The Weight of Listening: A Snapshot of Vicarious Trauma
- Apr 6
- 5 min read
by Laura Hyppolite
Laura is a co-chair of the Text Power Telling board and a master of public health student focused on community health. She developed Healing the Healers: A Self-Guided Writing Workshop for Those Who Support Sexual Trauma Survivors. Laura is passionate about using storytelling and accessible resources to promote healing and empowerment.
James* wakes up at 6:12 AM to the sound of his alarm.
He moves through the familiar choreography of his morning routine without much thought. The shower runs. The coffee brews. He buttons his shirt, threads his belt through the loops, and fastens the weight of his badge at his waist.
Outside, the world continues in its ordinary rhythm. His work unfolds within it, mostly unseen.
Today, Maria sits across from him in the interview room.
She folds her hands tightly in her lap. A recorder rests between them on the table, its small red light steadily blinking. He introduces himself as he always does. He explains why he needs to ask certain questions. He tells her to take her time.
She speaks carefully. Slowly.
He listens. He asks the questions he is trained to ask. Clarifies timelines and returns to details when he needs to. James is composed, even when the room itself seems to tighten around her words.
When it is over, he switches off the recorder. The click is soft, but definitive.
He thanks her.
She nods. He nods.
And then she leaves.
Today it was Maria.
But there was also Danielle.
Jason.
Sophia. Liam. Audrey.
He remembers their stories in fragments. A sentence. A pause. An octave change. The way their eyes would fixate on the floor when the words became too heavy to hold.
James does not carry one story. He carries all of them.
Not all at once. Not always consciously. But they settle somewhere inside him. Quietly accumulating.
James doesn’t talk about it. He still wakes up at 6:12 AM. He still makes his coffee. He still moves through the same routine.
But he finds himself thinking about what Maria said to him three days ago. He wonders if he asked Jason the right questions three weeks ago. If he missed something with Audrey three months ago. If he should have said less to Danielle three years ago. Or more to Cynthia three hours ago.
He tells himself he’s just tired. That it’s part of the job. He tells himself it’s burnout.
But it isn’t burnout.
Burnout is exhaustion. It’s depletion. It is what happens when the demands placed on a person exceed what they can sustainably give. It shows up as fatigue, detachment, a sense of running on empty.2
But it isn’t burnout.
This is vicarious trauma. And vicarious trauma is something else entirely.
Researchers describe it as a profound and lasting shift in how a person sees the world.3 It happens not because someone experienced the trauma themselves, but because they listened. Because they witnessed.3 Because they cared enough to stay present while someone else told the truth about what happened to them.
It is the cumulative effect of empathy.
When we sit with survivors, we do not just hear their stories. We absorb them.4 Our nervous systems register them. Our bodies respond to them.6 Over time, this accumulation begins to change us.
The world no longer feels quite as predictable. Or quite as safe.4
This is not a failure of professionalism, rather it is a reflection of humanity.
For a long time, trauma itself was thought to be rare. It was thought to be something reserved for catastrophic events and extraordinary circumstances.6 But as trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk and others observed, trauma is not extraordinary in its reach.6 It exists in ordinary lives. Ordinary homes. Ordinary conversations.
And for those whose work requires bearing witness to it, its impact does not end when the conversation does.
Research across fields—from detectives and therapists to nurses and advocates—shows that vicarious trauma can surface in subtle, disorienting ways.7 A story that replays in your mind while you’re washing dishes. A heightened awareness of danger in places that once felt neutral. A growing distance between yourself and the people you love, not because you care less, but because caring has begun to feel heavier.4
Some people describe feeling numb. Others feel constantly alert, as if their nervous system has forgotten how to fully stand down.4 Some carry a lingering guilt from the sense that they have witnessed something irreversible, and that witnessing alone was not enough to change it.4
It does not announce itself clearly.
It settles in slowly.
And yet, there is something that helps.
Writing.
Writing creates a place to hold the stories we carry.
When experiences remain unspoken, they stay diffuse and circulate through the body without resolution. Writing gives them structure.5 Shape. Containment. It allows the mind to move from reliving to observing.5
Research on expressive writing shows that putting difficult experiences into words helps the brain process and integrate them.5 It moves the experience from something that is happening to you, internally and involuntarily, to something you can see, hold, and understand.
It creates distance without requiring detachment.5
For those whose work centers the voices of others, writing also offers something else: the return of their own voice.
A place to exist not as a witness, but as a person.
Not as a container, but as a narrator.
So one night, James sits down and writes. James does not write about Marie, at least not directly. But he writes about the silence that followed her last sentence. He writes about the way it stayed with him. He writes about the questions he never asked.
He writes until the story exists somewhere outside of him.
And in doing so, he loosens his grip on it.
Or maybe, more accurately, it loosens its grip on him.
*James is a fictional composite based on the cumulative experiences of 42 sexual assault detectives interviewed across six U.S. jurisdictions in a 2021 exploratory study by Morabito, Pattavina, and Williams, published in Policing: An International Journal.
References
Horvath, M. A. H., Massey, K., Essafi, S., & Majeed-Ariss, R. (2020). Minimising trauma in staff at a sexual assault referral centre: What and who is needed? Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, 74, 102029. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jflm.2020.102029
Morabito, M. S., Pattavina, A., & Williams, L. M. (2021). Vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress or burnout?: An exploratory study of the effects of investigating sexual assault cases on detectives. Policing: An International Journal, 44(1), 77–92. https://doi.org/10.1108/PIJPSM-07-2020-0123
Nikischer, A. (2019). Vicarious trauma inside the academe: Understanding the impact of teaching, researching and writing violence. Higher Education, 77, 905–916. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-018-0308-4
Padmanabhanunni, A., & Gqomfa, N. (2022). “The ugliness of it seeps into me”: Experiences of vicarious trauma among female psychologists treating survivors of sexual assault. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(7), 3925. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19073925
Pennebaker, J. W., & Chung, C. K. (2011). Expressive writing: Connections to physical and mental health. In H. S. Friedman (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of health psychology (pp. 417–437). Oxford University Press.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Wies, J. R., & Coy, K. (2013). Measuring violence: Vicarious trauma among sexual assault nurse examiners. Human Organization, 72(1), 23–30. https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.72.1.x5658p957k5g7722