Hello everyone and welcome to therapy in a nutshell. I'm Emma McAdam, a licensed marriage and family

therapist, and this is the podcast where I condense mental health skills into bite-sized

nuggets of health. One day I was at lunch with one of my friends who happens to be a therapist.

We had previously worked at the same treatment center, and she started to tell me about how she was struggling with feelings of burnout.

She mentioned a case that had been weighing on her heavily. It involved a client who had gone through a lot of trauma in her life.

And my friend told me how working with her client's situation had impacted her personally.

She was feeling worn out, anxious, and stuck. And at some point in the conversation, I just

mentioned how it sounded like she was going through

secondary trauma. This is a term that another therapist would understand to mean having a traumatic

response to someone else's traumatic experiences. We chatted a little bit more, but we couldn't go into

much depth due to the, you know, constraints of time and

the fact that the McDonald's play place isn't the best place to go deeply into our emotions.

We were there with our kids, I swear. The next day, she texted me and said something along the

lines of, our conversation yesterday was so helpful. It makes so much sense

why I've been feeling this way. I had been so wrapped up in work that I didn't even realize

that I was experiencing trauma in my own way. And now I know what kind of steps I need to take

to start to work through it. I was, you know, happily shocked because I didn't do anything special.

I didn't use any sophisticated therapeutic techniques. I didn't even help her process through

her emotions that much. All I did was throw out a word for what she was experiencing,

secondary trauma. For her, that was enough to get a toehold and

begin the process of resolving that problem herself. A few months later, she had done some work,

made some changes, and rediscovered her joy and passion in work that had previously been

...