Raechele Pope: Welcome to Student Affairs Now, the Online Learning Community for Student Affairs Educators. I’m your host, Raechele Pope. Today we’re exploring a topic that is increasingly urgent, often misunderstood, and let’s be honest, deeply felt by many of us in this work. I’m talking about vicarious trauma. Our guest today, Dr.

Jill Bassett Cameron is here to help us understand what vicarious trauma is and what it isn’t, and why it demands more than a yoga class and a scented candle. We’re going to unpack the myths, dig into the research, and talk about what a more sustainable trauma-informed student affairs practice can look like.

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As I mentioned, I’m your host, Rochelle Pope. My pronouns are she and her, and I’m a professor in the Higher Education and Student Affairs program at the University of Buffalo. I’m recording today near the University of Buffalo’s campus on the Unseated Land of the Haudenosaunee people. Dr. Jill Bassett.

Cameron is the Senior Equity and Inclusion Officer and Title IX Coordinator at Central Connecticut State University since 2019. Her workshop, understanding your Vicarious Trauma, has reached hundreds of practitioners. Her writing has been featured in About Campus A Eyes Talking Stick, and the NEC Journal of Applied Educational Research.

She also hosts Spill the Beans with Dr. Jill, a YouTube series, bringing her research into Lively accessible dialogue. Jill, welcome to Student Affairs. Now we are so glad you’re here. We are thrilled. Hey, what else would you like us to know about you before we start this conversation start?

Sure. So I’m a mother of two toddlers.

Oh, you’re busy. My husband is also in higher ed. He’s actually the director of student conduct at a sister school and originally from Jamaica. Ah. So our home here where I’m recording from is the Iroquois tribe. So we had our house blessed when we purchased it, and we get to hear Native American drumming every spring to kick off the year.

So that’s a wonderful part of our home here. I have a senior dog named Jasper. He’s very. Sweet. Been in higher ed for a long time, about two decades or so, and I’ve been in the Title IX area and really just love to give back to higher ed as much as I can. I think that’s because I’m one of five children and so I’m used to like sharing, but I’m also a Leo and it’s Leo season, so I thought that this would be a great opportunity to share some nuances with our colleagues.

Raechele Pope: Oh, that’s great. That’s great, Jill. Thanks. And loving hearing about your family and how this all connects for you. Yeah. So let’s get into this. What exactly is vicarious trauma?

I hadn’t heard the term before. I started talking with you and, checking out some of your YouTube stuff, how does it differ from burnout and compassion fatigue that we hear a lot of? So what is vicarious trauma?

It’s such a good question and a lot of people get very confused. So one of the things I like to do in my workshops are talk about the vocab and the terminology.

So vicarious trauma is going to be what happens to the helper when they hear the trauma from another source. And it’s going to be neurological, cognitive, physical, emotional, spiritual, and. Physical, right? So it’s all encompassing into the holistic person. The other thing that I would explain is that it’s a pendulum.

So if you think about burnout is the worst of the worst, the opposite of that is called compassion satisfaction. So essentially compassion satisfaction is the pleasure that we get from the job that we do.

So that’s a pendulum. Halfway through is gonna be vicarious trauma, and that’s gonna be the lived experience.

When you go from vicarious trauma over to burnout, that’s leaning more into the compassion fatigue. See? And so vicarious trauma is like the step before compassion fatigue that leads to burnout,

Raechele Pope: right? But what you’re talking about is we’re listening to the stories of our students, of our colleagues.

We’re seeing something that’s happening on campus that for someone else. Has been pretty traumatic. It has it’s shaping them. And so we’re not just hearing the stories, we’re taking all of that in. Correct. And in some of those cases then we are on that pendulum that you were talking about the, the experience of compassion, the being satisfied and moving all the way to, to the burnout. But there are some steps before burnout. And if we’re, and if I’m hearing you correctly, if we’re smart if we’re wise, if our campuses are helping us, we don’t have to get to the burnout.

Exactly.

And we cost the institutions the business money when we have staff turnover, right? So one of my pitches to STA stakeholders is I can either get in there now or give literature and give support. Or when you have staff turnover, you’re going to have to re-enroll everyone, right? And teach all the dean of how to do the job versus nurturing the ones doing the job.

