Vicarious trauma: what practitioners need to know

When clients come to us, a key part of our role, as immigration legal advisors and advocates, is to listen sensitively and carefully to them: to what they have to tell us and to the particular threads of their lives that are relevant to their legal claim. Equipped with this detail we can focus on our core task: advising and advocating on the best outcome for each of our clients.

But what happens to the rest of what we hear and the trace it leaves us with? The weight of clients’ stories; the violence and mistreatment they have endured; the lack of safety, belonging and understanding they have suffered; the moral injury of guiding them through a system that so frequently denies them their humanity. There is so much that we hear and read that has ‘nowhere to go’ in the traditional approach to legal practice: one that believed we could be dispassionate and ‘professional’, and leave our personal, human, whole selves outside of our office or chambers.

This ongoing exposure to distress and trauma (and indeed the full range of human emotion) can be described as vicarious trauma.

The three layers of vicarious trauma

A neutral term

‘Vicarious trauma’ is a broad term that contains several layers of meaning. It is firstly a way of describing the way we are exposed to trauma: vicariously, through working with clients and their trauma. In this way it is a neutral term, useful to acknowledge the fact of this exposure.

Changes in how you view the world

Secondly, it describes a kind of paradigm shift.

We might have begun our careers with an understanding of some of the difficulties faced by clients navigating the immigration system. Then, after some time working on cases with clients and hearing the experiences of colleagues, we might start to view the institutions we once trusted (the Tribunal or courts, police or government) with distrust, cynicism or profound disappointment. Similarly, by way of example, those working with survivors of domestic abuse may become automatically mistrusting of new romantic partners or of those of their friends and family.

Of course, many immigration practitioners will come to the work well aware of the fallibilities (or worse) of the state or with experiences similar to their clients. Even so, the cumulative effect of months and years of seeing this in their caseload may increase the feeling of lack of safety both at work and in our day-to-day lives.

The impact of the work

Finally, ‘vicarious trauma’ is also a way to describe the wide-ranging impact of undertaking work that involves witnessing, reading about or listening to and watching traumatic events. In academic and clinical literature, there is no fixed definition of ‘vicarious trauma’, but the term is often used to cover burnout, compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress and more. These are all ways to describe the experience of being negatively affected by the work psychologically, emotionally and physically.

Some common signs that we are being negatively impacted by working with clients experiencing trauma are as follows:

• Unable to stop thinking about clients or casework
• Sleeplessness
• Unable to prioritise tasks (everything feels urgent)
• Fatigue
• Feeling numb
• Feeling cynical
• Irritability or anger

Whilst we may strongly relate to these ‘common signs’, our understanding of the full spectrum of how we are affected by traumatic work is a developing apace. By way of example, recent groundbreaking research suggests a link between vicarious trauma and digestive health issues.

We should be alert to the warning signs in ourselves and our colleagues that might differ from the received or traditional experience. We all respond differently to stress and traumatic stress, individually and across our lives, and that is okay and worthy of notice.

Part of the difficulty of being impacted by our work is that our natural response to stress and traumatic stress is to either: ramp up and do more, keep our focus on the task (or ‘threat’) and ignore whatever is going on inside; or to shut down, become numb and lose a sense of empathy. Both of these effects involve a disconnect to what is going on inside ourselves, emotionally, psychologically and physically.

Responding with reflective practice

The difficult effects of working with traumatised clients cannot be solved by a self-care to do list. They cannot be dealt by an annual long holiday or by a weekly exercise class (helpful as those things are).

We cannot respond to vicarious trauma unless we pay regular attention to what is going on for each of us, both at work and outside of work.

At a time when immigration law remains heavily politicised and clients subject to the hostile environment, the trauma we are confronted with is both individual and systemic, interpersonal and political, psychological and physical. It therefore needs a response that impacts these different spheres of our lives.

Collective care (where we work together to improve the working lives of our peers as well as ourselves) is as important, if not more so, than what we can do on an individual level. However, individual reflection is vital as a way to inform what we can do individually and what we can do as a collective.

Below we set out the practical steps for getting started with, ‘reflective practice’, to provide practitioners with a toolset to help manage the impact of our working practices.

How to establish a reflective practice

Reflective practice involves examining your values, motivations and assumptions alongside your emotions, thoughts, physical feelings and actions. It allows us to notice and be responsive to the impact of working with trauma, to share our experiences with trusted colleagues and to integrate our learning back into our working practices.

As a starting point, consider where in your work place you have the time and space to start this process of noticing. Is it built into your supervision sessions? Do you make space for it in team or department meetings? Do you have a mentoring or buddy relationship with a colleague within or outside your workplace?

Create the conditions for reflection

Having taken the step of starting (or continuing) reflective practice, it is important to create a space for reflection that fits you and your working preferences.

For someone who works remotely, this might be by way of a regular Teams meeting; for someone who is in the office, but often back to back with client meetings, this could be by way of a monthly slot at time of day that is not routinely booked with appointments.

Insulating the time, so that (as much as possible) it is not interrupted by client demands, is also helpful, to allow proper opportunity to reflect on the impact of our work. This can be  supported by realistic practical arrangements.

Sharing

It is also important to establish whether you want to share your reflections with a trusted colleague, supervisor (legal or clinical) or alone e.g. by way of journalling or conducting a work self-review. Ideally reflective practice would involve a number of these reflection spaces, each complementing the other.

Integrating

Having shared the impact of working with traumatised clients, we can learn from both ourselves and our own working experience, and from the co-reflections of our trusted colleague or supervisor, or simply as result of communing about the difficulty of doing the work we do. We should and are allowed to say that our work is hard; that it upsets us, that it leaves a mark.

Reflective practice is not a magic bullet that will resolve the difficulties of doing this work, instead it is a practice that connects us to our experience of doing this work. It allows us to recognise the impact on ourselves, to share that with our collectives, to respond to it and to integrate practice adjustments into our day-to-day working.

What else can you do?

Sometimes the thought of even beginning to fit ‘reflective practice’ into our current caseload feels overwhelming. If this really chimes with you:

Take a moment between meetings, drop the anchor, scan through the body, notice where you are, what’s around you. Treat what you find without judgment, but with curiosity. Is today a day where the mind is slow and sluggish? Is today a day where you can’t catch a thought and everything feels manic? Checking in provides us with important information, even when we feel we don’t have ‘time’ to process what we find; we can revisit when time allows.

Take a moment to reflect on your core values: what drives you to do this work? Why is that important to you? Why is that important to your communities and networks, and the people you love and who love you? The research tells us that a critical part of sustainable practice is reconnecting with our core values, even if they differ greatly from the values that made us choose this career at the outset.

Conclusion

This work is rewarding, maddening, exhausting; but above all it is impactful. Often that impact will be negative, as we struggle to find space to process what we hear and the traces it leaves us with. Sometimes it will be hugely positive, as we experience compassion satisfaction or vicarious resilience: standing by the side of our clients who have survived incredible hardship.

We, as practitioners, owe it to ourselves and to our clients to notice, reflect upon, share and integrate our learnings, to support a sustainable practice and to meet the challenges of our work today, tomorrow and into the future.

If you would like to learn more, please take a look at our book, ‘Vicarious Trauma in the Legal Profession: a practical guidance to trauma, burnout and collective care’.

We will be running open training on topics such as ‘A Practical Guide to Trauma-Informed Practice’ as well as a series on ‘Reflective Practice for the Legal Profession’ in the near future. Please keep an eye out on our events webpage for more details: www.claiming.space/events.