Vicarious Resilience Research Articles

Annals for Educators - 16 June 2020.

Annals for Educators - 16 June 2020.

The Bell Tolls for Thee & Thine: Compassion Fatigue & the Overdose Epidemic

Non-fatal and fatal overdoses are traumatic events that have been increasing over the past 20 years and disproportionately impacting rural communities in the United States. The human suffering caused by the opioid epidemic is rarely described in the empirical literature. The purpose of this article is to 1) define individual- and community-level overdose-related compassion fatigue (OCF), 2) review measurement of compassion fatigue (CF) and interventions to reduce CF, 3) discuss strategies that may reduce OCF and 4) briefly discuss policy implications. OCF is distress resulting from knowledge of or exposure to overdose-related harms, which at the community-level may prohibit collaboration and adaptive agency to effectively respond. When OCF occurs at a community-level, it could have negative consequences by eroding support for evidence-based services and fueling stigma-driven policies that blame people who use drugs. Empathy underlies both OCF and vicarious resilience by allowing one to understand the suffering caused by overdose deaths and to witness the joy of addiction recovery. Using the risk environment framework, OCF at the micro- and macro-levels of the social environment, may increase rural communities’ vulnerability to harm by emphasizing individual responsibility for reducing overdoses rather than community-level infrastructure and resource management. Additional research is needed to develop a measure of OCF and to confirm whether OCF is associated with increased stigma and decreased support for harm reduction in rural areas.

Consternation and complexity: learning from people who seek asylum

ABSTRACTPeople seeking asylum experience health inequalities, and it is challenging to meet their needs in primary care. Consultations can feel overwhelming; however, there are excellent opportunities for Transformational Learning, transferable to other vulnerable people. A critical approach to evidence-based medicine, emphasising values, can be used to mitigate the consternation generated by these encounters and expand learners’ perceptions about their roles and responsibilities. Global health, diversity, discrimination, intersectionality and power differentials can be explored. Realisation of the part practitioners play in leadership and advocacy is key. Helping the most marginalised is crucial to understanding patient-safety and quality improvement. Community-orientated approaches are performed well by Voluntary and Community Organisations. There is much to learn about co-production and their ‘No Wrong Door’ philosophy. Recognition of health literacy and promoting cultural sensibility for a growing population with Limited English Proficiency, also requires learning advanced communication skills. Developing therapeutic trust with forced migrants subjected to ill-treatment brings skills and behaviour relevant to other challenging encounters in primary care. Vicarious traumatisation is well-recognised when dealing with the sequelae of violence and, aided by their educators, primary care learners must understand ways to protect themselves and reflect on vicarious resilience, through recognising meaning in their work.

Decolonising emotional well-being and mental health in development: African feminist innovations

ABSTRACTThis article explores what a decolonial approach to emotional well-being and mental health looks like in development and humanitarian response, using the example of African feminist praxis around the emotional well-being and mental health of African women impacted by injustice, and the practitioners that work in solidarity with them. It draws on the experiences of the work of the African Institute for Integrated Responses to Violence Against Women and HIVAIDS (AIR), and analysis of the African feminist practitioners involved in its creation. It questions the presumption that orthodox Western psychology offers the most appropriate frameworks for understanding and designing mental health interventions targeted at African women and the practitioners engaging them, and looks instead to the thinking and practices developed by African feminist practitioners. Acknowledging that decolonising knowledge is central to the project of decolonising development, it argues for a decolonial feminist approach that takes seriously the healing knowledges produced by communities of African women affected by collective distress, and pays attention to the structural roots of trauma in African women’s lives. In doing so it calls for an approach to emotional well-being interventions that questions inequality and builds political and economic agency as part of emotional resilience. It also explores the practitioner–community relationship, arguing for the need to embrace the concept of vicarious resilience alongside that of vicarious trauma.

