Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi, I'm Kim Neely, and this is the trauma informed SLP.
[00:00:06] This is a podcast where we learn how to promote safety and empowerment to build resiliency in everyone we know, including ourselves.
[00:00:19] Welcome to the third episode in my Burnout series. The first episode was just on the topic of burnout, trying to define it, which is a tough thing to define. We figured that out, and we also went through certain aspects of the workplace, workplace domains that contribute to burnout or possibly prevent it if. If your workplace, you know, takes care of you a little bit. Right. And then we also talked a little bit about the concept of emotional labor and how that seems to relate to workplace burnout, especially in helping professions like healthcare, medicine, education, things like that. And honestly, it would totally count for customer service, too. I am a late entry into this field. I did music for a while. I have a voice, a masters of voice.
[00:01:11] Tried to do some opera stuff. Didn't go very far. Not that impressive. However, thanks to that, I have a lot of experience in just customer service stuff in general, particularly food service. I did a lot of that. So, you know, some of my own stories are sprinkled in with that. And so on episode two, we went through what traumatic stress is, essentially what defines a trauma, which I use a neurophysiological definition, meaning there's actually been a physiological shift to a person, if you're actually going to define it as a trauma, and it's very individually defined by how that person reacted to some past event that occurred. If you would like a little more detail on that definition, I do recommend you go ahead and look at the primary traumatic stress episode. The first 20 minutes or so, I think, is where you get into the definition there. And the other place I have that information is on my podcast episodes. If you go to my podcast playlist, I have a fight flight freeze on my episode that goes through the physiology of trauma. So if you're like a physiology geek and you want to know about what I mean when I say trauma, please go there. But I use a definition that is kind of, I've paraphrased essentially what I feel is kind of a gold standard definition of trauma, essentially. Okay. In terms of research and literature, then in episode two, we also went through systemic issues, organizational issues that can lead to traumatic work environments, and also interpersonal issues, more of the individual, one on one type of things and the type of primary traumas that can come from that. So, like workplace bullying and, like, gaslighting and things like that. So if you want to know some more about those things, please go check out that episode. I am not a mental health professional, so if you hear anything on any of my episodes that seems to relate to you and you want to delve more into your experience with that thing and maybe unpack some things that might come up to you. First off, pause at any time. Take a break. Take care of yourself. Treat yourself well.
[00:03:19] I definitely do not want any of my information that I send out into the world to be traumatic for anyone because I would not be very trauma informed if I did not care about your wellbeing. Face the facts here. But also if you want to unpack it a little more, I do recommend seeking out some skilled, trauma informed professional mental health services in your area.
[00:03:41] Preferably someone who works somewhat locally, has good references, and also just find someone who fits well with you. I do have a video on my own mental health journey on here, one of the earlier videos I did. It's kind of long and rambly because it's just me talking about my own experience getting anxiety and depression treatment and treatment for my own history of trauma and my experience with that. And at the end of it, I tried to give some pointers on what it's like to actually have a really good therapist and what it feels like to have a good therapist. But I only can give you kind of what I know from my own experiences and stuff. I've heard other like advocates and educators on social media say so. But nonetheless, finding a good mental health fit is kind of tough, especially in the United States. So if you want, you can go check that one out as well.
[00:04:33] So on this third episode of my Burnout series, we were talking about secondary traumatic stress sts. I use that term because it seems to be the main term used by researchers in this area from what I can tell of more current articles that I've looked up. But this is the same thing as vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, trauma exposure response. It goes by a lot of different names. I've seen some like blog posts of like mental health practitioners who try to distinguish those terms. But from as far as I can tell when looking through the research literature out there, when I do my Google scholar searching and stuff, it looks like the terms switched by like what decade the research was done in and also just what environment or situations they were studying. So vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, all of this stuff seems to be under the label of secondary traumatic stress, at least for the more current articles as far as I can tell. So that's what I'm going to be using today, and that is what we're talking about. So we are going to go over what secondary trauma is. We're going to go through some unofficial warning signs, essentially that you might be suffering from it. Unofficial in the sense that there is no DSM five diagnosis for secondary trauma. There's just PTSD. But secondary trauma exposure can lead to PTSD. There's plenty of people who actually get diagnosed with clinical PTSD. Their only exposure to trauma has actually been vicariously through either their job or maybe family members or friends who have gone through things. So it can be the same thing we'll talk about in a little bit.
