Caring and Coping

Compassion in counseling and psychotherapy communicates caring, engagement, and helpfulness. It also has potential emotional costs. Secondary traumatic stress has a rapid onset and includes symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. Vicarious traumatization develops over time and exposure to traumatic experiences presented by clients. Stress is the perceived demands of a situation that require more than the possessed resources to manage successfully. While the objective characteristics of the situation may be consistent, the experience of that situation varies considerably across individuals’ cognitive, emotional, physiological, and interpersonal processes. Burnout concerns the perceptions of stress held by the individual. While challenges are inevitable, there is also the potential for personal growth in the forms of compassion satisfaction, vicarious resilience, and thriving.