Thoughtful Thursday: Tragedy and Trauma and Vicarious Trauma
I am struggling right now to make sense out of our world. There are things that are happening that are traumatic. There are things that are wrong. There are things that will ruin us as a whole that are happening because of a very small number of people who presume that we share their ideas. I have a father and several family members who think that the things happening now are the greatest things ever. The rest of us don't talk about these things.
I have been on a news hiatus since the last Presidential election. I find myself either yelling and getting furious at what I hear or I cry about it. There is very little in between, and I just cannot go through that process every day. So, I avoid listening to the news. Right now, though, there is no ignoring what is happening to families in our nation.
I work with children who have been separated from their original families and often from many other family units as well. Sometimes those separations have been warranted - the family was unable to care for the child for one reason or another or the family was dangerous for the child. The reasons for the separation are never what the child remembers - they remember being taken away. They don't remember the staff members who take care of them and show them what safety is like - they remember that they were taken. The trauma of separation runs deep and it harms children and families - even the members of bad families.
I have never been traumatized in this particular way. My family unit is a good one, and we are pretty close to each other even now. My family unit is one of the reasons I think I've been able to work with my clients - I have a strong unit to depend on when the sympathy starts to set in. When I start to get overwhelmed with vicarious trauma, my family supports me and helps me process what is happening.
Vicarious trauma is one of those things that we don't really talk about much, but I'm starting to believe that it happens much more these days than it did before. What are the effects of watching traumatic events over and over again on media formats for those of us who are not directly involved but who are exposed to visuals of the event? For some of us, that is traumatizing. For some of my clients, watching kids being forcefully taken from their parents will be traumatizing - some will be re-traumatized, others will add another layer to their own trauma experiences. I hope folks are screening CNN Students News carefully these days.
The problem with vicarious trauma is that people don't often associate things going on in their lives with the constant bombardment of news stories that are at their fingertips. Lots of my friends, interestingly the ones that are most vocal about situations going on at the moment, are reporting difficulty with sleeping. I don't know if there is a direct correlation with what they are watching, but I have to believe that there is something that links those two situations. Maybe the difficulty with sleeping is leading to the increase of situational posts on social media, but the two seem to go together pretty often. I believe we are being traumatized without realizing it.
This reinforces my hiatus of all news sites.
Go out there, do what you have to do to deal with the trauma of life - the personal experiences, the secondary experiences, the vicarious experiences. Be cognizant. Be realistic. Be safe.
I have been on a news hiatus since the last Presidential election. I find myself either yelling and getting furious at what I hear or I cry about it. There is very little in between, and I just cannot go through that process every day. So, I avoid listening to the news. Right now, though, there is no ignoring what is happening to families in our nation.
I work with children who have been separated from their original families and often from many other family units as well. Sometimes those separations have been warranted - the family was unable to care for the child for one reason or another or the family was dangerous for the child. The reasons for the separation are never what the child remembers - they remember being taken away. They don't remember the staff members who take care of them and show them what safety is like - they remember that they were taken. The trauma of separation runs deep and it harms children and families - even the members of bad families.
I have never been traumatized in this particular way. My family unit is a good one, and we are pretty close to each other even now. My family unit is one of the reasons I think I've been able to work with my clients - I have a strong unit to depend on when the sympathy starts to set in. When I start to get overwhelmed with vicarious trauma, my family supports me and helps me process what is happening.
Vicarious trauma is one of those things that we don't really talk about much, but I'm starting to believe that it happens much more these days than it did before. What are the effects of watching traumatic events over and over again on media formats for those of us who are not directly involved but who are exposed to visuals of the event? For some of us, that is traumatizing. For some of my clients, watching kids being forcefully taken from their parents will be traumatizing - some will be re-traumatized, others will add another layer to their own trauma experiences. I hope folks are screening CNN Students News carefully these days.
The problem with vicarious trauma is that people don't often associate things going on in their lives with the constant bombardment of news stories that are at their fingertips. Lots of my friends, interestingly the ones that are most vocal about situations going on at the moment, are reporting difficulty with sleeping. I don't know if there is a direct correlation with what they are watching, but I have to believe that there is something that links those two situations. Maybe the difficulty with sleeping is leading to the increase of situational posts on social media, but the two seem to go together pretty often. I believe we are being traumatized without realizing it.
This reinforces my hiatus of all news sites.
Go out there, do what you have to do to deal with the trauma of life - the personal experiences, the secondary experiences, the vicarious experiences. Be cognizant. Be realistic. Be safe.
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