Hawaii Island Recovery 
Trauma affects the daily lives of anyone who has experienced it in any form. Whether a person has lived through abuse, physical or emotional injury, loss, or any other form of trauma, the impact of these experience on daily life is profound. However, one of the more often overlooked forms of trauma is vicarious trauma, even if the effects of vicarious trauma are equally as intense. Their impact is felt not just by those who work in jobs or roles where vicarious trauma is common, but also by their families and loved ones, making addressing this form of trauma paramount for individuals, families, and entire communities.
What Is Vicarious Trauma?
There is no single way to experience a traumatic event, and each person can react differently to trauma. However, vicarious trauma can be unique in that an individual does not necessarily have to be present during a traumatic event to still be exposed to its effects.
Vicarious trauma is a form of trauma that occurs when a person hears stories, recounts, or about the experiences of others who have experienced trauma first-hand. This kind of trauma is most common among those who work in service to their communities, such as first responders, EMTs, law enforcement, medical professionals, and mental health professionals. Military personnel and their families are also at an increased risk of experiencing vicarious trauma as they hear about war stories of fellow service members and the loss therein.
Hearing about abuse, reviewing case files or videos of victims of trauma, discussing the effects of childhood traumas, and hearing stories of grief, loss, natural disasters, medical diagnoses, and more can all have a profound impact on the mental and emotional health of each person. Likewise, those in professional roles are not typically exposed to a single instance of vicarious trauma. Instead, many experience repeated exposure to these stories each day at work. Hearing from victims of physical or sexual abuse and their stories, and then returning to work the next day, can have a lasting effect on a person’s mental health and perspectives in daily life.
While vicarious trauma is most common in those working in jobs like law enforcement, medical professionals, and mental health professionals, anyone can experience vicarious trauma. Hearing about a friend or family member’s traumatic past, or acting as an engaged support to a loved one overcoming trauma, can lead to vicarious trauma, especially as they are repeatedly exposed to these stories and perspectives.
Signs and Symptoms of Vicarious Trauma
Those experiencing vicarious trauma can have daily life and routines profoundly affected. Recognizing the signs and symptoms of vicarious trauma is essential in helping a friend, family member, or loved one begin to pursue treatment to address its negative effects.
Some of the most common signs of vicarious trauma include:
- Mood swings and difficulty regulating emotions
- Physical and emotional fatigue
- Pervasive pessimism
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Doubt
- Disinterest in hobbies
- Low motivation
- Feelings of detachment
- Self-isolation tendencies
- Cynicism
- Burnout or compassion fatigue
- Strained spiritual beliefs
- Headaches
- Difficulty sleeping
- Nightmares
- Self-destructive behaviors
- Compromised spiritual beliefs
- Substance use
Individuals may have difficulty empathizing and sympathizing with others or experience persistent stress and pessimism in their own lives. This is typically compounded over time as an individual is exposed to repeated instances of vicarious trauma, making it difficult for a person’s emotional state to recover from the deluge of negative stories, documents, and discussions about difficult topics.
Constant exposure to vicarious trauma can also fundamentally reshape a person’s worldview and spiritual beliefs. It is common that those who experience vicarious trauma may begin to express doubt in their own lives as well, and may even feel that their work is “meaningless” due to the continuation of such devastating events. This level of doubt, exhaustion, compassion fatigue, anger, and more can all combine to inform self-destructive lifestyles and coping strategies, including using drugs or alcohol.
The Effects of Vicarious Trauma on the Family
Trauma’s effects are widespread and can continue to impact the individual who experienced the trauma and those hearing these accounts, but also their families and communities. Whether a person experienced a traumatic event themselves or vicarious trauma through these victims, these experiences can impact a person’s relationships with family members and households. However, Hawaii Island Recovery’s unique Hawaii rehabilitation is always available to help create a sustainable healthy environment to overcome the effects of trauma and stress while establishing healthy coping strategies for entire families.
