Vicarious Trauma and Secondary Traumatic Stress
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Are you a fellow clinician? Are you experiencing intrusive thoughts about your client’s experience? Are your client(s) stories interfering with your own ability to parent according to your values, have healthy relationships with your loved ones, or even create a healthy work life balance?
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Are you in the legal profession or in an advocacy role in which you hear horror stories from clients? Are you experiencing intrusive thoughts about these experience? Are these stories interfering with your own ability to parent according to your values, have healthy relationships with your loved ones, or even create a healthy work life balance? Maybe you are turning to unhealthy coping like drinking to feel any sense of peace and relaxation.
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Are you in law enforcement experiencing trauma and witnessing others’ trauma on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis? Maybe this is beginning to take a toll on how you interact with others? Do you find yourself interrogating your loved ones? Maybe you are quick to judge or quick to react? While many of these things may help you on the job, they may be interfering with your life outside of work and your relationships.
There Is Hope
Talk therapy can help provide a safe space to reconnect with yourself and your body. It honors your experience and can help you prepare for future scenarios in which you may be triggered. Therapy can help you learn to communicate these feelings to your loved ones, including how to talk openly, express your needs, and get support from one another.
Additionally, therapy can assist with boundary setting, increasing self-compassion and tending wounds while connecting with your inner child.
EMDR (Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy) is an evidence based treatment that taps into your natural ability to heal from past emotional wounds, get unstuck and move forward.
EMDR works more quickly than talk therapy in resolving emotional distress and letting go of limiting core beliefs connected to past traumas.