Secondary Trauma Quotes

Vicarious traumatization. It can happen to those who bear secondary witness to the traumas of others.

The most important job of the brain is to ensure our survival, even under the most miserable conditions. Everything else is secondary. In order to do that, brains need to: (1) generate internal signals that register what our bodies need, such as food, rest, protection, sex, and shelter; (2) create a map of the world to point us where to go to satisfy those needs; (3) generate the necessary energy and actions to get us there; (4) warn us of dangers and opportunities along the way; and (5) adjust our actions based on the requirements of the moment.

Indeed, a symptom of post-Holocaust trauma is that normative assumptions about the human species are questioned more than ever. Can human nature still be trusted? The breach of civilized values was too great—and in a nation that had produced so many significant philosophers, scientists, scholars, and artists. The intellectual shock—a secondary trauma, as it were—is not only that it happened but also that it happened with only scattered pockets of resistance and even a degree of cooperation among the cultured classes.

In children's literature, young female characters are self-evidently important, and their traumas, whatever they may be, are secondary. In adult fiction, if a girl is important to the narrative, trauma often comes first. Girls are raped, over and over, to drive the narrative of adult fiction...

Many survivors of relational and other forms of early life trauma are deeply troubled and often struggle with feelings of anger, grief, alienation, distrust, confusion, low self-esteem, loneliness, shame, and self-loathing. They seem to be prisoners of their emotions, alternating between being flooded by intense emotional and physiological distress related to the trauma or its consequences and being detached and unable to express or feel any emotion at all - alternations that are the signature posttraumatic pattern. These occur alongside or in conjunction with other common reactions and symptoms (e.g., depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem) and their secondary manifestations. Those with complex trauma histories often have diffuse identity issues and feel like outsiders, different from other people, whom they somehow can't seem to get along with, fit in with, or get close to, even when they try. Moreover, they often feel a sense of personal contamination and that no one understands or can help them. Quite frequently and unfortunately, both they and other people (including the professionals they turn to for help) do misunderstand them, devalue their strengths, or view their survival adaptations through a lens of pathology (e.g., seeing them as "demanding", "overdependent and needy", "aggressive", or as having borderline personality). Yet, despite all, many individuals with these histories display a remarkable capacity for resilience, a sense of morality and empathy for others, spirituality, and perseverance that are highly admirable under the circumstances and that create a strong capacity for survival. Three broad categories of survivorship, with much overlap between them, can be discerned: 1. Those who have successfully overcome their past and whose lives are healthy and satisfying. Often, individuals in this group have had reparative experiences within relationships that helped them to cope successfully. 2. Those whose lives are interrupted by recurring posttraumatic reactions (often in response to life events and experiences) that periodically hijack them and their functioning for various periods of time. 3. Those whose lives are impaired on an ongoing basis and who live in a condition of posttraumatic decline, even to the point of death, due to compromised medical and mental health status or as victims of suicide of community violence, including homicide.

Secondary structural dissociation involves one ANP and more than one EP. Examples of secondary structural dissociation are complex PTSD, complex forms of acute stress disorder, complex dissociative amnesia, complex somatoform disorders, some forms of trauma-relayed personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder, and dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS).. Secondary structural dissociation is characterized by divideness of two or more defensive subsystems. For example, there may be different EPs that are devoted to flight, fight or freeze, total submission, and so on. (Van der Hart et al., 2004). Gail, a patient of mine, does not have a personality disorder, but describes herself as a "changed person." She survived a horrific car accident that killed several others, and in which she was the driver. Someone not knowing her history might see her as a relatively normal, somewhat anxious and stiff person (ANP). It would not occur to this observer that only a year before, Gail had been a different person: fun-loving, spontaneous, flexible, and untroubled by frightening nightmares and constant anxiety. Fortunately, Gail has been willing to pay attention to her EPs; she has been able to put the process of integration in motion; and she has been able to heal. p134

