Vicarious Trauma Illustrated

A graphic medicine book looking at how Psychoanalytic, Jungian, Feminist, Narrative, and Mindfulness theory address Vicarious Trauma. Each of these theoretical concepts has something to offer in how to process difficult experiences. Are you feeling unable to integrate what you hear from your clients? It keeps you up at night? You are isolating from your friends and family because you are so exhausted? You have become more spiritual or agnostic trying to make sense of the pain and suffering you have heard about? All of these are common responses of Vicarious Trauma. Your told by your boss to remember “Self Care” but nothing seems to bring you back to the self you were before you started direct services work. At the end of each section, there is a directive to help you put theory into practice and take a deeper look at why these stories are impacting you.

Drawing on my eight years as an Internship Supervisor for a Masters in Counseling, everything in this book has been tested and reworked with folks working with our most vulnerable populations. I would see students turn from bright-eyed new clinicians to dragging themselves to their placement sites and class feeling utterly hopeless about the system, their clients ability to “get better” and who they were as therapists. I had the term Vicarious Trauma, even felt it myself, seen it in my coworkers, but something there was something different watching it in weekly three hour chunks, one a face of a student paying a lot of money to train to be a therapist. I began researching protocols, of which there are many and no one has heard of them, and creating my own.