Raechele Pope: Yeah. So why is it a problem when people start confusing vicarious trauma with just what we’re hearing for self-care now? I don’t really wanna, I know I made a little comment early on about scented candles and all, yeah, about this, but I think we underplay what self-care really means.

And so how, why is it a, talk to us about this problem between confusing vicarious trauma with self-care needs.

So the analogy that I like to give is vicarious trauma is like the cavity. Okay? Self care is you brushing your teeth. Got

Jill Bassett-Cameron: it.

Everyone needs great to brush their teeth regardless if they have a cavity, okay?

Because I have cavities, I might brush my teeth more often,

Jill Bassett-Cameron: right?

So because I have vicarious trauma, I might wanna do more self care.

Jill Bassett-Cameron: But

brushing the teeth is only going to aid in the cavity prevention, but not necessarily like everyone needs to brush their teeth. Everyone needs self-care, period.

And then the cures trauma might be the byproduct of what we do for a living.

Raechele Pope: Yeah, I think that’s really an apt analogy too, that, we can think about it that way, and it’s not to put down the fact that we need a massage or scented candles or just spend some time away from work. But that’s not gonna solve our problem

exactly.

It’s not going to

Raechele Pope: address the issues of vicarious trauma.

Yeah, and I would even take it one step further that in speaking with dental hygienists, some people are more prone to cavities than others. I’ve actually never had a cavity in my life and I’ve had more tartar. And so some people who experience PTSD for example.

Might be more accept to the vicarious trauma because they had their own lived experience. So that’s what I recall, the unicorn, when you yourself have experienced the trauma, but then you’re helping someone through that same trauma, that’s a unicorn experience.

Raechele Pope: Okay. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense in that why.

Two of us can hear the same story. Help a student or a colleague through the same issue, but one of us is affected differently, correct. Than the others. Sure. Okay.

Jill Bassett-Cameron: Yeah.

Raechele Pope: So what does VI vicarious trauma look like in everyday student affairs work?

Yeah. So we’re gonna absorb it from, the disclosures from any kind of trauma, but it’s also not like large traumas.

And so a lot of the colleagues that we work with have putting out fires every day. It doesn’t need to be the worst of the worst scenario, right? It doesn’t need to be a suicide, a gesture, self harm. It doesn’t need to be huge. It can be small. Because it’s really about how the practitioner experiences that, right?

I’m sure you and I have both have stories of cases that roommate conflicts can take, five hours to five days to five months, right? And so it’s not so much about. The grandiosity of the incident as so much as what the practitioner is giving and the amount of bandwidth. And what that will look like in our colleagues is called indicators of vicarious trauma.

PTSD is a medical diagnosis, so they have symptoms. Vicarious trauma is not a diagnosis, it’s a, an experience of life. And so no one can deny that you have vicarious trauma, but you also can’t fall ill from vicarious trauma. So the indicators might be anything from anger to cynicism, to sadness, to anxiety.

I have colleagues who have nightmares, overeating, undereating, stress, hyper vigilance. Disengagement, guilt, uhhuh avoidance, some social networks, inability to listen, and there’s a whole list. And so that’s how it might manipulate in our colleagues is that after they absorb this information, they haven’t been able to reset their valve and they’re starting to feel a certain kind of way.

And until we nurture that, it just stays dormant.

Raechele Pope: Yeah. That. I can even more clearly understand this pendulum that you’re talking about, because a lot of the indicators you mentioned sounds a lot like burnout

Correct

Raechele Pope: indicators. And so as you’re moving further, if this is not addressed

It then turns into burnout.

And it’s there’s numerous ways that we can nurture our vicarious trauma because we are in the United States in particular, already susceptible to three triggers of vicarious trauma by noon. Whether it’s our social media, our email exchange, the news, or even driving to work.

Jill Bassett-Cameron: So

a lot of us who are in the helping professions, and you gotta keep in mind the other helping professions have been researched ad nauseam regarding their vicarious trauma. So you’ve got the medical profession, you’ve got law enforcement, social services, ev clergy. These are all practitioners that know that part of their job is hearing other people’s trauma and they, you can’t just shake it off.

That’s not how this works. So we’re learning through them and we’re talking more about it because we understand the value of that.