Strained Emotions
Vicarious trauma can cause a persistent strained emotional state. For many, the constant stress and negativity can cause a person to compromise their emotional resilience or coping strategies, potentially resulting in mood swings, anxiety, persistent anger, being easily irritable, or even lashing out. These strained emotions and lowered emotional resilience can result in increased potential conflict between family members or growing emotional distance between people, affecting trust and feelings of comfort within a household.
Deteriorating Communication Skills
Tendencies to self-isolate or distance oneself from others as a result of vicarious trauma can also result in the deterioration of otherwise effective or practiced communication skills. For some, this can mean communicating less often or less openly with others, while others may find it difficult to navigate conversations due to newfound pessimism, irritability, and anger.
Likewise, this can impact trust and emotional closeness, making it difficult to reach out for help or overcome stresses or other problems. Affected communication skills can also lead to misunderstandings or avoidable situations that may add unnecessary stress to relationships.
Compromised Responsibilities
The stress and effects of vicarious trauma can cause an individual to begin to eschew regular responsibilities. Pervasive pessimism, hopelessness, doubt, and emotional and physical exhaustion can make it difficult to tend to responsibilities around the house. Exhaustion can make it difficult to have the energy and focus to tend to these responsibilities, while others may feel that such efforts are meaningless.
These responsibilities may then be forced onto other family members. This can mean more chores and responsibilities imparted to a person’s spouse or even children. Children especially may be compelled to take on caregiver roles early in their lives to help address the effects of vicarious trauma on the family, making it difficult to enjoy childhood and potentially leading to traumas in their own lives.
Pervasive Feelings of Anxiety
An individual who experiences consistent exposure to vicarious trauma can experience a great deal of anxiety. However, these feelings of anxiety can permeate throughout entire households. Coupled with mood swings and lowered emotional resilience, family members may experience this stress themselves, feeling as if they have to tread lightly around their own houses to avoid upsetting or disturbing an individual who is already under a lot of stress. However, this can cause family members to feel less safe or comfortable in their home.
Self-Destructive Behaviors
Engaging in self-destructive behaviors like substance use can also affect the entire family, and potentially introduce further challenges for both individuals and family members navigating the effects of vicarious trauma. Drugs and alcohol can comprise relationships, trust, communication, and more with their use, especially if such use becomes normal as a way to cope with the effects of vicarious trauma.
Addiction and substance use disorder (SUD) can be common for those who work in these stressful positions. Talking with professionals about the signs and symptoms of addiction is necessary to pursue effective addiction treatment while also challenging the effects of vicarious trauma. Professional treatment programs for overcoming vicarious trauma, stress, and substance use in tandem are necessary to navigate such a complicated situation.
Modeling Unhealthy Coping Strategies
Children in households with a parental figure experiencing vicarious trauma can also be exposed to a myriad of potentially unhealthy coping mechanisms. For some, this can be the normalization of substance use from a young age, while others may not be exposed to healthy communication and stress-relief skills or self-care. These children may adopt similarly unhealthy coping strategies like self-isolation that can impact their daily lives as they continue to grow into adults themselves.
Strategies for Overcoming Vicarious Trauma as a Family
Addressing the effects of vicarious trauma as a family is important not just for ensuring that those living with vicarious trauma have the necessary support they need to address its symptoms and effects but also so family members can engage in effective healing to create a supportive and safe at-home atmosphere. However, talking about the effects of trauma is still exceptionally difficult. Taking a dedicated familial approach to healing and change in a professional treatment setting is necessary for the most effective and sustainable transformations, with daily efforts at home to continue to manage change and healing.
Have Regular Family Meetings
Getting together as a family can be difficult with so many obligations, responsibilities, schedules, and more going on. A hectic daily life and busy work schedule can make it difficult to sit down with family members. However, regular family meetings can also be essential for overcoming the effects of vicarious trauma. While for some families, this can take the form of a dedicated dinner time each day of the week, others may instead choose to hold weekly meetings with more time dedicated to them.
These times are meant to continue to foster communication and openness within a family, encouraging the development of trust and ensuring that each person has a safe space to express needs, goals, challenges, and more. Building communication is necessary for reestablishing trust and an active, effective safety net to challenge feelings of isolation or identify misunderstandings.