[00:06:16] So part one, what the heck is secondary traumatic stress? Like, where does it come from? What are the warning signs? How do I know it's happening? What is the happening? And I don't mean the movie with Marky Mark. If primary traumatic stress is essentially when somebody has a physiological shift due to an event directly happening to them, then secondary traumatic stress is essentially when a person suffers from the exact same reaction. But the events didn't happen directly to them. They just happened to witness the event. That could include they saw the event happening in front of their eyes. Like you see a car accident happening. It could also be you were listening to traumatic stories from people. Like, if you're in counseling, if you're in some sort of intake situation, people who work hotlines get exposed to a lot of trauma. 911 call, like center operator answer people. That is not their name. I can't think of their appropriate title right now, but, yeah, the people who answer the phones at 911, like, they get exposed to a lot of drama, obviously, first responders, you know, the emts, emergency medical techs and firefighters, police officers, all these people, they get exposed to a lot of trauma. But secondary traumatic stress is the thing that happens to a lot of people. And I honestly think it happens to a lot more people than we think. I think, you know, that's kind of one of my goals of this video, is to give you this sense of, like, we really need a lot more education and training around this because I think it happens to a lot more people than we think. And I'm gonna. I have a slide on that. I'm gonna get to that a little bit. Some of the, like, kind of. They call this symptoms clusters. From the article I got this from. I can't remember if this is the CSlack et al article that I've been using the last couple episodes, or if this is from I have a bride et al 2004 article also on my slide, but essentially secondary traumatic stress, you have a reaction that resembles PTSD or just traumatic reaction, right. The symptoms are parallel to those observed in people directly exposed to trauma, and they call these symptom clusters. So one includes intrusive re experiencing of the traumatic material. So maybe you're out with friends, hanging out, and then, like, the story that person tells you just happens to pop into your mind and makes you feel very upset. Again, that's like an intrusive re experiencing. You didn't mean to be reliving that at that moment or remembering it at that moment, but it just kind of shows up in your mind because it's sort of like that stress is just sitting and just simmering, you know, and sometimes it just bubbles up. Also, you might have avoidance of the things that trigger the trauma or even emotions that are centered around it. So you might avoid feelings of, like, anger or frustration or heartbreak, pain, sadness. You might actually start to avoid those. Like, you don't want to feel those because it reminds you too much of the trauma that you've either witnessed or heard about. And you also have this physiological shift, which is an increase in, they call it the physical arousal, which I know sounds like a kind of a dirty word, but not that kind of arousal we are talking about. Essentially, your body goes into fight, flight, or freeze response really rapidly. It's really sensitive. It can be triggered in an instant, and it takes a long, longer time for you to relax away from it. So essentially you're in this like, chronic stress survival mode, hypervigilant kind of state a lot more often and for a lot longer. Okay, that's what they mean by that. As a slight review, that sea slack et al. Study that I keep referencing it is that big meta analysis. They were really looking at what is burnout versus what is traumatic stress, basically secondary traumatic stress specifically. And they did find that essentially the only defining feature of burnout that all the research seems to, like, agree upon is exhaustion. And that cynicism and inefficacy had a much stronger correlation to secondary traumatic stress in all the studies they looked at, because that's what a meta analysis is. They take a ton of studies and they do a study on the studies, basically to figure out what really is going here. It gives us more of that big picture, what is actually here, what is actually kind of the root, what is the big umbrella thing that's happening? And then they also found that the association between secondary traumatic stress and jaw burnout is really high. The two concepts overlapped as much as 48% amongst all the studies. Which is a lot of overlap for concepts. You know, it tells me that maybe we're confounding the two a lot. And then that Shoji et al article that I also mentioned in the last episode, they found that jaw burnout they were looking at, essentially, the directionality which comes first, is it secondary traumatic stress and then burnout or burnout and secondary traumatic stress? And what they found is, typically burnout comes first, and you have an increased risk of developing secondary traumatic stress when you are burnt out. So if we think of it, if we put these two results together, we think of it as like, okay, if you're really, really exhausted, burnout, right? If you have this, like, level of, like, almost fatigue, like medical fatigue, almost level, not chronic fatigue. That's syndrome. That's