Raechele Pope: Yeah. Yeah. And I would suspect that psychologists are another group and they are aware of this, but in student affairs, we haven’t talked about this a lot.

We, we might say, Hey, how you doing? You had to deal with that really tough situation, but pretty short-lived.

Yes, I agree. We do more tabletops on the policies to prevent liabilities and litigations. And we don’t, we, we’ve done a lot of circling around of like, how did that incident go?

Practices, but not putting the practitioners involved and said, and now how do you feel?

Raechele Pope: Not front and center. And not only how do you feel, but what do we do next? So let’s get to some, what do you do next in a few minutes? Yeah. But I first wanna go back, you’ve been doing workshops about this.

You’ve been talking to individuals in groups. What are the themes that have emerged from your workshops across functional areas in student affairs?

Yeah. I think that validation. Is really big. They practitioners love to hear, wow, you just validated how I’ve been feeling.

Jill Bassett-Cameron: Yeah. And

it’s normalizing the language and not making them feel like they’re less than or not a good employee.

You, I always talk to students in student affairs of You don’t get. A special cord at graduation because you did it the hard way.

Jill Bassett-Cameron: And

I like to use that language with our colleagues of, you’re doing things super hard. Your performance evaluations are not showing any issues, but yet you have this bias of you feeling weak or not good enough if you disclose that this stuck with you.

And that’s what we need to change. I’m seeing that theme a lot. I’m also seeing a theme of grit and resiliency. Not enough acknowledgement of, that’s a moment in time. You could still have grit and resiliency and still acknowledge your vicarious trauma.

Raechele Pope: Yeah. I think people miss that.

I’m either resilient and I can continue to function, yeah. Or I’m not, yeah. And I’m a mess. But the reality is both of those could be true at the same time.

A hundred percent.

Raechele Pope: Yeah. Yeah. So why has student affairs if clergy have done it, if medical field has done it, if law enforcement has done it if the mental health field has done it.

Why has student affairs had such a tough time? Ha have, why has student affairs struggled to name and respond to vicarious trauma, particularly in their in the practitioners and administrators who work in this field?

So I have two theories on that. The first one is that if you go back to educators in general, there wasn’t a lot of focus on the social work part of our job, right? So there was some nuances of, I’m thinking about like a door mom years ago, right? They would teach you how to iron. They would teach poise and etiquette, and at some point higher ed evolved to these are life skills and that belongs here, and here’s other skills, but.

In general, I don’t think educators ever got the credit of. The, the learning that occurs outside of the classroom. And so in that it created relationships where students then started sharing more and treating educators, guidance counselors, principals, teachers, and then stemming up to us in higher ed that this is someone that I feel safe, that I can disclose what is going on, why I am not retaining this information.

Why I can’t focus is because I’m hungry. I’m hungry because I don’t have money for food and so on, so forth. So I think it was a shift in education. I also think that some institutions just don’t have time to invest in the practitioner. And I know that’s a really sad statement that I said, but I do think that some institutions work like a business and it slows down the process if you invest in the people.

Now we’ve seen corporations invest in the people who have been very successful, but there needs to be from a top perspective of what is that investment gonna look like so that we get the most out of our employees.

Raechele Pope: Sure. Let’s take, go back to this historical approach. Yeah. Once we moved into this professionalism of student affairs, we often saw it go into three different camps.

There were the student affairs programs that were housed in counseling programs. So they were doing a lot of counseling. There were student affairs programs that were housed in, admin. Roles. And so Ed, educational administration. And so they had a little less counseling, but even those programs had at least one class in listening skills or counseling, so to speak. And then there were the standalone student affairs programs, which seemed to take both approaches. And so we’re, again we’re talking history, but I think the point you’re making is that most of our focus was on. The helping skills for others, we were focused on the student

Yes.

Raechele Pope: Or the client. And we weren’t focused on the individuals doing the work, and we were looking for people who were real skilled. And as the profession the word has become, accountability.

Not just responsibility, but accountability. And we started getting, paying more attention to, as you were saying, the legal ramifications of the things that we do.

And the potential liabilities as opposed to finding the ways to care both for the student. And the helper and the student affairs professional. And so we are stuck there and we’re not doing that part of it very well. And in fact, I keep hearing, gosh, wasn’t COVID the perfect example of that.

