Shared Trauma

Definition and Distinguishing Features

Shared trauma, also referred to as shared traumatic reality and simultaneous trauma, is defined as the affective, behavioral, cognitive, spiritual, and multimodal responses that mental health professionals experience as a result of primary and secondary exposure to the same collective trauma as their clients. As with vicarious traumatization, these reactions have the potential to lead to permanent alterations in the clinician's existing mental schema and worldviews—the difference being that having experienced the trauma primarily, these clinicians are potentially more susceptible to posttraumatic stress, the blurring of professional and personal boundaries, and increased self-disclosure in the therapeutic encounter. Similarly, clinicians experiencing shared trauma may resemble those faced with compassion fatigue or secondary trauma in symptomatology; that is, multimodal and common symptoms such as exhaustion, depletion of empathy, and identification with the client may be similar, but are attributed to the dual nature of the trauma. The use of the term shared trauma, however, does not imply that the clinician's trauma response was identical to that of the client; clinicians and clients can be variably affected by the same simultaneous event.

Depending on the nature, intensity, extensiveness, and time frame (chronic vs. acute) of the shared trauma, the clinician can respond professionally and personally in myriad ways, with each area affecting [Page 625]the others. For instance, an Israeli clinician exposed to chronic acts of terrorism might be preoccupied with the safety of her family and have difficulty concentrating on client care, whereas a New Orleans practitioner might seek respite from personal Hurricane Katrina–related problems by overinvolvement in her clinical work and overidentification with particular clients. Israeli authors living and practicing in the terror-prone region near the Gaza Strip prefer the term shared traumatic reality because it encompasses the wider traumatic reality that clinicians and clients living and working in the affected community are exposed to on a daily basis; the emphasis is on the chronic traumatic impact on interpersonal and communal levels. Although shared traumatic reality has similar features to shared trauma, the latter is the more commonly employed term used to describe the impact of single catastrophic events in relation to individual client-clinician situations, as well as to the general therapeutic process and larger mental health community. Hurricane Katrina and the attacks of 9/11 are prime examples of these acute, singular disastrous events.

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