“Horrible Slime Stories” When Serving Victims: The Labor of Role-taking and Secondary Trauma Exposure

Abstract

The emotional and psychological consequences associated with providing services to traumatized others have been well established with extant scholarship highlighting these workers’ susceptibility to vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress. But less is known about the underlying interactional processes by which symptoms of secondary trauma emerge. This research investigates the consequences of taking the role of a person who is victimized and experiencing emotional turmoil by analyzing interviews with workers who serve victims seeking legal services. Role-taking is the process of mentally and affectively placing the self in the position of another, understanding another’s perspective. Workers described listening to victims’ experiences or coworkers’ accounts of difficult cases as being “slimed.” Those engaging in both cognitive and empathic role-taking often struggled to “shake” this content and became susceptible to mirroring the distress of the traumatized clients and coworkers. In response to this exposure, workers often shared troubling intakes or cases with coworkers as a type of interpersonal emotion management. Workers who provided emotional support to colleagues often experienced indirect exposure to trauma on two fronts: in the service of clients who had experienced intimate partner violence and from coworkers. Thus, those best able to role-take with victims or coworkers are most likely to experience greater secondary trauma exposure and its potential toll.

Haunting details: A mixed‐methods study on predictors of details recalled from a victim narrative

“…In another example, a White female recalled "choking because I used to be married to someone who did that to me." The participants connecting their IPV experiences or personal fears to the narrative aligns with scholarship highlighting how role-taking can blur the boundaries between thoughts and feelings of the self and a traumatized other (Ellis & Knight, 2018;Groggel, 2023;Ruiz-Junco, 2017). Participants who remembered the substantive details of the narrative contrasted with those who focused on analytical themes.…”

“…Qualitative themes may reflect not only what the participants recalled most from the case but also their willingness to fully write out what they remembered. Second, the narrative selected mirrors the narratives that the public might face as jurors or workers serving traumatized clients (Groggel, 2023). In the face of such an account of extreme abuse from an actual court case, the participants may not have felt able to connect with the victim as a protagonist abstracted from more details of the case.…”

“…Other workers may also be exposed to this content when interacting with traumatized clients or processing trauma‐laden materials (e.g. written documents, verbal accounts, and videos) (Chamberlain & Miller, 2008; Groggel, 2023; Weir et al., 2021).…”

Absorption vulnerability: A new look at compassion fatigue.

“…(2014, p. vii) Carrying the suffering of clients and absorbing their pain as if it were our own, however, is not sustainable or beneficial. Traumatic material may be absorbed due to the intensity of one particular trauma story and/or the cumulative impact of many violent details from multiple stories over a period of time (Groggel, 2023).…”