We were asking people to go to, especially frontline student affairs people, to be, to, you’re the ones that need to take care of the students that are still here. You’re the ones that need to be on delivering the food or whatever.

A hundred percent. Wow. We learned so much from COVID, and yet some systems haven’t changed.

Yeah, and you would be surprised to know when I’ve done these workshops. For other sectors, like the social work, there is a tool that I love to use. It’s the Dr. Stam, S-T-S-T-A-M-M. Dr. Sam has a tool professional quality of life scale, and it’s 30 questions and it was made for the social work program.

Social workers need to take the pro quo in order to go back into service. So when you think about social workers that were brought in for hurricanes and other national disasters, they do their pro quoll in order to get back into work. So many social workers I’ve met have never even heard of the pro quoll.

So how would I expect higher ed practitioners to know about it if the own people that are supposed to be taking it aren’t doing it?

Raechele Pope: Yeah. I can think of a variety of situations on a campus where there’s been a major event.

Or and we can define major in some of the same ways that you did.

Like we think about nine 11, we think of COVID, we think about a few other things, and afterwards we might grab everybody in one meeting and just say. So how are you doing? Let’s talk about this. Anyone that needs to talk about this, let’s have it. But it usually ends at that one meeting.

We pull people together. We’re certainly not using a tool like you were talking about the Dr. Sta tool or whatever. But but we haven’t seen this as, sustained. And so I’m right. So I’m really, I wanna spend some time talking about looking ahead solutions. What can we do? But first I wanna say I wanna make sure we understand this one little piece I’ve learned from your work that we can trigger vicarious trauma in a way that might seem innocuous.

Yeah, like we’re interviewing someone, someone who’s leaving a position, looking to get a promotion or going to a new institution, and so we can trigger this vicarious trauma in a way that might seem innocuous to most of us. Like a simple interview question. Can you gimme an example? Of how that might happen, an example or two, and then examples of how we can reframe those same interview questions to avoid retraumatizing the staff who are dealing with that.

Yeah. The one that comes to mind is this question of. Can you tell me of a time when you’ve had to deal with a difficult situation and how you navigated that?

I’ve been asked that on an interview and I’ve had to politely say, I think what you’re trying to assess is my ability to crisis manage.

Am I hearing that correctly? Because if so, I can give different examples, but I don’t really feel that it would be beneficial for everyone to hear the last time or the biggest event that I had to triage, because essentially that’s just unloading undue trauma to you. That’s like the major example that comes to mind.

Lemme stop with that. What is those skills? Yeah.

Raechele Pope: Lemme ask you a question about that. What is that question doing? Are you in your answer? It sounded like you were preventing the people in the room that, if it was a group interview, the people who were interviewing you from hearing your trauma.

Exactly, but it doesn’t seem to address how it might bring that back up for you.

Because I don’t think it’s fair that I’m interviewing for a job that I want. So I’m like wearing my best clothes. I’m putting my best foot forward, and now you’re asking me to go back and have a flashback, of a really traumatic situation. And then that’s not healthy for me and now I’m off my game to interview. And so are we purposely sabotaging to see how they do in those spaces? Because that seems a little dark to me. Or are we asking the wrong question, which is, how do you work under pressure?

Can you follow protocols? Tell me about any difficulty that you have with listening to authority or, those kinds of things are more an appropriate question than reliving one of the worst days of your life in the field. We wouldn’t do that to others. We wouldn’t do that to military.

We wouldn’t ask a doctor, tell me about a time that you lost a patient and how it shaped you. That is just bad practice. So I would equate that as my example for that.

Raechele Pope: Oh that’s great. How else might it come up in an innocuous way outside of a, an interview?

Yeah.

So the other example that I think about is like trauma sharing. So let’s say you and I are on the same staff team. And you and I dealt with the same incident, and then we go out to lunch, and then we’re talking about the incident and we’re talking about the nuances of it.

That’s actually not helpful to either one of us, because that is not. What we refer to as a protective factor because we were both in it. That’s essentially just re festering. Now there’s time to case manage and that’s at work and that’s, a deep dive to look at the critiques. But if friends develop at work and then they talk about the same incident, that’s just trauma sharing.

