tourism, tour guide, and interpretation literature. In guiding tourists through topics and sites of death, atrocity and genocide, tour guides are subjected to a form of Secondary Trauma. The article examines the part of the research which looks at what kinds of coping mechanisms guides adopt in order to deal with regularly interpreting acts of violence, cruelty and human tragedy. The article reviews the context of this examination and the literature written on Secondary Trauma. It goes on to present early findings and to discuss the ad-hoc ways in which guides deal with the psychological effects of guiding the dark, with various levels of awareness to the symptoms of secondary trauma. Finally, the article coins this phenomenon as Guiding the Dark Accumulative Psychological Stress, allowing room for more research in the future to fill this gap in the literature.