a different. That's a different medical diagnosis. But if you're just constantly chronically exhausted, then you have a much higher chance of developing secondary traumatic stress from where you work, from anything you're exposed to at work. So it kind of makes sense, because as the authors, shoji, at all, kind of hypothesized when they were summarizing their results, the more exhausted you are, the more your resiliency is likely to be worn down. So essentially, you don't have the energy to cope with all the stuff you're seeing, which makes sense as to why, like, psychologically, you can't process it, you can't cope with it, and then it's going to kind of ruminate and sit there and kind of shift your physiology, maybe. And then you might end up with a trauma response. Because if you're dealing with traumatic events, it really does take a lot of energy and time to, like, sit and process, and you have to have strategies and techniques to help you process that in a healthy way. You know what I mean? And that stuff where our society's not very giving us those healthy techniques, let me tell you, the greater United States society is not very good at that. So that's part of what I'm hoping. I'm hoping we can get better at it. That's part of what I'm hoping to do here, you know?
[00:12:42] So I feel like this is really important for a lot of people in caregiving professions, speech language, pathologists in particular. You guys, listen up. Teachers, also educators. Oh, my gosh. Paraprofessionals. Good lord, you guys, paraeducators. All you guys need to listen up here. I think it's really important for us to focus on secondary traumatic stress because I think we are exposed to so much at our jobs and speech language pathologists in particular, especially at schools, we're the ones who sit and like, talk to kids either one on one or in very small groups. So we tend to get to know our students really well and they feel really safe with us and then they tell us things about stuff going on in their life and it can be some pretty traumatic hard stuff to hear. But we're not mental health professionals, so we don't really have the skills. We're not really trained in the skills of first, how to handle those situations, which is sort of a separate video probably on that, but also like how to deal with how it makes us feel, how to deal with the information we're taking in and the kind of feelings it brings up in us. You know what I mean? And honestly, honestly, honestly. This is my hypothesis. It's untested and I haven't found any literature on it to really, like agree or disagree with me. But listen, I think there's a reason why, especially in the United States, a lot of educators, you know, we get time off in the summer. That doesn't happen across other countries, but in the United States, summer are the months that most public schools are out. So when you work at a public school, if you're not doing extended school year, you probably have about two months, maybe two months in a week or two off. People say three months. But really that's from the perspective of when students tend to go back, staff tend to work a little bit longer after students are off and then also come back a little sooner for trainings and preparing things for the next year. But a lot of people are like, oh, we're super jealous, right? And then they're like, well, why do you need to get paid more? Especially when it comes to livable wages. Why you guys want to get paid more? You only work nine months out of the year, right? It becomes this whole thing. And I know a lot of educators like to defend ourselves as being like, well, like, we work really hard during the school year. We need that time off.
[00:14:58] And I think that becomes a hard sell. Right? It's a hard sell when you're talking to other professionals and say like, well, we work harder. So you know what I mean? It feels sort of comparative and kind of invalidating to other people. But what I think is actually happening is the school year definitely, like, it comes with its own special brand of exhaustion, you know, for me, for sure. Like you get start getting really exhausted fairly early on in the school year. But at schools you are exposed to so many like traumatic stories, kids. We're mandated reporters, so we need to call child protective services where we see red flags. We're trained on what those red flags are. So sometimes, even without students saying anything, we can see what's going on. And we kind of know that kid has some sort of maybe neglect happening or something somewhere, you know? And it's like, that's really tough to deal with. It's tough to deal with kids who do. Who bully other kids.
[00:15:55] Some bullying behaviors are really bad, y'all, especially nowadays. Some of it can be really bad. So it's like, you have to deal with that. You might witness that it might be a student, you know, really well, doing the bullying, and you never would have thought they would have, right? Like, there's so many things going on in addition to the fact that you're not really paid a livable wage in most states in the nation because it's state dependent in the United States. I have. I say that a lot as a caveat to my United States peeps. I say that a lot because I see some of my stats and there's some Australians and people in the UK tuning in. So I'm just going to do the caveat of United States education.