Raechele Pope: And that’s not. Healthy for someone experiencing vicarious trauma? How about me if I’m not experiencing vicarious trauma, but I still wanna, I still can’t get this out of my head. I just feel a need to talk about this with a colleague who is that, so if neither of us are feeling vicarious trauma, is that still problematic, I guess is my question?

Yes.

I would argue that if so I’ll quote Dr. Bridge who, when I was doing my dissertation, she said to me. The reality is the only individuals that have vicarious trauma are individuals who care. If you don’t care about your client, your student, your anyone, then you don’t get vicarious trauma. So if I have a student affairs professional saying to me that they don’t get vicarious trauma.

I challenge. You’re also telling me you care about our clients and our students, so how does that work? Like you can’t be both. You can’t say you care about them, you’re emotionally invested in them, but that you don’t get vicarious trauma because it is an organic byproduct of our job. How you measure your vicarious trauma might be so small compared to somebody else who’s very large.

But there is always a level of vicarious trauma.

Raechele Pope: Okay, so I thought we had talked about in the beginning that not everyone is going to experience vicarious trauma.

If they’re in the helping profession, but they don’t deal with student facing cases, then they wouldn’t. Right? ‘Cause what if you are working as the registrar you’re in higher ed, so that is a helping profession.

But do students really come to you and tell you their grievances or their trauma stories? I don’t know, but I can say that I’ve had registrars who do are on the front lines. Sure. And say, I just heard, this financial aid office, they do their SAP appeals. There’s tons of disclosures in those.

So it’s really about your position and how much exposure you have to the firsthand knowledge of the trauma.

Raechele Pope: So it’s going back to your analogy about the dentist and brushing teeth and the cavity. That the same stuff is coming in. Yes. And I’m brushing. And I’m brushing well, and the same I’m gonna get stuck in the analogy ’cause I don’t know enough about how a cavity forms, but the same stuff that allows a cavity to form is hitting all of us. Correct. But because of things I may be doing internally Yes. I can prevent. The cavity.

You got it. And there’s other things that, behaviors that can put protections against your cavity. And one of the protective factors is having a good sounding board. And so I always say you vent three times.

To three different people and then you move on.

Jill Bassett-Cameron: And if

you don’t feel like you can move on, like you still feel this knee jerk reaction to tell the narrative again, you probably vent it to the wrong people. So I don’t like us to vent to family members. They seem to be biased. I don’t know if you know that, but nothing that I do would ever make my siblings say that I’m the worst.

So a mentor is the best person to vent to because that’s someone that you can vent up to. They’ve typically been where you have been or have some relation and could really be a listener. The second person would be, of course, a therapist because they’re paid to listen to you. And then the third would be a partner.

Someone that is emotionally invested in you for love and not necessarily someone that does what you do for a living. Because the other thing is you can’t give someone vicarious trauma.

Raechele Pope: So if I have it, I can’t hand it off to you instead.

Not typically, because you’re not going to talk to me about the same students that I’m emotionally invested in.

Got it. And so think about if you’re my partner you’re invested in me and my wellbeing, not my students. Got

Raechele Pope: it.

So it’s a ripple effect. I like to, there’s this analogy that’s very well known in vicarious trauma world where the stone goes into the water and there’s a small ripple effect around that.

That’s gonna be the PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder is for the person who experienced the trauma. Got it. The second ripple is much bigger from this initial impact, and that’s us. That’s the vicarious trauma. The third ripple is so far removed from the stone that there’s no correlation. That’s who we vent to our support network.

Raechele Pope: So they’re hearing the sad story or the terrible story or the event. But they’re not affected by it in the same way, and then they’re not seeing that person’s pain or experience. Or the event itself.

Okay. And I don’t know about you, but when I tell the stories, I don’t go into the weeds of all the details.

Like I say, a student was assaulted or there was a physical interaction. I don’t go into the details the way we know them.

Raechele Pope: They’re not our details to share and they’re not our de we’re not experiencing the details in the same way.

Jill Bassett-Cameron: Yeah. Okay. Yeah,

Raechele Pope: that makes sense.

What are your top strategies for managing vicarious trauma? Since we’re all experiencing this is, okay, heads up. Everybody heads up listeners. This is what we need to know. What are those top strategies?

