Secondary Traumatization, Burnout, and Vicarious Traumatization

Abstract

Trauma therapy influences the personal and professional lives of therapists as they cope with the secondary traumatic stress associated with treating trauma survivors. Therapists go through an internal process as they try both to make sense out of the stories they hear from clients, and to integrate those stories into their own existing cognitive schemas. During this process of integration, trauma therapists often experience secondary traumatic stress reactions that negatively impact the treatment process, as well as their own experiences of self. Secondary traumatic stress, vicarious traumitization, and worker burnout are distinctly different processes that practitioners need to differentiate, even though they are often similar in their initial presentation.