Strengthening Vicarious Resilience in Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Narrative Approach to Couples Therapy

Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) is correlated with numerous adverse effects, both intrapersonal and interpersonal. Couples where one or more partners is a CSA survivor often report problems in social/relational adjustment, emotional expressiveness, revictimization, low relationship satisfaction and stability, and sexual dysfunction. Despite the adverse effects of CSA, some individuals with a history of CSA retain typical levels of functioning, and data from studies of resilience in CSA survivors suggest the importance of social and relational support for favorable outcomes. Resilience is not only an individual factor but also a social, ecological process, and research on vicarious resilience in therapist–client relationships suggests that resilience can be transmitted across relationship systems through a combination of witnessing resilience stories and beliefs about the possibility of resilience and its transmission. We suggest that in romantic partnerships (including nonheteronormative configurations) where one or more partners has a history of CSA, narrative couples therapy is well suited to address the systemic impacts of trauma and resilience by facilitating the transmission of each partner’s resilience to the other. Two narrative interventions, mapping and definitional ceremonies, are suggested to facilitate the transmission of resilience within the couple system through the sharing and witnessing of each other’s subjugated resilience narratives, thereby promoting a re-authored preferred identity based on acceptance, strength, and agency rather than shame, avoidance, and interpersonal difficulty.

An Ecological Systems Framework for Professional Resilience in Social Work Practice.

The cumulative effects of chronic work-related stress pervasively and persistently affect the well-being of the human services workforce. As a preventive measure, the ongoing commitment to self-care strategies and resources is essential in maintaining a healthy and resilient professional quality of life. This article describes a holistic approach to cultivating professional resilience through the ongoing practice of self-care. A model for self-care using an ecological systems framework with activities across the biological, interpersonal, organizational, familial, peer-related, spiritual, and recreational aspects of the biopsychosocial self is proposed. Within this model, emphasis is placed on the role of compassion satisfaction and vicarious resilience as key components to fostering meaningful and rewarding careers for social workers.

Vicarious resilience and growth in psychologists who work with trauma survivors: An interpretive phenomenological analysis.

Vicarious resilience and growth in psychologists who work with trauma survivors: An interpretive phenomenological analysis.

Personal experiences of vicarious trauma and resilience within child-welfare research: An arts-based reflection

Abstract The emotional impacts of being a researcher within the field of child welfare are often unrecognized or underreported, despite extensive discussions of vicarious trauma and vicarious resilience within the therapy literature. This article provides an arts-based reflection on my experience of undertaking doctoral research that explored children’s resources in the context of homelessness and family violence. Songwriting was used as a reflexive method throughout my research to explore my intense emotions, feelings of helplessness, sense of responsibility and desire to changes the ways in which children are viewed, understood and responded to within their family and the service system. Four songs are shared throughout the reflexive discussion as a way of describing the research journey and exploring the ways in which the arts-based process provided a new perspective on the research. Implications for researchers in similar fields are explored.

Vicarious Resilience: A Comprehensive Review

Vicarious resilience has been defined as the positive impact on and personal growth of therapists resulting from exposure to their clients’ resilience. This review provides a comprehensive summary ...

Community Mothers and Vicarious Resilience: An Exploration in a Colombian Community

This study explores vicarious resilience process in early childhood education. It addresses the question of how low-income community mothers who are involved in child care and education for other low-income working caretakers are affected by the children’s resilience. It focuses on the women’s interpretations of the children and caretaker stories’ experiences and stories, and how they make sense of the impact these experiences and stories have on their lives. Twenty-one semistructured interviews were conducted with community mothers who work in the Hogares Comunitarios de Bienestar Program (Wellness Community Homes), of the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare in Cali, Colombia; their perceptions of the children and caretaker’s overcoming adversity were explored. Data were analyzed through grounded theory and Consensual Qualitative Research methodology to describe the themes that speak about the effects of witnessing how children and caretakers constructively overcame adversity. These themes are discussed to advance the concept of vicarious resilience and how it can contribute to sustaining and empowering educational endeavors, community leadership, and family life in the context of poverty, adversity, and potential trauma.

Clinicians' Experiences of Shared Trauma After the Shootings at Virginia Tech

This phenomenological study was designed to describe the shared trauma perspectives of 8 counselors who experienced the shootings at Virginia Tech and responded to community mental health needs. Shared trauma, vicarious traumatization, compassion fatigue, vicarious resilience, and posttraumatic growth were examined. Themes derived from interviews included changed perceptions of those who experienced shared trauma and the influence of the experiences on clinicians' work. Implications for practitioners and for counselor training are presented.

Vicarious resilience in sexual assault and domestic violence advocates.

