Vicarious Resilience

Abstract

The original framework used by McCann and Pearlman, 1990 was reviewed for relevance by 22 counsellors registered as trauma therapists in New Zealand. As predicted by the vicarious traumatization theory, the counsellors who were interviewed were profoundly impacted by their work with trauma survivors, particularly within the first five years of practice. The experience of vicarious traumatization generated a search for meaning which enabled the counselors to evolve strategies and ways of being that effectively fostered personal and professional resilience. This immersion in trauma, paradoxically, enhanced the participants' ability to `bounce back' or buffer the more negative effects of the work. Clinical supervision, the use of support, humour, spirituality, and ongoing training were variables identified by the participants as ameliorating vicarious traumatization.

Introduction

Social workers and other helping professionals routinely deal with clients who disclose traumatic material. When engaging empathetically with traumatic disclosures in their work with survivors of domestic violence, abuse, and sexual assault, social workers run the risk of becoming traumatized themselves or encountering vicarious traumatization. Using a qualitative methodology and in-depth interviews with social workers working as sexual abuse therapists, this study discovered that vicarious traumatization was more of a fleeting experience than suggested in the vicarious traumatization literature. Consistent with the findings of more recent studies, “vicarious resilience” or the ability to “bounce back” after empathetic engagement with traumatic events was also a feature of the research participants’ experience. The presence of “protective factors” in awareness of transference as a bodily experience, personal and professional relationships, effective teamwork, a supportive workplace, and a growing sense of spirituality acted to “buffer” the more negative impact of the work. Using themes from the interviews with the participants, a layered model for fostering worker resilience is proposed.

Statement of Problem

Sexual abuse counselors who witness accounts of trauma take on the role of healer in a similar way to other members of the helping professions and so are involved in a moral as well as a clinical enterprise (Pack, 2009). However, when attempts to restore health and well-being are unsuccessful, or the client fails to return to everyday life as anticipated, the intent to do what counselors are trained and socialized to do is challenged and a search for alternative meaning is generated.

The current article building on earlier theory development (Pack, 2004, 2009) suggests that vicarious resilience like vicarious traumatization stems from counselors’ empathetic engagement in the traumatic disclosures from their clients. Engagement in traumatic client disclosures and the counselors’ responses to them is paradoxical, both the source of vicarious traumatization and the means of building vicarious resilience. This article suggests that vicarious traumatization acts as a rite of passage and is essential to the development of the coping resources and self-efficacy required to practice in the field as a sexual abuse therapist. These cycles of personal reflection and development of the relationship between self and other, client and self, and spirituality I have referred to as “the search for self,” and “the search beyond self.” These are connected processes in which the trauma therapist is engaged. These processes, over time, enable therapists to make sense of their work, themselves, and the societal forces that color the environment in which sexual abuse and therapy take place (Pack, 2004, 2009). This new source of knowledge developed out of this search can be used as a resource from which sexual abuse therapists practice and nurture themselves and others both personally and professionally.

The Lived Experience of Being a Sexual Abuse Counselor

Reference to the theories of feminist writers such as Dr. Judith Herman (1992, 2010), who views sexual abuse work as a political act of witnessing, fitted the experiences of the counselors and psychotherapists interviewed for the research more closely than the discourses in which much of their original training was grounded. Herman (1992, 2010) has identified three stages in the recovery process from trauma: the establishment of safety of the survivor, remembrance and mourning, and the reconstruction of personal narratives. Once safety is secured, feminist empowerment principles guide each stage of the recovery process. Retelling the narrative of the traumatic event assists the traumatic memories to be assimilated into the survivor’s life story. Empowerment continues to guide this stage of recovery, with the survivor controlling the pace and details shared with the therapist (Herman, 1992, 2010). The final stage of therapy involves the survivor rebuilding the assumptions and beliefs that have been damaged by trauma through reconnection involving developing a new sense of self, relationship, and meaning in life in the present and looking forward to the future (Herman, 1992, 2010).

To begin to explain the meaning making that occurs for sexual abuse counselors, I also drew on theories of embodied experience from the French essentialist feminists, exemplified in the writings of Irigaray (1980, 1993). Theorists writing from an essentialist feminist position such as Irigaray value the idea of women’s autonomy and difference based on the lived experience of the female body. Irigaray critiques ideas that are prefaced on “gender” as bodily sameness and views the goal of women’s attainment of equality within male-stream systems as failing to liberate women from the patriarchal discourses.