It was December 15, 2012, the day after twenty-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot twenty children between six and seven years old, as well as six adult staff members, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. I remember thinking, Maybe if all the mothers in the world crawled on their hands and knees toward those parents in Newtown, we could take some of the pain away. We could spread their pain across all of our hearts. I would do it. Can’t we find a way to hold some of it for them? I’ll take my share. Even if it adds sadness to all my days. My friends and I didn’t rush to start a fund that day. We didn’t storm the principal’s office at our kids’ school asking for increased security measures. We didn’t call politicians or post on Facebook. We would do all that in the days to come. But the day right after the shooting, we just sat together with nothing but the sound of occasional weeping cutting through the silence. Leaning in to our shared pain and fear comforted us. Being alone in the midst of a widely reported trauma, watching endless hours of twenty-four-hour news or reading countless articles on the Internet, is the quickest way for anxiety and fear to tiptoe into your heart and plant their roots of secondary trauma. That day after the mass killing, I chose to cry with my friends, then I headed to church to cry with strangers. I couldn’t have known then that in 2017 I would speak at a fund-raiser for the Resiliency Center of Newtown and spend time sitting with a group of parents whose children were killed at Sandy Hook. What I’ve learned through my work and what I heard that night in Newtown makes one thing clear: Not enough of us know how to sit in pain with others. Worse, our discomfort shows up in ways that can hurt people and reinforce their own isolation. I have started to believe that crying with strangers in person could save the world. Today there’s a sign that welcomes you to Newtown: WE ARE SANDY HOOK. WE CHOOSE LOVE. That day when I sat in a room with other mothers from my neighborhood and cried, I wasn’t sure what we were doing or why. Today I’m pretty sure we were choosing love in our own small way.

Adult survivors of family scapegoating abuse have historically been diagnosed with one or more mental health conditions that ignore the trauma symptoms they are regularly experiencing. Rarely will their most distressing symptoms be recognized as Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) secondary to growing up in an unstable, non-nurturing, dangerous, rejecting, or abusive family environment.

Hearing directly from a person who has been hurt in a profound way gives the listener a secondary trauma. When a Swedish colleague, Anders Svensson, asked me to offer support and supervision (Sinason and Svensson 1994) it was because his patient, a severely learning-disabled patient, claimed she had been raped. As the therapy proceeded she began to provide details of rape, sadomasochistic activities, necrophilia, pornographic films, bestiality and, finally, the murder of a child. The police were called in and she was given extra security. Week by week a more harrowing tale evolved of night-time rituals, of men in masks, the drinking of blood and eating of faeces. It took me over eight months to find the term ‘ritual abuse’.

What If I Love Someone With a Serious Trauma History? This is seriously tough, isn’t it? You have someone that you care about so much that is really struggling with their trauma recovery. You want to HELP. And feeling unable to do so is the worst feeling in the world. You’re at risk of serious burnout and secondary traumatization. Because yeah, watching someone live out their trauma can be a traumatic experience in and of itself. Two things to remember, here: This is not your battle. …but people do get better in supportive relationships. This is not your battle. You don’t get to design the parameters, you don’t get to determine what makes something better, what makes something worse. No matter how well you know someone, you don’t know their inner processes. They may not even know their inner processes. If you know someone well, you may know a lot. But you aren’t the one operating that life. Telling someone what they should be doing, feeling, or thinking, won’t help. Even if you are right. Even if they do what you say…you have just taken away their power to do the work they need to do to take charge of their life. There are limits to how much better they can really be if they are continually rescued by you. …but people do get better in supportive relationships. The best thing to do is to ask your loved one how to best support them when they are struggling. This is the type of action plan you can create with a therapist (if either or both of you are seeing one) or ask them in a private conversation. Ask them. Ask if they want help grounding when they are triggered, if they need time alone, a hot bath, a mug of tea. Ask what you can do and do those things, if they are healthy things to provide. It may be helpful for them to have a formal safety plan for themselves (there are resources for sample safety plans at the end of this book), with what your specific role will be. This will help boundary your role, and keep you from setting up scenarios when you rescue or enable dangerous and/or self-sabotaging behavior. You may need to set hard limits. You may need to protect yourself. This isn’t just for your well-being, but will help you model the importance of doing so to your loved one. Love the entirety of them. Remind them that their trauma doesn’t define them. Allow them consequences of their behavior and celebrate the successes of newer, healthier ways of being. Be the relationship that helps the healing journey.

the adversities and trauma of our children and others can create a secondary firestorm inside our own nervous systems.

