Vicarious Trauma in Female Therapists While Working with Returning Military Females diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Vicarious trauma is a complex emotional and psychological reaction to hearing stories of fear and terror that a client describes to a therapist when they have felt physically threatened or witnessed someone else being injured or killed. Using constructivist self-development theory, a qualitative in-depth interview was used to study female therapists who work with returning military females coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD. This population was important to study because females in the military are now subject to combat trauma. Past studies have shown that therapists have suffered vicarious trauma from working with males in the military from past wars but no study has looked at the relationship between female therapists and female military from these more current wars. Understanding how this is affecting female therapists is critical so that other therapists can recognize this as vicarious trauma and be more effective in therapy. Twelve female therapists were pre-screened and reported as having vicarious trauma symptoms. Responses were analyzed using an 8-step phenomenographic approach with responses placed into key categories: work-related symptoms, relationship with client symptoms, cognitive schema changes, and symptoms that affected family and friends. According to study findings, therapists are experiencing complex forms of vicarious trauma symptoms related to a combinatory trauma experience from working with females in the military who present with PTSD symptoms from combat trauma and sexual trauma. Social change implications of this study is that therapists will be able to identify how vicarious trauma can affect several areas of their lives and recognize how some other therapists have coped with these feelings of vicarious trauma.