Language is a major concern of Irigaray and the French essentialist feminists. To use language indiscriminately is unintentionally to confirm and promote patriarchal thinking (Irigaray, 1980, 1993). Irigaray considers that we need to find new ways of writing about women’s experience in an attempt to free language from patriarchal thought in which it has become enmeshed. She develops discourses that suggest that women’s ways of knowing, based on the lived experience of the female body, are important sources of wisdom. For example, Irigaray interviews Dr. Helen Rouch, a scientist who has reformulated our understanding of the relationship between mother and child in utero. Dr. Rouch describes the placenta as existing in a symbiotic rather than the parasitic relationship described in medical discourses (Irigaray, 1993). Irigaray, drawing from such reformulations, challenges the duality and sense of separation based in the predominant scientific discourses. In so doing, Irigaray brings direct, bodily experience within the realms of what counts as “knowledge.”

Aims of the Research

The initial purpose of this study was to discover whether the original research on which the vicarious traumatization literature is based in the writings of American feminist psychologists (McCann & Pearlman, 1990) resonated with the experiences of therapists who work intensively with sexual abuse disclosures. Therefore, this research began by using the vicarious traumatization literature as a starting point, however, in the interpretation of the findings, new theory is generated that aligns to the directions in the more recently researched concept of vicarious resilience (Putterman, 2005). Specifically, vicarious traumatization was described by participants as being considered as a “rite of passage” or stage in the practitioner’s career development (Pack, 2009).

Second, the intention was to explore how the counselors developed strategies to maintain their effectiveness. This article’s focus is on the counselors themselves and their responses to stress and trauma encountered in the course of their work. The theoretical implications suggest that counselors need to address stress and trauma on three levels: the individual practitioner, the relationship between the worker and the client, the practitioner and the employing organization, and the practitioner and wider institutions that surround the work of sexual abuse therapy.

Literature Search on Protective Factors Promoting Resiliency Among Helping Professionals

For social workers, the demands of high caseloads, high acuity, and client turn over coupled with daily challenging of the conventional medical model of assessment and treatment through a systemic and environmental approach operate to produce a host of potential stressors in the workplace. These stressors extend beyond the social workers’ clients and their individual experience of traumatization to their interactions with the systems in which they work. In a study of hospital-based social workers, for example, social workers on a daily basis were found to balance “an internal tightrope between empathetic connection with families and emotional separation” in the organizational ethos of “quick fix” to manage burgeoning caseloads (Badger, Royse, & Craig, 2008, p. 70) “Preservation methods” were proposed, which suggested that social workers make a conscious effort to detach themselves from the patient’s experience to self-protect to gain a greater awareness of their own experience to avoid becoming lost within the various pressures (Badger et al., 2008 p. 70). A regular forum for processing/debriefing and attending to self-care together with finding a work–leisure balance were found to be important to ameliorating the effects of trauma-related work (Badger et al., 2008, p.70).

Humor has been found to be a protective factor in moderating vicarious traumatization as it enables helping professionals to cognitively reframe and reinterpret situations and so reduce stress and tension through communication and emotional expression (Moran, 2002, pp. 140–151). However, using humor requires a context in which differing forms of humor is tolerated, as the author comments, “laughter in the face of tragedy is viewed with suspicion” (Moran, 2002, p. 140). Maintaining an attitude of “optimistic perseverance” in the face of difficulties encountered on the job and in relation to client disclosures is similarly recommended (Mederios & Prochaska, 1988). The development of spirituality and growth of awareness of the intangible humanistic aspects of existence when dealing with trauma is an area of growing interest in developing resilience for helping professionals (e.g., Spiers, 2001).

Providing opportunities for communicating the experience of the work in clinical supervision is recommended in the range of strategies for enabling therapists to maintain a fresh perspective in the work with trauma survivors (Knight, 2006). The vicarious traumatization and countertransference cycle in the area of worker self-disclosure and boundaries for survivor therapists has illuminated the need to develop specific models of clinical supervision for workers who deal with trauma (Etherington, 2000). These models simultaneously focus on the therapist, the client, and supervisees’ experience of their work in clinical supervision and the therapists’ own personal therapy (Etherington, 2000; Knight, 2006).

