“I don’t know how you do it, listening to people’s problems all day. I wouldn’t be able to let it go, I’d be heartbroken all the time.”
This is what a dental hygienist said to me recently, after she asked what I did for work. It’s a very common response, one that I’m sure most people in the helping professions have heard. The hygienist imagined that being a therapist meant feeling the deep pain of others, all the time.
Feeling others’ pain is a real phenomenon – it’s called distress empathy and it is a normal, human response. It is why we flinch when we see someone stub their toe–our body thinks we have just stubbed our own toe. It is why when people repeatedly watch news of disasters, they start to exhibit the same trauma symptoms as those who actually experienced the disaster. For helping professionals, when this vicarious pain is severe, we call it vicarious trauma, and it is one of the most common on-the-job injuries for professionals in helping roles. (Here is our LCA article on distress empathy and how to help with it)
“I kind of think I have the best job in the world,” I replied to the hygienist. “I get to see the very best of people, all the time.” For me, this is the truth of my 35 years as a therapist- I’ve been the beneficiary of thousands of patients’ wisdom, strength, courage, and inspiration.
In the very same room where someone is naming a trauma or struggling through deep sorrow, they also reveal something luminous: insight, courage, forgiveness, clarity, resilience, or sometimes boldness, compassion, joy, and love. Just as we are affected by others’ suffering, we are also affected by their successes, infinitely unique strengths, and growth. Unlike distress empathy, it is not burdensome, but is instead a kind of unexpected gift. A reminder that all people, ourselves included, navigate through deeply difficult things in this life; we persevere through hardship, we carve meaning out of what seems meaningless, we make peace; sometimes we accept, sometimes we change; we survive, thrive, and grow.
This is what I think of as vicarious strength—the transmission of human wisdom, perspective, love and grace that we receive from witnessing it in our clients.
We often speak of how therapy changes our clients. But every therapist, helper, and listener knows this truth: we are changed, too. We are shaped by the people who let us into their lives. Sometimes in big, dramatic ways, sometimes in smaller, more nuanced ways. Their courage makes us braver. Their insights sharpen our own. Their healing becomes part of our memory, too. Our worldview shifts. Our capacity grows. Our sense of what humans are capable of; love, generosity, forgiveness, transformation, and recovery expands. These vicarious experiences changes us, our patterns and often our world view.
When my husband died, I was worried about my teenage kids losing their father; would they be scarred? I was comforted by remembering the adolescent sister and brother whom I’d seen for counseling over 15 years ago, just after their dad died. How amazed I was that, in the midst of their grief, they could feel gratitude for the time they had with their dad, that they remained close to each other, to their mom and to their community. I felt solace in recalling their experience, in being reminded that no one goes through life without being grief stricken from loss – and that even as an adolescent, one can be deeply sad and resilient at the same time.
Whenever I’m tempted to overprotect my kids from difficulty or suffering I remember a young adult who told me “My mom says I’m a rose. But she plucked me, closed her fist over me, to keep me safe. She bruised and crushed my petals.” Her insight about herself was astounding to me at the time. And she changed my parenting: I vowed not to crush my kids with my fear for them. I think about her, when I try to protect my kids from hardship – I remind myself it isn’t possible to protect our kids from suffering – instead we support them and help them navigate it.
I think about all the parents I’ve seen, and the wisdom I’ve absorbed from them—before I even had kids, I had a bank of parenting experiences. Years later, when I was feeling like everyone in my family was judging me for how I was parenting my high-needs son, I remembered a patient who sat against my door to keep her high needs child from running out, and who talked to me calmly while her son zoomed around the room, about letting go of how others perceived her as a parent- resting in her knowledge that she knew her son best, and what he most needed. I have spent years following her example.
I think about all the recovering people I’ve seen, and how much they’ve enriched my own recovery. I think of how uplifted and brave I feel after sessions with a client who, for the first time in her life, drew boundaries with her family. I had a client who was dying, and reconciled with her estranged children, to apologize to them about the poor parent she’d been. She had so much peace before she passed away. I felt the peace, too, and resolved never to be too proud to admit my shortcomings to the people I loved.
The same is true of the smaller moments. I had a client recently who valued friendships so much, she “automated” them—scheduling monthly game nights, weekly phone calls, and regular trips. I thought, wait, that’s a thing?! I immediately scheduled a monthly phone call with a dear friend who I didn’t want to lose track of. Another client was working on eating when she was hungry, going to the bathroom when her bladder was full, and drinking when thirsty. Wow. What a revelation—taking care of physical needs? I started doing this, too.
We tend to emphasize the risks of this work—burnout, overwhelm, compassion fatigue—and those are very real. What if we paid just as much attention to the ways this work feeds us? Not in some insincere faux-inspirational way that glosses over the difficulties people experience, but in an honest recognition of the steady accumulation of strength, insight, and meaning we absorb along the way.
Acknowledging vicarious strengths has another benefit: it reminds us of the complexity and infinite uniqueness of all humans; it keeps us from reducing clients to their problems, their difficulties, or their traumas; it guards against the ‘othering’ of clients who are suffering, and reminds us we are humans helping humans, not fixers helping broken people.
Noticing, acknowledging, and receiving vicarious strength does more than shield us from burnout; it enriches our lives; and every moment spent bearing witness deepens our humanity.
