Vicarious Trauma

Vicarious trauma is a term coined by Irene Lisa McCann and Laurie Anne Pearlman to describe how work with traumatized clients affects trauma therapists. In vicarious trauma the therapist experiences a profound worldview change and is permanently altered by empathic bonding with a client, a change thought to require empathic engagement with graphic traumatizing material, exposure to human cruelty, and the reenactment of trauma within therapy itself. The phenomenon has also been called secondary traumatic stress, a term coined separately by Charles Figley, and while McCann and Pearlman say the two constructs are probably related, they maintain that vicarious trauma is a distinct phenomenon still being worked out by theorists.