Recruitment of Participants

With these themes in mind, I embarked on a qualitative study of sexual abuse counselors with the aim of determining whether vicarious traumatization was an issue in counselors’ experience of the work. A purposive sample was drawn from the register of approved trauma therapists, which is available as a public document. The register comprises a variety of professions—social work, psychotherapy, clinical psychology, and counseling. Twenty-two registered counseling, social work, and psychotherapists specializing in sexual abuse work (whom I refer to hereafter as the counselor participants) agreed to participate in the research that was approved by Victoria University’s social sciences research ethics committee prior to the commencement of the interviews. In order to obtain a varied sample of participants, no more than two participants were selected from any single work setting.

Research Approach and Methodology

As the existing studies on vicarious traumatization had been completed using large-scale research survey techniques within clinical psychology (McCann & Pearlman, 1990; Pearlman and Saakvitne, 1995), I wished to focus on the participants’ accounts of their own practice, which included both experiences of resilience and traumatization. Consistent with my background as a social worker and psychotherapist, I chose a qualitative research approach based on in-depth interviews with counselors registered as sexual abuse counselors. As the counselor participants wished for their narratives to be used to illuminate a common experience, to preserve their individual confidentiality each chose a pseudonym to represent their contribution.

Within the social work practice research literature, critical reflective approaches are emphasized. As a social worker, I wished to follow the research tradition established by social work colleagues who were trail blazers in developing critical reflective approaches in practice research. Fook (1996) building on the work of Schon (1995) researched by asking participants questions about their practice to reveal their theories in action. Through eliciting extended case narratives with reflection of the practitioner, these researchers demonstrate how the individual practitioner uses a critical reflective process to work through their experience of practice dilemmas to illuminate and guide their future practice (Napier & Fook, 2001). This research also indicates how matured insights on practice act as a resource that can be actively used to guide future decision making in practice (Napier & Fook, 2001). However, I was also mindful that critical reflective approaches used in social work are not widely acknowledged as “scientific knowledge” due to the challenges these approaches make to more traditional research paradigms (Napier & Fook, 2001). Therefore, in addition to the individual interviews with sexual abuse counselors about their practice, a focus group of five psychotherapists and social workers met throughout the project over a 5-year period to verify the emerging themes within the interviews to provide another lens of analysis beyond the researcher’s. Comments from the focus group were integrated back into the writing process in a research cycling approach recommended by proponents of participative research methods (Reason, 1988).

Interview Process

To set the scene, for the interview, I posted to each of the counselor participants a copy of the McCann and Pearlman (1995) article on vicarious traumatization for reflection and comment, as a discussion starter. When we met, I asked whether and how this framework resonated with their experiences of the work and whether they considered there had been any changes in their personally held theories/beliefs/philosophies over the time that they had been working in the sexual abuse counseling field. If they had identified particular changes, I clarified what these changes had been and asked each person about the impact of their work on their life more broadly. Thus, the relevance of ideas presented in the original research framework establishing vicarious traumatization was canvassed alongside the evidence suggesting vicarious resilience.

Data Analysis

There were four frames of analysis guiding the interpretation of the data: thematic analysis; the theory underpinning the vicarious traumatization literature (self-constructivist development theory); the feedback of the focus group; and the French essentialist feminists’ theories of embodiment; specifically the work of Irigaray (1980, 1993) and Dr Judith Herman’s theories of trauma and recovery (Herman, 1992, 2010)

Thematic analysis with reference to the focus group was the main means of verifying the emerging trends in the interviews. Thematic analysis is a method of identifying a wide range of patterns such as themes and stories within research data (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The versatility of thematic analysis is that it is not connected to any preexisting theoretical approach, so unlike the individualist focus of constructivist self-development theory on which the vicarious traumatization literature is based, it is shaped by the broader social contexts in which meaning is grounded.

