Introduction
Professionals, who work closely with trauma as therapists, humanitarian workers, peacekeepers, or journalists, often carry the emotional weight of the stories they hear. This guide by Dr Yael Danieli offers practical insights to help caregivers recognise, contain, and transform their emotional responses to trauma exposure.
These reactions, known as event countertransference, are a natural part of empathetic engagement. Left unaddressed, however, they can take a personal toll and affect professional effectiveness. The principles outlined here provide a pathway for maintaining emotional well-being, fostering growth and sustaining the strength needed to support others.
The following principles are designed to help professionals (protectors and providers) recognise, contain, and heal A. To recognise one's reactions:
B. To contain one's reactions:
C. To heal and grow
3. Seek consultation or further therapy for previously unexplored areas triggered by patients' stories.
4. Any one of the affective reactions (i.e., grief, mourning, rage) may interact with old, un-worked through experiences of the therapists. They will thus be able to use their professional work purposefully for their own growth.
5. Establish a network of people to create a holding environment (Winnicot, 1965),
within which one can share one's trauma related work.
6. Therapists should provide themselves with avocational avenues for creative and relaxing self-expression in order to regenerate energies.
Being kind to oneself and feeling free to have fun and joy is not a frivolity in this field but a necessity without which one cannot fulfill one's professional obligations, one's professional contract.
*The manual is an extract from: Danieli, Y. (Ed.), Sharing the Front Line and the Back Hills: International protectors and providers, peacekeepers, humanitarian aid workers and the media in the midst of crisis. Published for and on behalf of the United Nations by Baywood Publishing Company, Inc., Amityville, New York, pp. 279 -380, (2002).
Dr Yael Danieli (www.dryaeldanieli.com) is a clinical psychologist, traumatologist, victimologist and psychohistorian. Having developed the first program to help Nazi Holocaust Survivors and their Children in the 1970s, she has devoted much of her career to studying, treating, writing about, and preventing lifelong and multigenerational impacts of massive trauma worldwide, to ensuring victims’ rights, the rights of future generations, and to reparative justice.
In the last two decades Dr Danieli created the Danieli Inventory – the gold measure to (comparatively) assessing intergenerational legacies of Trauma and founded the International Center for MultiGenerational Legacies of Trauma (www.ICMGLT.org).
As a victimologist, she has spent over four decades participating in drafting, adopting, implementing victims' rights, and ensuring that victims’ rights reach the victims.
1. Develop awareness of somatic signals of distress - one's chart of warning signs of potential countertransference reactions, e.g., sleeplessness, headaches, perspiration.
2. Try to find words to name accurately and to articulate one's inner experiences and feelings. As Bettelheim (1984) commented, "what cannot be talked about can also not be put to rest; and if it is not, the wounds continue to fester from generation to generation." (p. 166).
1. Identify one's personal level of comfort in order to build openness, tolerance and readiness to hear anything.
2. Knowing that every emotion has a beginning, a middle, and an end, learn to attenuate one's fear of being overwhelmed by its intensity to try to feel its full life-cycle without resorting to defensive countertransference reactions.
1. Accept that nothing will ever be the same.
2. When one feels wounded, one should take time, accurately diagnose, sooth and heal before being "emotionally fit" again to continue to work.