[00:16:31] And also for anyone who's just not an educator, if you're an educator and you're, like, talking to your spouse or your best friend or even maybe like, your family, and you're like, y'all need to see this explanation. This is also for them. So that's the thing, is that you end up having this burnout because you have so much to do. You have all these plans. You have all these lord service providers. I'm a special education service provider. Speech lamp, pathologist. We provided special education services in the schools. And there's so much paperwork, so much paperwork with it. Whoo. Report writing assessments, taking data, writing notes. Like, it's constant, right? And it's tiring. It's exhausting. Like, just the week itself is more than 40 hours, really. Usually, if you're actually doing your job, like we call it, working at the top of your license, like you're doing the best you possibly can do, you're probably going to be doing more than 40 hours a week, or maybe not every week, but you'll definitely do it some weeks, you know, so you get really exhausted. You get really tired. You're exposed to all this stuff that happens. And I think that's why when you hit summer, this is my experience, whenever summer hit, it would be like a month of me feeling like all I have the energy to do is sit here and binge watch tv shows that I didn't have the energy to watch during the school year. Do I have plans of doing other things? Yes. Do I have a list of projects I would like to get to around the house or maybe some hobbies, some crafting things I want to finish? Yes. Do I actually get to those things? Maybe one or two of them. Because when I actually feel rested and rejuvenated and ready to actually do some of that stuff that I actually really enjoy doing, it's like two weeks before I go back to trainings and the school year starts again. So it really effectively feels like you have no time off.
[00:18:21] And I think that exhaustion level, the fact that you're so exhausted that it takes you, like, a month plus to recover. I think it might be a sign that it's not just exhaustion in a lot of us. I think it might be a sign that we're dealing with a lot more emotional upheaval and a lot more of, like, potentially a physiological shift toward being really chronically stressed out and really hyper vigilant. Really, like, survival mode, fight, flight, freeze a lot, way more than we would say. And then when you add on lack of livable wages on top of that, well, then that's going to add a whole nother bucket of stress in the real world, right? Like, money doesn't buy happiness, but it does buy a significant reduction of stress and worry, which, let me tell you, that is very indirectly related to a better quality of life, which indirectly relates to experiencing more happiness. So let's not pretend that money doesn't matter when it comes to our emotional states, okay, and our quality of life, because it does. And if you're barely making a livable wage, if you feel like you're scraping by living paycheck to paycheck, you add that stress on. On top of dealing with, like, all the student stress and all the stuff going on, on top of constant scarcity in the system. And, like, it's a recipe for people dealing with a lot more than a single person is really should ever be expected to cope with at their work, quite frankly. And then you have, like, this was how it was before COVID shutdown, and then after Covid shutdown, it's even worse because everybody went through Covid shutdown, and that made everybody a whole special level of stress. You know, that's my two cent. That's my hypothesis on, like, educators feel like we need that summer break because it's probably more than burnout. It's probably more than just being tired and overworked. I think we're dealing with a lot more than that.
[00:20:11] And the system needs some serious time, attention and money spent on helping to heal from all of that for everybody in it. I think that's why we have so much attrition. Essentially, right now, the United States is having a really big issue with attrition. People leaving education, teachers leaving their jobs, speech language pathologists are leaving schools. Like people don't want to work in the system anymore. And I would argue that some level of traumatic stress is probably why. And secondary traumatic stress definitely might be a lot of it, actually. But that's just, that's just. That's just my hypothesis.
[00:20:41] Do what you will with that. And if you're scientists, feel free to study this question. That would be great. Let me know what you find out.