Results

Themes in the Counselor Participant Narratives: The Search for Self

In this section of the results, counselors described a search for self, which was generated by their engagement in the traumatic narratives of their clients. These experiences were sometimes described as “directly traumatizing” or “vicariously traumatizing” or a combination of both. What was “traumatizing” was conceptualized as a sense of “disjuncture” with oneself and others. The effects of trauma on self and other relationships described in the vicarious traumatization theory align with this finding (Pearlman and Saakvitne, 1995). Bodily and emotional manifestations of this “disjuncture” were described by the counselor participants, which fit with essential feminist theories of embodiment (Irigaray,1980; 1993) awareness of which became a source of alternative knowledge upon which the counselors drew to build vicarious resilience in the face of traumatic disclosures from their clients.

In the first 5 years, vicarious traumatization as described by Pearlman and Saakvitne (1995) strongly followed this search for meaning and selfhood. For example, those counselors interviewed, facing situations in which their clients did not “recover” from trauma, their nonrecovery led the counselor participants to a crisis of meaning that manifested in their bodies. Feeling “distressed” and having breathing problems was one example of this theme. One of the counselor participants, who wishes to be known as Audrey, explains her shock and disbelief when a child client she was seeing for assessment was abducted. Audrey thought this was a direct experience of being traumatized herself on the job rather than one vicariously experienced: Audrey:

From memory the main thing I thought was I hadn’t so much had vicarious traumatization as having been traumatized from the horrible stuff people told me and being made anxious by family group conferences, courts, and those incidents I told you about where actual things happened that distressed me. Like the child being abducted. So I was thinking of another way of looking at it. That is there is trauma that happens to us on the job.

Paradoxically, it was through the awareness of bodily feelings and physical sensations that the counselor participants were able to discern a disruption in their relationship with the client. However, immersing themselves in these practice dilemmas and exploring this sense of physical disjuncture offered alternative ways of making meaning from experience. For example, Angela, another of the counselor participants, noticed that when she was writing up client assessments in the absence of her clients, she experienced a feeling of anxiety in her body and noted a “fight or flight” response. What was experienced as traumatizing seemed to relate to the experience of working with traumatic disclosures with clients when the employing or funding bodies were hierarchically organized with top-down policies that the counselors felt powerless to influence. The requirement to complete an assessment report within two funded sessions was discussed as part of what was found to be “traumatizing.”

Reformulating Personal and Professional Identities

Reauthoring personal narratives as the counselor participants worked with abuse survivors was a further theme in the interviews. They had an appreciation of how their proximity to survivors of sexual assault imbued their own personal and professional narratives. Two of the counselor participants, Sally and Sophia, discussed the difficulty of communicating the hope that inspired their continued involvement in sexual abuse therapy to others. For Sophia, framing her roles in life in new ways was important to her in relationship with friends. For Sally, inspiring stories from her clients fuelled hope for herself and others, now and in the future: Sophia:

I don’t actually often tell people what I do. I’ll tell them about my teaching work but if it’s new people and they say: “what do you do?” I’ll usually say: “I tutor and do counseling and grow flowers”. And because it’s all together they can pick out which one they want and they don’t usually pick out counseling of course. (Laugh). (It gives a balance.).

Sally:

People often say: “How can you do this kind of work?” “How can you sit here and hear these terrible things day after day.” And my stock response is usually: “Well I couldn’t if there was no hope.” I am hearing stories of regeneration, of people succeeding over hideous odds often. And if there wasn’t that, I couldn’t do it.

In order to reconstruct their identities, the counselor participants ventured out of the known into uncharted territory. Their experiences mirrored the dilemma feminists highlight of the need for women to move into areas of traditional male power with the intention of transforming them and the need for women to redefine these same areas with their own experience of their suffering and powerlessness (Irigaray, 1980, 1993). Sophia, a survivor of domestic violence, discusses in the following excerpt, the life she has created since leaving a violent marriage and establishing her counseling practice. She interweaves her own struggle as a sole parent and moving into a new field (counseling) with her enjoyment of life within her circle of friends. Increasing hope in her life and in the future is raised as a further illustration of this theme: Sophia:

My life is much more satisfying now. I’m in charge of it (laugh) which is one thing I really like. Not being married is really good. I really love having my own place. I love it when the kids are this age now because they can look after themselves a lot now. I’ve got lots of good friends. Life’s a struggle financially somewhat being solo. But my life is good, very full.

