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Bennett, Andrea Heather

University of British Columbia

Over the past three decades, researchers and therapeutic practitioners have been discussing the negative impacts that working with clients who experience traumas, including the effects of vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, and compassion fatigue can have on therapists. However, research has revealed that therapists can experience positive effects, including the phenomenon of vicarious resilience, which holds promise that trauma therapists can develop and maintain both professional and personal growth from witnessing the resilience in their clients. Unfortunately, there is a scarcity of empirical knowledge regarding this phenomenon. Further, of this small body of research, it has primarily been studied in samples of therapists working with clients who have experienced political torture, exile, and war. The present study sought to understand the process of vicarious resilience in registered clinical counsellors working with clients experiencing complex trauma. In-depth narrative interviews with nine registered clinical counsellors working in the Canadian province of British Columbia explored their lived experience of vicarious resilience. Thematic content analysis of the participants’ narratives revealed one overarching theme of Vicarious Resilience as a Process, embedded with three key themes of: The Importance of the Therapeutic Relationship; Professional Growth in Therapists; and Personal Growth in Therapists. Results indicated that vicarious resilience is a process that occurs within the therapeutic relationship that operates in a reciprocal fashion between the client and the therapist, as well as recursively within the therapist to elicit positive growth in their professional and personal lives. From this, vicarious resilience was a proposed to be a comprehensive framework to understand positive outcomes associated with trauma work, as well as occurring as a parallel process to negative outcomes of working with trauma. These findings have important implications for training and supervision models that can assist in further mitigating risk for negative outcomes of trauma work.

Text

2024-11-25

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89714

Counselling Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/