[00:20:51] The other thing I want to address is, with just people in general across the world today, being in a globally connected Internet, social media world, 24/7 News Cycle World we're in right now, I think secondary traumatic stress is also something to think about because I know for myself there's only so much horrible traumatic news I can take before I can't hear anymore. I start getting too triggered, honestly, I start feeling too. Like I'm gonna use that. I know that word is like, people don't like it, but essentially I'm reliving a lot of traumas. I feel like I'm vicariously. Like I have images pop into my head where I can. Like I. I'm trying to see it, I visualize it. It becomes intrusive in my brain, especially, like, with the stuff happening in Gaza. Like, that stuff is just.
[00:21:44] And, like, really somewhere so. So many places around the world as well. But so it's like, there's just so much out there and the new cycle's ever present and if you don't keep up with it, you still know somebody who does, right? Like somebody will still bring these things up or it'll be when you're doom scrolling, trying to find cute animals, you might see headlines from something that is like, completely not what you were hoping for at that moment in time, but now you have to deal with it. You saw this information of the losses and things like that, and I just can only imagine how much this information bombardment is impacting our ability to process through this kind of trauma. Because, like, it's pretty new in the history of human evolution. It's pretty new that we know about all these traumas happening across the world for example, or even within our own state, you know, anything outside of our town, essentially, it's pretty new that we have access to this much information. And I think I have another hypothesis, essentially that I think that it's really impacting the way people, whether or not they can process emotions, essentially gets impacted by all of this, because I don't think our brains are really made to try to process constant traumas in the world, to be aware of and know about all the constant traumas that are happening out there, all the traumatic events and all the injustices and everything.
[00:23:13] I know for some of us, and I know for myself, when I hear too much about certain things in the news, I start to feel really hopeless and helpless, and I start to feel really vulnerable. And when it comes to how the definition of trauma, I use, and I lean on the one from the tip 57, essentially a sense of helplessness and hopelessness and powerlessness and vulnerability that is a breeding ground for a trauma response when you feel powerless. In fact, there's a really great quote, and I can't remember who it's by right now. I've heard this quote before where it says trauma is an affliction of the powerless. So I think that's part of it, too. Is that like, the news cycle? If you're someone like me and you just feel horribly powerless against everything in the world, when you're looking and reading and seeing headlines and seeing pictures from around the world of horrible injustices and traumatic events and war zones, I think it's reasonable that that can cause potentially a traumatic response in your body. And the thing about it is, taking breaks and taking time off is great, but if time was all it really took to recover from trauma, I think the human race would probably be a lot more compassionate and nice to each other by now. You know what I mean? So, honestly, trauma doesn't always respond to just rest and time. Right? It sometimes takes a lot more strategies to deal with an actual shift like that. Right? So more awareness, I'm hoping, will be a good thing for people out there. This is why this episode is essentially the meat of everything here, I think, really the culmination of the research side of this series. Encar.
[00:24:55] I'm actually gonna end here because this got a little too long, and I am going to. I've already recorded the strategies, one. And the burnout and the, like, stuff that I want to say next, but I'm going to go ahead and end it here because this got to be a lot. So I want you guys to just be really kind to yourselves. Take the rest you need. Do whatever you need to do to be really good to you and to others around you. And I will not see you next time because that script feels weird to me, but you'll see me next time. Drop me a comment below if any of this was helpful, or just say comment, that's totally fine, too. And also, if you're listening on the podcast, if you're listening to this instead of watching it on my YouTube channel, first off, it is on YouTube. You guys, you're missing out on some funny things. If you want to check it out, if you like a little extra meme y humor, jazz unmasking stuff, check me out over there. But if you're just listening on the podcast, feel free. Like, consider leaving a review just to let people know or sharing the episode, whatever. If you feel like it would be helpful if you know somebody, whether they're a speech language pathologist or nothing. If you feel like any of this information is helpful, please let people know. Share it around. Let them know and let me know. Let me know what you found helpful, what you liked. If there's something else you want me to dive into, or if there's stuff that you're just, like, not agreeing with, let's go. Let's do that. Hey, also, if any of my research is out of date or inaccurate, please do let me know. Actually, I would love some additional citations and references because I'm just doing a lot of this research on my own time, my own thing. All right, until next time, guys. I want y'all to keep it weird. Embrace your weirdness. The good. Use your weirdness for good. We're gonna use the weirdness powers for good, okay? It's a trauma informed way.