Another participant describes how hearing the stories of survivors brings home to her an emancipatory potential that transforms her own life. Hope generated by respect and awe (in a spiritual sense) was evoked for her in witnessing the healing journey of her clients from sexual abuse: Jill:

It’s a balance between the terribleness of it and the awful, awful stories that you hear and the amazement of people, what they’ve made of their lives. Something quite different and their values. I mean I’m hugely affected by these, [stories] but they’re really amazing. I’m constantly in awe really of some of the stories because, I mean, some I have to say: “How on earth is this person still alive really?” “What is holding them?” There’s some creative spirit that they keep moving forward.

The Male Counselor Participants

For the three male counselor participants interviewed, a range of other issues in relationship to women clients and colleagues were discussed that were not mentioned by female counselor participants. One theme raised by the three male counselors was a tendency to think that all women whom they knew had been subjected to some form of abuse. Reformulated views of the appropriateness of cross-gender counseling of sexual abuse survivors, and a structural analysis of the oppression of women in male-stream discourses, were other themes for the men in the sample. The male counselor participants described their feelings of being a man in female spaces which gave them otherness or an outsider status, as one of the counselor participants explains: Geoff:

One of the things that has affected my personal relationships, yes it has, I’m in no doubt at all about that, it has made it a lot more difficult to relate to women because one of the things is I’m almost unconsciously looking for trauma and then I withdraw.

As a consequence of these experiences, the male counselor participants often changed their views about the appropriateness of counseling female clients who had been sexually abused. Kevin, one of the counselor participants describes a change in his thinking through his own experience of being challenged by female colleagues:

I think my own thoughts have changed a lot there too. I mean, 10 years ago, I would have held very adamantly to that, to the fact that as a male therapist I could work with female clients who are abused and it comes up in the transference and there is a certain amount of specific healing opportunity that becomes possible by virtue by working with a man in healing. Now I would look at it probably far more gently and say that I think there’s a number of women for whom it is not helpful to work with a man even if they’re willing to, and where possible, if that was the case, I would tend to refer that person onto a woman.

The Importance of Collegial Support

In this theme, greater contact with professional colleagues supported counselors’ own experimentation with alternative therapeutic frameworks and gaining support for their own personal and professional development. These collegial relationships often became personal and so there were challenges to existing relationships.

On the training course to become a counselor, or therapist, there was often an opportunity for counselors to experience a level of emotional intimacy with colleagues that may have been missing from more personal relationships. Such relationships with colleagues were then maintained or referred back to as prototypes to other, more personal relationships. Where there were major differences between the satisfactoriness of the personal relationships of the counselor, the training course, and professional associations made there seemed to bring these personal relationship dilemmas into sharper focus. For some, these trends led to a sorting through of significant relationships and the expectations attached to them. Greater connection across the “work lines” became evident. Bronwyn, one of the consultants interviewed, summarizes this sense of disjuncture between the personal and the professional during attendance at a professional training course:

Bronwyn: After my first weekend training course we had a whole session on “don’t burn up on reentry.” They were well aware of how we would be stirred and how the feelings would be heightened, and how we just had this exquisite experience of being close to all these people, and then we’d go back to being with somebody who didn’t know what we were talking about.

The Search Beyond Self:

Spirituality and Personal Growth

In this section of the findings, the theme of spirituality and connection to community is explored as building resilience among the counselors interviewed.

The search for inner strength through spirituality seemed to be connected with a growing disillusionment with hierarchy and patriarchal structures. An awareness of abuse in the church brought about a search for alternative sources of the intangible aspects of life. “Spirituality” was increasingly referred to belonging to a group working toward the collective good of humanity. The counselor participants developed an awareness of being connected to a greater source of being, which replaced or modified earlier held beliefs. These evolving beliefs established a new way of being and relating to the world and others. These revised beliefs established a context for continuing to practice as a counselor. Rose explains how she has integrated her developing sense of spirituality with her involvement in the church in which she was raised:

I value, currently and for the last 20 years, being part of a community of people with similar spiritual beliefs. I’m currently part of two communities, one a community of women whom I‘ve been involved with, two of a group of eight for about 20 years and that’s a group which is based around the Catholic spirituality. Their work is to carry out spiritual retreat work. And, as my own spirituality has grown and changed…a lot of the dogma doesn’t fit with my beliefs anymore….

