Secondary Trauma, Sunlight, Self Care

One of the classes I'm taking is called "Trauma and Crisis Counseling" (or something close. I may have the order of words backwards). As such, you would expect it to be maybe a bit hard to read some of the readings. 'Secondary Trauma' is something people who work with Trauma victims/survivors encounter, where they get trauma symptoms themselves. Similar perhaps to how people who watched too much media coverage of certain traumatic events ended up with trauma symptoms themselves.

In general, humans have wonderfully sensitive, empathic nervous systems that can feel the distress of others. But if they are experiencing empathy, holding hands and going through traumatic experiences with others, it can backfire in that way.

Last week and this week have been about abuse and IPV (intimate partner violence--domestic abuse) and learning about it is a little heartbreaking. I haven't experienced enough to constitute secondary trauma, but after sitting for a while, reading about it, I feel the need to decompress, spend some time out in nature, read something uplifting or meditate. The need for "self care" that is frequently stressed in my textbooks make sense in light of this.

I also wonder if I will be able to muster empathy and compassion, if I'm dealing with the abuser? Especially if they are unrepentant. There is definitely a part of me that just wants to say, "No, that is wrong. You need to stop doing that." But I don't imagine that would be very effective.

Despite this, I'm getting excited about my upcoming internship. It's right around the corner, and I'll finally get to start actually doing what I've been in school for these last years. I'll finally get to start actually learning how to be a therapist. The info is interesting, but it is so useless without practice. Like so many parts of our education system, it's quite poorly designed, for actual learning.

I'm not sure if I can upload this properly, but I want to share a beautiful light show I saw this morning. it was a little beam of light, peaking through our curtains, sunlight through windy trees. I want something like this playing in the corner of my computer at all times, accompanied by windy nature sounds and relaxing music.