There is little research related to sexual assault and domestic violence advocates' experiences, with the bulk of the literature focused on stressors and systemic barriers that negatively impact efforts to assist survivors. However, advocates participating in these studies have also emphasized the positive impact they experience consequent to their work. This study explores the positive impact. Vicarious resilience, personal trauma experiences, peer relational quality, and perceived organizational support in advocates (n = 222) are examined. Also, overlap among the conceptual components of vicarious resilience is explored. The first set of multiple regressions showed that personal trauma experiences and peer relational health predicted compassion satisfaction and vicarious posttraumatic growth, with organizational support predicting only compassion satisfaction. The second set of multiple regressions showed that (a) there was significant shared variance between vicarious posttraumatic growth and compassion satisfaction; (b) after accounting for vicarious posttraumatic growth, organizational support accounted for significant variance in compassion satisfaction; and (c) after accounting for compassion satisfaction, peer relational health accounted for significant variance in vicarious posttraumatic growth. Results suggest that it may be more meaningful to conceptualize advocates' personal growth related to their work through the lens of a multidimensional construct such as vicarious resilience. Organizational strategies promoting vicarious resilience (e.g., shared organizational power, training components) are offered, and the value to trauma-informed care of fostering advocates' vicarious resilience is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Development of the Vicarious Resilience Scale (VRS): A measure of positive effects of working with trauma survivors.

Attending to the potential impacts, both positive and negative, of clinical work with trauma survivors on professionals themselves is a crucial aspect of clinical training and supervision. Vicarious resilience refers to unique, positive effects that transform therapists in response to witnessing trauma survivors' resilience and recovery process. This study describes the development and exploratory factor analysis of the first instrument to assess vicarious resilience. The Vicarious Resilience Scale (VRS) was developed and administered via electronic survey to 190 helping professionals from around the globe working with survivors of severe traumas, such as torture. Exploratory factor analysis yielded 7 factors: Changes in life goals and perspective, client-inspired hope, increased recognition of clients' spirituality as a therapeutic resource, increased capacity for resourcefulness, increased self-awareness and self-care practices, increased consciousness about power and privilege relative to clients' social location, and increased capacity for remaining present while listening to trauma narratives. The Cronbach's alpha reliability of the VRS was .92 and, as hypothesized, the VRS was moderately and positively correlated with posttraumatic growth and compassion satisfaction, indicating convergent validity. The VRS was not significantly correlated with compassion fatigue (CF) or burnout, indicating discriminant validity and that vicarious resilience is a unique construct that is not merely "the opposite" of CF or burnout. The VRS possesses sound psychometric properties and can be utilized in supervision and training contexts and for self-assessment by professionals working with trauma survivors to aid the recognition and cultivation of vicarious resilience. (PsycINFO Database Record

Supplemental Material for Vicarious Resilience in Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Advocates

Supplemental Material for Vicarious Resilience in Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Advocates

Vicarious resilience: Complexities and variations.

This article presents results from a qualitative study further exploring the concept of vicarious resilience. Thirteen therapists working with survivors of torture in 3 different locations were interviewed to better understand the complexities and variations of vicarious resilience. The analysis focuses on the therapists' perception of clients' resilience and the therapists' awareness of how this affects the therapists themselves. Four major themes emerge: change in the therapists' self-perception and their general outlook on the world, altered spirituality, modified thoughts about self-care, and new views on trauma work and connecting with clients. The results suggest that vicarious resilience can significantly influence therapists' personal lives as well as their therapeutic work. Therapists employing a strengths-based approach seem to be affected more by vicarious resilience. The results are situated within the growing body of literature that documents the positive effect of trauma work on therapists. The development of training curricula for strengthening therapists' awareness of vicarious resilience is recommended. (PsycINFO Database Record

Vicarious resilience and vicarious traumatisation: Experiences of working with refugees and asylum seekers in South Australia.

The negative psychological impacts of working with traumatised people are well documented and include vicarious traumatisation (VT): the cumulative effect of identifying with clients' trauma stories that negatively impacts on service providers' memory, emotions, thoughts, and worldviews. More recently, the concept of vicarious resilience (VR) has been also identified: the strength, growth, and empowerment experienced by trauma workers as a consequence of their work. VR includes service providers' awareness and appreciation of their clients' capacity to grow, maintaining hope for change, as well as learning from and reassessing personal problems in the light of clients' stories of perseverance, strength, and growth. This study aimed at exploring the experiences of mental health, physical healthcare, and settlement workers caring for refugees and asylum seekers in South Australia. Using a qualitative method (data-based thematic analysis) to collect and analyse 26 semi-structured face-to-face interviews, we identified four prominent and recurring themes emanating from the data: VT, VR, work satisfaction, and cultural flexibility. These findings-among the first to describe both VT and VR in Australians working with refugee people-have important implications for policy, service quality, service providers' wellbeing, and refugee clients' lives.