For those therapists who had an awareness of sexual misconduct, male oppression, and abuse within the conventional church systems they had worked and worshipped within, there was a desire to leave the existing hierarchies to begin a new life. For one of the counselor participants, being involved in abuse counseling within the church where she was a minister was “the last straw”: Sally:

I guess in the end I got very disillusioned by the Church. And so a part of that, not the whole, just a small part, I was involved in, I forget what they call it, but it was basically being available in the area here over people coming out about sexual abuse cases within the Church. One was aware that there had been abuse in a wide sense, but to actually now hear specific cases I thought: “I don’t actually want to be part of this abusive situation.”

The Implications for Social Work Theories of Practice

A Multidimensional Approach to Vicarious Traumatization to Promote Resilience

There are three levels on which the counselor participants described as being related to their sense of dissonance. Each level is interrelated and changes in one level impact or have repercussions on the other levels. This “ripple effect” is not specifically referred to in the vicarious traumatization literature. This research suggests that the awareness of this dissonance jettisons counselors into a search for meaning, that, when traversed, creates discursive spaces and support networks within which the experience can be worked with creatively and transformed.

I conceptualize these levels as the internal consistency of theoretical frameworks and the felt gap between theory and practice (level one). The space between organizational philosophy and the counselor’s evolving personal and theoretical frameworks and philosophies for practice (level two).The space that exists between the client and counselor in the therapeutic relationship (level three).

To illustrate the facets included in this multidimensional model of stress and trauma, I refer to each level but reiterate that each level on which trauma and stress is experienced is interrelated and can only be understood as a whole process.

Level One: A Search for Meaning: Finding a Theoretical Basis for Practice

Early on-the-job experiences necessitated the creation of reflective spaces in preparation for working with clients who have been abused multiple times. In such spaces, the counselor participants used narrative and a range of strength-based and emancipatory approaches in the absence of other theoretical knowledge that worked to create new possibilities for attributing meaning to experience. The telling and retelling of personal and collective narratives based on stories of survival mediated moments when practitioners were aware of a pervading sense of disjuncture. In adopting these frameworks, practitioners were entering a space in which they began to discover what works with traumatized clients and what does not. Sometimes the original theoretical framework was found wanting and was discarded. In other instances, fragments were used in a collage that bore little resemblance to any one theory yet represented a sufficient and complete framework for working, however disparate and cobbled together it might at first appear. Through repeated practice with each client, the internal consistency of the emerging theoretical approach was tested. Each client is, therefore, a test of the particular synthesis of theoretical approaches which the practitioner uses.

Level Two: The Therapeutic Relationship: The Translation of Theory Into Practice

In choosing the particular mix of theoretical approaches in working with sexually abused clients, the counselor participants sought to position themselves into a collaborative framework. This was a common element in the way that the counselor participants bridged their sense of dissonance. This was the major learning to emerge from their immersion and engagement in their work within sexual abuse therapy. Narrative and storytelling represent a primary means of integrating theory and practice when working with traumatized clients (Herman, 1992). Perspectives that encompassed a dual focus on the individual and the wider social narratives enabled the counselor participants to transcend the quick-fix mentality prevalent in institutions based around monetarist policies and case management practices in which disclosure was required in two funded counseling sessions. In the field of trauma, the discourse of quick fix no longer seemed appropriate, as it threatened the internal consistency of the practitioner’s theoretical frameworks that had a relational focus.

Holistic and more relational therapies enabled the counselor participants to position themselves in alternative theoretical frameworks. Moments of crisis in therapy were often first noticed by the counselors as a series of bodily sensations. These signs became constitutive of meaning in working with clients who had been sexually abused. It was also informative of the process and transference within therapy (Pack, 2009).

Level Three: Organizational, Professional Discourses, and Personal Philosophies

The third site of dissonance was related to conflicting roles and organizational philosophies in which the counselor participants find themselves working. The requirements and expectations of the agencies involved in sexual abuse work often placed the counselor participant in an assessing, forensic, or expert role in relation to the client. The hierarchical relationship that was established when the counselor was cast in these roles meant that it was difficult to form and maintain a more collaborative relationship that was seen to be fundamental to healing from trauma. The counselor participants faced a crisis of not being able to carry through with their original intentions for entering the work that was to establish a relationship in which healing could occur. Consequently, the agency structure and functioning placed the therapeutic relationship under the risk of various disruptions and ruptures that effectively separated the client and counselor from being in relationship with one another. This loss of connection is a key component of stress and trauma for practitioners who work in the field of trauma.

