“Secondary” traumatic stress is a misnomer used to describe emotional and physiological distress that develops from indirect exposure to another person’s traumatic experiences. Trauma is trauma. Your body doesn’t care whether something scary happened directly to you or if you watched it happen to someone else. When life becomes overwhelming—especially when you feel helpless, terrified, or betrayed—your body reacts in the exact same way to try to keep you safe.
Causes
Indirect exposure: Hearing graphic details, re-experiencing narratives, or viewing disturbing images of another person’s trauma.
Caring roles: Supporting or treating trauma survivors, such as family members with PTSD, healthcare providers, therapists, and first responders.
Common Symptoms
Symptoms closely mirror post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and span three core areas:
Intrusion: Re-experiencing narratives, nightmares, or intrusive thoughts about the trauma.
Avoidance: Emotional numbing, social withdrawal, or avoiding talking about triggering events.
Arousal: Hypervigilance, chronic exhaustion, sleep difficulties, and irritability.
Management and Support for Recovery
Self-awareness: Paying attention to changes in your physical, emotional, and relational well-being, and recognizing when the ongoing demands of witnessing or responding to another person’s suffering are exceeding what you can sustain.
Connection and support: Staying connected with trusted people who can listen, share perspective, and help carry the experience. This may include colleagues, peers, supervisors, friends, or other supportive relationships.
Organizational support: Creating conditions where people are not expected to continually absorb others’ suffering without adequate time, resources, boundaries, rest, and meaningful support.
Professional support: When needed, seeking a practitioner who understands secondary trauma and can provide a place to process what you have been exposed to without treating your responses as personal weakness or individual failure.
Resources:
Secondary Traumatic Stress – The National Child Traumatic Stress Network
For the full scoop on emergency preparedness from an Interpersonal Neurobiology lens, visit Trauma Aware America’s Emergency Preparedness page.
