When You’re the Victim: Secondary Trauma, Compassion Fatigue

“When we are constantly serving others, often between 25 and 125 students each day, our emotional piggy banks are constantly being drawn upon. After a while, it can become so depleted, that we just can't bear it anymore. They call it ‘secondary trauma’ and ‘compassion fatigue,’ the concept that we absorb the traumas our students share with us each day.” ~ Sydney Jensen, Teacher.

Please, please… Take eleven minutes to watch this moving TED Talk by teacher Sydney Jensen. (No relation.) She will touch your heart. Your soul. And make you think.

She speaks of the daily trauma that first responders and doctors and nurses… and teachers… experience. “And after a while, our souls become weighed down by the heaviness of it all.”

I can relate. Over family dinner conversations, the teachers in my family tell similar stories. So do several best friends who are teachers. 

Almost every one of us can relate.

It’s not just first responders and educators that experience secondary trauma. You do too. Every day. So does your cubemate. And your manager. And your boss’s boss. 

The endless droning of morebetterfaster, morebetterfaster, morebetterfaster in all our ears. The delayering of all internal support during the ‘80s, ‘90s, ‘00s, and ‘10s. The soon-to-come robotizing of all remaining efficiencies. 

Secondary trauma and compassion fatigue aren’t just for those who are connected to traumatic experiences. All of us who experience disruptions that make us feel vulnerable or displaced or overloaded or concerned about how we’ll keep up — which, by the way, is most of us — are slogging through secondary trauma and compassion fatique, on a near daily basis.

This is why the World Economic Forum recently declared that “humane leadership must be the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s real innovation.” And none of us can wait for that kind of humane leadership from the C-suite. We can’t just point to the corner office and say, “Yeah, we deserve that from you guys.” That kind of humanity begins with each of us, in our everyday routines. 

Sydney Jensen tells of Midweek Meetups, where teachers get to share things that are going well, and not so well. And she shares that one of her fellow teachers, Jen Highstreet, takes five minutes each day to write an note of encouragement to a colleague, “letting them know that she sees their hard work and the heart that they share with others. She knows that those five minutes can have invaluable and powerful ripple effect across our school.”

I too try to do my small part. With most every talk I give, I try to end with “Give someone here a hug. Tell someone here or at home that you love them.” 

Those small moments and actions matter. They add up.

We all can, and need to, start more conversations that truly matter. Let more people know that we see them, and that they matter to us.

Please, pay that forward after reading this. Give someone a hug. Tell someone that you love them. Don’t wait. Reach out to them within the next five minutes.

Let’s begin erasing some of that secondary trauma, for ourselves and others, today.

Jensen Site, Twitter, FB. Bill’s upcoming book, The Day Tomorrow Said No, is a powerful fable about the future of work. (Spring 2020.) A fable specifically designed to revolutionize conversations about the future between leaders, the workforce, educators, and students. Go here to download a FREE copy of the final pre-press draft of the book.