Secondary traumatic stress: One teacher’s experience

My career as a teacher was relatively short: five years, all in a large, urban district in the Midwest. Budget cuts had forced three elementary schools to merge into one, and as a result, more than 700 students were crowded into the building where I worked. It was an explosive environment, with too few resources and too many children with high levels of need. Ninety percent of the students were growing up in poverty, and many had already been affected by trauma, including gang violence, homelessness, abuse, malnutrition, violence in the home, even sex trafficking.

When I took the job, I thought I understood what teaching in a Title I school required. I’m a caring person, and I knew I would have no trouble empathizing with my students. But no one prepared me to confront children’s trauma every day.

In my first year of teaching, I started showing signs of stress — excessive emotional reactions, insomnia, and increased feelings of agitation — all of which I initially attributed to “adjusting” to my new job. Teaching is a stressful career. Of course I was struggling!

However, when a drive-by shooting took the life of one of our kindergartners, it hit me that I was in over my head. I wept as I read the news for the first time, and I cried over and over again in the following days. The 6-year-old who was killed was close to the age of my own child. Why couldn’t the violence in this community have spared this young life? For the next several weeks, I was overcome by a deep, dark sadness.

I often hear about teacher burnout and job stress, but those terms do not adequately capture what I was experiencing. Teachers are tasked not only with providing academic instruction but also with forming close, caring relationships with students. And as I discovered, when those students have experienced primary trauma, the cost of caring can become hard to bear.

In recent years, trauma-informed care has been implemented in districts across the country. At this point, most educators know about the significant effects of trauma on students’ socioemotional and academic development. However, many of us remain unaware that long-term interaction with students who have experienced trauma can also have significant effects on our own mental and physical health. Those of us who work in teaching, nursing, and other helping professions often find ourselves plagued by what psychologists call secondary traumatic stress (STS) (Figley, 1995), suffering from symptoms that mimic those of post-traumatic stress disorder (Hydon et al., 2015). When left unmanaged, STS can disrupt the well-being of any teacher who works with traumatized children, whether that teacher is a novice or a veteran, male or female, working in the primary grades or in high school.

Shutting down

As time went on, I found myself struggling to process what my students were telling me about their lives. A few of them were refugees, and they would share memories of machete attacks, murders, and dead bodies in the streets. Their classmates would listen with rapt attention. We all became preoccupied with death, much more than I wanted to admit.

At night, I often lay awake, my heart hurting as I thought about the traumas my students had experienced. On the weekends, when I should have been enjoying time with my family, I would become distracted, wondering about my students and what they were doing. I began to feel distrustful of their parents — why hadn’t they intervened when their children were in trouble?

We hadn’t touched on any of this in my university courses, but managing trauma was consuming a large part of my attention in the classroom. One day, an 11-year-old girl told me she felt ill, and she described having the symptoms of a sexually transmitted disease. Anger and nausea welled up in my stomach, but I held myself together and asked her, gently, who had been spending time in her home, and how long had she been experiencing physical discomfort? According to the state office that responds to evidence of child abuse, teachers are not supposed to press students for details, but, right or wrong, I couldn’t help but ask. In any case, after I filed a report, the state never followed up with me. I don’t even know whether an investigation was conducted. My hands were tied.

My feelings of guilt and inadequacy mounted. Was I truly powerless to stop the abuse my students were suffering? And without formal training, how could I support them effectively? Our dedicated counselors and social workers were helpful but at the same time inundated with more and more cases of traumatized students. I couldn’t place myself between students and their abusers. I couldn’t provide food for every hungry child in my room. I couldn’t provide homeless students a safe place to go at night. I didn’t know how to counsel students struggling with the death of a parent. And no matter how often I searched online for information about foster care in my state, I couldn’t rescue my students from dangerous living conditions.

Over time, I found that I was becoming less able to be present for my students, personally or academically. As their needs piled up, I began to shut down and distance myself from their cries for help. Such emotional distancing, I’ve since learned, is a common symptom of STS. So, too, is a decline in one’s own physical health (Kahill, 1988). I frequently fell sick, and it wasn’t just because of the germs that run rampant in elementary schools. The more consumed I became with stress and worry, the less effort I made to take care of my body.

Learning to cope — or not

Eventually, I found ways to pick myself up and keep going. I learned to rely on mindfulness instead of alcohol, for instance, and I opted for talk therapy instead of substance abuse. For some of my colleagues, though, coping strategies weren’t enough.

The one common symptom of STS that was, thankfully, absent from my own suffering was loneliness. As it became clear that my fellow teachers were experiencing the same kinds of distress, we began to share information about preventative care plans and how to access available support systems. The professional culture at my school came to include frequent, open, and honest communication about our common affliction. I found this to be invaluable (and I’m heartened to know that many other schools across the nation have implemented protocols to support teachers in their battle with STS).

At the same time, through my everyday work in the classroom, I began to restore my sense of the joy and purpose in helping students overcome their challenges. Such warm, happy feelings — researchers use the term “compassion satisfaction” — were no cure for STS, but they were enough to keep me at the school for another four years. The demons I faced were too big for me to keep fighting them off forever, though. In the end, I failed my students, becoming yet another of those transitory adults who rotate in and out of their already tumultuous lives. So did many of my colleagues; the staff turnover rate at my former school hovers around 20-25% percent every year.

The power of sharing

Since leaving the classroom, I’ve considered it a moral duty to share my story, inviting others to talk candidly about a struggle that all of us — particularly those of us who choose to work in the helping professions — will likely face, sooner or later. The odds are high that you, like me, have experienced at least one traumatic life event. The odds are also high that you, like me, have sought to ease the traumatic experiences of a family member, friend, student, or colleague. Unfortunately, the statistics on traumatic life experiences, both among children and adults, suggest that nearly all of us have been or will be affected by trauma, whether directly or indirectly.

If we cannot remove the trauma from our students’ lives, then at least we can tend to our own mental and physical well-being, so that we can continue to serve those students effectively. For me, that has involved learning about STS, conducting research in this area, and working with others to better understand exactly what we face. Together, I believe, we can find ways to improve the quality of life for education’s most precious resource: teachers.

References

Figley, C.R. (1995). Compassion fatigue as secondary trauma stress disorder: An overview. In C.R. Figley (Ed.), Compassion fatigue: Coping with secondary traumatic stress disorder in those who treat the traumatized (pp. 1-20). New York, NY: Brunner/Mazel.

Hydon, S., Wong, M., Langley, A.K., Stein, B.D., & Kataoka, S.H. (2015). Preventing secondary traumatic stress in educators. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 24 (2), 319-333.

Kahill, S. (1988). Symptoms of professional burnout: A review of the empirical evidence. Canadian Psychology, 29 (3), 284-297.