I always get asked what mine are, but then I’m also gonna give you three that are pretty well known.

Okay? Sure. So my strategies are I always wash my hands after a really hard intake. So whether it’s discrimination, harassment. Whatever the disclosure is, I always go and wash my hands. There’s so much research out there about water therapy. It’s my way of getting that ick out. Sure. I also think of it as like when you are helping someone who was bitten by a snake and there’s venom in their body and you suck the venom out, you can’t swallow it. You need to get rid of it yourself. So that washing is like my. Ritual. I then use different types of lotions to connect to my sensories, and then I go for my walk.

I have a drawer in my office called Happy’s, and it’s every card or note that I’ve ever gotten from anyone ever in my career. And I pick one out at random and I read it to reframe myself of there are people I have been able to help.

And those are my strategies.

Other strategies that can help in reducing the impact of your vicarious trauma Can be everyone from like those venting three times mentor. A person that cares about you emotionally as well as a therapist. But also getting a mentee is proven to reduce your burnout and increase your compassion satisfaction.

So think about the last time that you talked to somebody who wanted to be you. There are people who want to be in our field, believe it or not, as crazy it is as they look up to you and they wanna hear about it. So when you do that. You essentially fall in love with your position all over again.

And so I think when we don’t spend the time to nurture mentees, and trust me, I know that we’re super busy, but in doing that, it is a bit of selfishness. It is some self-care in there because you reminisce on what works well, why you got into the field, and you only tell them the good stuff. Mentees don’t typically hear the bad stuff we’re going through, so that’s a real way for us to remember and fall in love.

Raechele Pope: Yeah. That is such a smart thing that I hadn’t thought about in a long time. Yeah.

Yeah. And it’s a commitment, right? Just this is my self-care, I’m going to the gym, right?

So you have to do that same commitment to take care of your vicarious trauma. I also talk about the difference between group care and self care. So group care is your supervisor’s. Responsibility. And you as a supervisor are responsible for group care? Group care would look like, I am not scheduling staff meetings on Fridays or during lunch.

Self-care is the practitioner’s responsibility and I choose to do whatever I need with my lunch hour. And my supervisor prevents any, conflict of interest. That way it pulls me away from what I’m doing for my self-care.

Raechele Pope: Yeah, that some sense makes a lot of sense.

Jill Bassett-Cameron: Yeah,

Raechele Pope: I think those are really important because I think we sometimes forget that as a supervisor we have some options.

We don’t have to, we always have a meeting on Tuesday at 10, for example. But we just went through something major on Monday and it would be real convenient to get everybody together at Tuesday and 10. But it might also be really compassionate to say we’re not meeting this Tuesday.

Yeah. Another things, I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience.

I always find it to be a little bit of a slap in the face when I’m on a call that ends like five minutes early and whoever was running the call says, oh, I’m gonna give you back your time now. And I’m like, five minutes. Is that a joke? I think that’s a bad practice, but what I do love is a practice of I’m gonna schedule the meeting for an hour.

If we get done early, you do whatever you want with it because it’s your time. I think it’s a different framework. I also love when organizations come together outside of work, I just wish that our field would stop referring it as happy hour and start referring it as social hour.

Social Hour helps to nurture those that are in recovery and to stay sober. But it also helps those extroverts and introverts to be very clear of, this is gonna require me to be social.

So some stuff like that is really like low hanging fruit that we can do to help.

Raechele Pope: Yeah. What are some other institutional shifts that we could do to better support staff?

Oh if I had a magic wand it would be two big things that I’ve always wanted for our field. One, this idea of how you survive and thrive in the profession needs to be part of the curriculum that we’re teaching in higher ed. If you are getting your degree in higher ed, I want this to be a class.

Like part of the curriculum, just like everything else that we teach. And then my second big ask is that when we do have instances of high trauma, whether it’s a Title IX incident or anything that requires the colleague, the staff member, to give more than like an hour of work time, that we have a best practice established already.

I don’t want my staff to have to request time off when they’ve been up all night. But I know that would be a huge shift, not just for institutions, but for higher ed, that if we did what, like law enforcements do, right? So if you shoot your gun, you’re outta work for three days.

Given if you lose a child in er.