Through engagement with traumatic disclosures, the counselor participants returned to their own corporeality. The experience of vicarious trauma had disconnected them to their sources of sustenance in a parallel way to their clients. Both counselors and their clients are brought into a greater awareness of their corporeality as they are living within male-stream discourses through these experiences. Irigaray and other feminists writing from an essentialist feminist perspective have suggested that the place of the unspeakable (the body) is also a place of desire, celebration, and joy (Irigaray, 1980, 1993). There are also emancipatory stories of the body that are resistant or even impervious to trauma. These are narratives of the body that are resilient to living within the predominant discourses while, simultaneously, learning to live outside them. The transformation of the body as “voiceless” to the remaking of the body through reformulated discourses creates a counterculture within the predominant patriarchal discourses and returns subjectivity or voice to the speaker.

The development of a spirituality that returned counselor participants to their subjectivity also allowed the counselors interviewed to help their clients to reclaim their voice and so reauthor their identity.

What these counselor stories of practice suggest is the importance of remaining relational with clients until they have integrated the awareness gained in therapy. However, in the cases discussed as “difficult,” there were impediments to achieving this goal that included continuing client self-harm, victimization, and suicide. Referring to feminist theories of the body to understand the counselor participants’ narratives suggests another way of working with clients and with the reformulation of material that is “hard” for counselors to hear. The challenge faced by the counselors is one of reconnecting with their own subjectivity to enable clients to reconnect with theirs. To do this, the counselor participants actively pursued sources of knowledge that allowed them to reinvent themselves using the lived experience of the body.

Conclusion

The findings of this research suggest that those working as sexual abuse therapists, regardless of what their original training had been, do obtain negative and positive feedback from the nature of their engagement in the work of doing sexual abuse therapy. Whether the coping mechanisms developed from this engagement with survivor stories relate primarily to the workers’ own reflective practice and association with others doing similar work is a distinction that future research needs to clarify definitively. The present study found that these processes were interrelated so the reflective processes were supported by personal and professional association with other sexual abuse counselors leading to the evolution of effective coping strategies, transformed lives, and revised frameworks for practice.

The counselor participants moved beyond traumatization to enact their personal and professional values and philosophies as a way of dealing with the experience of dissonance, which is the hallmark of vicarious traumatization. Out of such experiences, there is a search for meaning and the movement from one theoretical framework to a bricolage of many; from a rule-bound to a process-orientated context. Successfully finding the means to create multiple layers of experience through the creation of reflective spaces in such fora as clinical and team supervision is crucial to mediating this dissonance. Practice in a synthesis of theoretical frameworks provides a context for establishing and maintaining connection on a variety of levels: within the self of the therapist, with others including the counselor’s colleagues, and with the wider social discourses in which sexual abuse counseling is located. These networks and the development of spirituality help to build resilience to the rigors of trauma-related helping.

Social workers and other helping professionals are often warned about the effects of burnout in their training, but there is a responsibility for employers to educate and anticipate how the nature of the work will affect their employees over time. Appropriate programs need to be embedded as part of the ongoing professional development following graduation of which the professional associations have a duty to inform their members. Workers need to know the signs and symptoms of vicarious traumatization and their experiences normalized in individual and group/team supervision. The positive effects of the work leading to growth need to also form part of the wider discussion within agencies employing social workers.

The nature of the organizational structure is also an issue when counselors are dealing with trauma survivors; there needs to be room for having one’s voice heard as a counselor in the development of policies and protocols in a power-sharing and collaborative environment. Otherwise, the organizational or funding body employing sexual abuse counselors can inadvertently mirror the parallel process in relation to the counselor’s engagement with abuse stories from clients and so compound counselors’ experiences of vicarious traumatization. The movement to private practice was a theme for the counselors interviewed.

Academic and professional journals that provide a balanced view of the potential for positive and negative consequences can greatly assist and inform those who are engaged in work with traumatic disclosures. Above all, it is important for social workers to become more aware of their own philosophy on life, their core values, and beliefs before embarking on this journey of discovery.