Saakvitne and Pearlman, in their workbook, Transforming the Pain, define vicarious traumatization as the “transformation of the therapist’s inner experience as a result of empathic engagement with another’s trauma” (i.e., it gets in).3 Secondary traumatization is an occupational hazard, an inescapable effect of trauma work. It is not viewed as something our clients do to us, but rather as a human consequence of knowing, caring, and facing the reality of trauma.

You cannot sit with depression, abuse, strife, fear, etc. and not be shaped by it. We will catch the soul diseases of others. We read more and more in literature about secondary traumatic stress disorder. It is the nature of human beings to be impacted by what they sit with. If I habitually reflect trauma or sit with trauma, I will bear the image of trauma in my person. We see this even in the person of Jesus, who though he was perfect, bears in his person the image of our sin and suffering. If it was true of him, how much more so for us who are sinners ourselves!

To live in the real Garbage City is to be impacted by the garbage. When you live with garbage and work with garbage, you start to smell like garbage. If you are there long enough, that smell permeates everything, and even if you walk away from the garbage, somehow it is still with you. There is a professional term for that in our field. It is called Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder or “compassion fatigue.” The process of attending to the garbage that is in this world and in our work can result in harmful biopsychosocial effects not unlike those experienced by our clients. To sit with sin and suffering with any empathy at all is to become vulnerable to the emotional and spiritual effects of vicarious traumatization.

Ask yourself if the emotion is tied to external stimuli that you observed or that happened to you. If the answer is yes, the emotion is primary. Ask yourself if you are feeling the emotion more intensely as time passes. If the answer is yes, then it is a secondary emotion. Ask yourself if you experience the emotion more times than the event that evoked the emotion. If the answer is yes, then the emotion is a secondary one. Ask yourself if the emotion went away when the event that caused it stopped. If the answer is yes, the emotion is a primary.

Trauma has the power to reach out from the past and claim new victims,” writes addiction psychiatrist Dr. David Sack in Psychology Today. “Children of a parent struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder can sometimes develop their own PTSD, called secondary PTSD.” He reports that about 30 percent of kids with a parent who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and developed PTSD struggle with similar symptoms. “The parent’s trauma,” he says, “becomes the child’s own and [the child’s] behavioral and emotional issues can mirror those of the parent.”42 Children with a parent who was traumatized during the Cambodian genocide, for example, tend to suffer from depression and anxiety. Similarly, children of Australian Vietnam War veterans have higher rates of suicide than the general population.

What a returning soldier needs most when leaving war is not a mental health professional but a living community to whom his experience matters. There is usually such a community close at hand: his or her surviving comrades. Men and women returning from combat should "debrief" as units, not as isolated individuals. Unit rotation [in my understanding, the lack of it] is the most important measure for secondary prevention of combat PTSD.

Triggers include: Abortion (backstory) Anal sex Autassassinophilia Attempted sexual assault Bullying Cannabis growing (and dealing) Car accident Castration Child assassins (backstory) Child porn (secondary character backstory) Child sexual abuse (backstory) Choking Collaring Coprophilia (brief mention) Cults Date rape drugs (by minor antagonist) Desecration of a corpse Desecration of a grave Dismemberment Doxxing Erotophonophilia Execution Fear play Financial abuse (by minor antagonist) Forced abortion (backstory) Gang rape (to side character) Gaslighting Grooming (backstory) Hallucinations Human centipede (on minor villains) Humiliation Imprisonment Improper use of a thigh bone Improper use of extension cables Improper use of holy water Knife play Mask play Medical misconduct Medication tampering Memory loss Mental illness Miscarriage (backstory) Murder Online harassment Osteophilia Phrogging Pornography Primal kink Rape (of rapists) Sadism Sexual harassment Snuff movies Somnophilia Spanking Stalking Suicide Suspension bondage Teacher-student relationship (backstory) Torture Trauma Victim blaming (by minor antagonist) Vigilante justice Reader discretion is advised. If you find any of these topics distressing, please choose a different book. Your mental health matters.