You get a certain amount, three days on, three days off. There’s tons of best practices that other helping professions do to prevent us from overworking because again, that’s where mistakes can happen.

Raechele Pope: Sure.

But we are just not there yet.

Raechele Pope: And not only prevents mistakes from happening, but it keeps us further away from the other end of the pendulum that you talked about.

We keep going in that direction. We end up in, in burnout, which right there isn’t a lot of recovery from, and staying in the field because so many people think that’s the end. I need to leave.

And that’s why I love to talk to colleagues who feel like they’re burnt out.

And I’m like let’s do some assessment, let’s ask. Because majority of the time it’s just their situation. They’re burnt help from their situation, but not higher ed. I know I can’t save everyone from leaving higher ed, but I do think that you have to look at what I refer to the shoes that you’re wearing.

Have you grown out of the shoes? Do you need new shoes? Has your style of shoes changed? All of these analogies apply to the institution. And so sometimes we’re very quick to say, that’s it, I’m leaving I’m going barefoot forever. And it’s okay, let’s just take a beat here and be creative with your network to talk about it.

Raechele Pope: It’s so funny how we make these quick assessments. I remember when I was first in a, I had. Moved into a different job and the person who was there, and it was a big administrative position, and the person who was there before me was probably four feet taller than I was. He was a very tall man, and I’m sitting at the desk that he was at in the chair and every day I was going home with a back ache.

Ooh.

Raechele Pope: And I kept thinking, God, maybe this is too much stress going through it. My feet didn’t touch the floor. This is what I didn’t realize. And so I was ready to think I wasn’t ready for this position or whatever. And what, and I didn’t fit the role. And what didn’t fit was the chair. I got a new chair.

I love that and

Raechele Pope: I was fine.

And so it’s a perfect example of this that we think this means I no longer belong in the profession, no longer wanna do this. I’m tired of doing this. It might mean I need a change in career. It might mean I just need a new pair of shoes, as you said in your example,

yeah. Yeah. Vacation time is there.

Pl time is there, and I think a lot of our colleagues, I know that we’re so busy, but even just a 15 minute check-in with someone could reshift perspective for you for the day. And so I think being able to give yourself those permissions to say, yeah, I need a break. I’m just, I’m gonna take the break and then I’ll reassess.

Raechele Pope: I think that’s so important. And we don’t do it because we think if I can get one more thing done,

correct,

Raechele Pope: I really have this report that’s due it is due

right.

Raechele Pope: 15 minutes isn’t gonna stop you from getting it done. Correct. So what would you say to someone who now realizes after listening to this conversation that they’ve been experiencing vicarious trauma?

Yeah, hopefully they can breathe a little bit better and feel not, the solidarity of our job. I also think one, one of the ahas that a lot of our colleagues have when they’re like, wow, this is what I’ve been experienced. They now have a new. Love for what they do. So I really, Dr. Figley, when this started coming out in like the eighties, said that there was a cost for caring.

There’s a palpable cost for caring about someone. What I’m trying to reframe in our field specifically is that this is a badge of honor. I would love all the colleagues who are feeling like they have vicarious trauma to say that I’m so proud of them because my two toddlers one day.

Might go to higher ed. And when they do, I want them to be surrounded by people who care about them as deeply as I’m caring for my students. And so if we continue to stay invested, you should be proud of the fact that you are so emotionally invested that you do take some of it home with you. And all we need to do is focus on how to reframe that.

How to reframe the idea that you are evolving. Within the job and the things that you’re exposed to, no different than any other helping profession.

Raechele Pope: Yeah. I am just so struck by that, that, this cost of caring, that whole phrase that some people say I shouldn’t care so much, and you’re saying No, that really is.

A strength of you in this profession. All we have to do is figure out ways to help you manage that caring.

Correct. Yes.

Raechele Pope: Joe, I wanna just say thank you for your insights. I am so grateful for your time today. I learned a lot, I had fun with this con, made me think about a lot of things and this has been a great conversation.

So thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me.

Raechele Pope: Hey, that’s all for today’s episode of Student Affairs. Now, thanks to our sponsor, evolve. Evolve helps senior leaders who value Aspire to lead on and want to unleash their potential for transformational leadership. Our own Keith Edwards from Student Affairs.

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