Theoretical Paper The ethical considerations of counselling psychologists working with trauma: Is there a risk of vicarious traumatisation?

Content & FocusThis paper will discuss the importance of professional and ethical guidelines for both Qualified Counselling Psychologists and Counselling Psychologists in Training when working in the field of trauma. It will also explore some of the challenges therapists may face when taking these guidelines into account. This paper will present a case vignette on how vicarious traumatisation may present, as well as how it may affect therapists before moving on to discussing how for some people trauma can lead to vicarious resilience. This paper questions if it should be compulsory to introduce trauma awareness courses prior to psychologists working with trauma survivors or within professional training programmes and concludes with suggestions of how therapists may prevent and/or manage vicarious trauma including the importance of self-care.

FROM THE ZONE OF RISK TO THE ZONE OF RESILIENCE: PROTECTING THE RESILIENCE OF CHILDREN AND PRACTITIONERS IN ARGENTINA, CANADA, AND IRELAND

This three-site investigation conducted in Argentina, Canada, and Ireland, examines the concept of resilience within specific socio-cultural contexts of child protection practice. The study seeks to understand how child protection workers (CPWs) construct and utilize the concept of resilience and how they enable resilient capacities in children and families. CPWs were encouraged to share client narratives of resilience and to reflect on how these narratives impact them in working with clients. The paper explores how working with resilient clients helps foster resilience to compassion fatigue and secondary traumatic stress in CPWs through a process of shared or vicarious resilience. Lastly, the study questions the role of child protection agencies in protecting the resilience of the worker. Resilience in this context may be defined as the capacity to sustain professional competence and commitment under conditions of adversity. A key finding in the study is the critical role of resilient teams in sustaining the resilience of the CPW. The rationale for this study is based on the assumption that CPWs have to develop the capacity for resilience and be able to sustain their own resilience in order to be effective in their work. Knowing how child protection workers can remain resilient and committed to children is of great interest to social workers and other professionals involved in this work.

Living on the Edge: The Role of Critical Incidents on the Development of Secondary Resilience in Physicians

This qualitative, phenomenological case-study focuses on physician-reported experiences related to caring for refugees, in order to investigate what experiential factors contribute to effective therapeutic relationships. Findings and medical literature show that caring for refugees can have adverse psychological and physiological repercussions for physicians. Extensive exposure to trauma narratives and vivid examples of human suffering can lead to burnout, vicarious trauma, and/or secondary traumatic stress – affecting physicians’ ability to care for patients effectively. Nonetheless, emerging psychological literature indicates that, over time, providers may be able to develop vicarious resilience by mirroring the resiliency of their patients. This notion is based on theory that chronic exposure to patient suffering can bolster social advocacy and altruistic behavior in providers. Supplementing this theory, the data shows that providers can develop “secondary resilience” after a single exposure to a critical incident, that evaluation of critical incidents is the link between secondary traumatic stress/vicarious trauma and secondary and/or vicarious resilience, and that secondary/vicarious resilience can coexist with vicarious trauma or secondary traumatic stress, allowing physicians to continue caring even as they witness suffering and suffer with their patients.

Vicarious resilience in counselors of child and youth victims of interpersonal trauma.

In this study, we investigated how bearing witness to clients' resilience processes during treatment impacts the personal and professional lives of counselors who work with child and youth victims of interpersonal trauma. We used a qualitative instrumental multiple-case study design and thematic analysis to explore the research question. The participants indicated that they experienced an increased sense of hope and optimism, and were inspired by the strengths of their clients while working with this population. As the participants reflected on the challenges that their clients faced, the participants put their own challenges and strengths into perspective; they reported positive changes in their personal relationships. We suggest that future research might investigate the relationships we found between optimism, hope, and vicarious resilience processes, as well as the potential relationship between the counseling approach that counselors adopt and the development of vicarious resilience responses.