Scheduling these regular meetings, allowing family members to speak freely and honestly without fear, and using this time to communicate and express support can all be instrumental in challenging the effects of vicarious trauma, or even identifying areas of stress in the first place.
Normalize Self-Care
Self-care is essential both for those overcoming trauma and those providing support. However, effective self-care routines can also be the first things compromised due to the effects of trauma. Family members can not only set clear self-care routines to tend to their own emotional needs and personal goals but can also use this time to model effective self-care strategies for others navigating their stresses and challenges.
Normalizing self-care through setting time to tend to personal hobbies, go on a walk, watch a favorite TV program, read, or engage in healthy spiritual practices as a part of daily life can be instrumental in overcoming the effects of vicarious trauma on entire families. Some families may also use these self-care outlets to reach out to other members, inviting them to engage in new practices, new hobbies, and more for more effective familial healing.
Consistent mealtimes and healthy diets can also be a normalized part of the day, ensuring that each person is physically caring for themselves while also navigating emotional needs and strategies.
For families with children, self-care routines can be expanded into family game nights or other activities that get both children and parents involved while distancing from the stresses of vicarious trauma and its effects.
Express Gratitude
Gratitude is a powerful thing. However, it can also be a difficult thing to communicate. Creating an at-home culture that celebrates expressing gratitude can be paramount to creating a healthy home atmosphere and deepening relationships with family members. Making an effort to express gratitude, either through saying things out loud, writing them down, or leaving notes for each other thanking each other for even small efforts can introduce a positive, supportive element to a home, challenging the otherwise pervasive negativity brought about by vicarious trauma.
Gratitude and positivity can also help validate feelings of worth. Vicarious trauma can cause an individual to feel as if their efforts do not matter in the larger scheme, and it is common to experience feelings of doubt as a result. However, small expressions of gratitude can help to address these feelings while fostering healthy spiritual beliefs and greater communication between family members.
Normalizing Healthy Boundaries
While healing from vicarious trauma as a family can be an amazingly transformative experience, it is also important to consider healthy boundaries. However, healthy boundaries and self-isolation are very different. Healthy boundaries can involve avoiding discussing certain subjects at certain times or having a place where a person can call their own and retreat in times of stress without fear of being bothered, such as a bedroom or hobby area.
This dedicated space can also ensure that a person can freely engage in new hobbies, activities, and other enjoyments such as artistic efforts, listening to music, yoga, and more. Clearly setting and respecting these boundaries can be a great experience, and can help continue to foster respect between family members.
Avoiding Substance Use
Drugs and alcohol are commonly used to address challenging feelings and stress. However, they often worsen these feelings with their use, especially when used repeatedly or excessively. While overcoming the effects of vicarious trauma on an individual and their family, it can be best to avoid the use of drugs or alcohol to help prevent SUD from developing, encourage other healthy coping strategies, and ensure that an individual challenges their use of such substances and addiction in their lives. Removing addictive substances from the household while healing from vicarious trauma, even if an individual is not diagnosed with addiction, can be beneficial for effective healing.
Engaging in Family Programs to Overcome Vicarious Trauma
Overcoming vicarious trauma is difficult, and there is no easy way to identify and challenge these feelings. It can fundamentally change a person’s beliefs, spiritual health, mental health, and worldview. For many families, a dedicated family therapy program is necessary to understand the effects of trauma and practice safe and healthy coping and communication strategies.
Hawaii Island Recovery is committed to this kind of familial healing, helping educate family members on the effects of vicarious trauma to engage in honest, sympathetic dialogues while also empowering families to engage in their own effective healing.
Vicarious trauma is a unique form of trauma that can be difficult to overcome, especially if you or your family member is exposed to repeated instances of traumatic accounts. At Hawaii Island Recovery, we understand the effects of all kinds of trauma not just on you but also on your family members at home, and we are committed to effective familial healing for sustainable change. Our proven therapies can help you explore your own mental, emotional, and spiritual healing practices while also educating family members and creating a culture of support and trust at home. For information on how we can personalize your Hawaii rehabilitation, or to speak to a caring, trained staff member, call us at (866) 390-5070.
