Vicarious Trauma Support
Worried your team is carrying too much?
Specialist Workplace Support for Trauma-Exposed Teams and Leadership
What is Vicarious Trauma Costing Your Organisation?
Burnout. Resignations. Rising Sick Leave. Workplace Stress Legal Claims.
All Risks of Unaddressed Vicarious Trauma.
Vicarious trauma is a psychological risk to your employees and a business risk to your organisation.
When your employees are regularly exposed to trauma as part of their job, it affects both their well-being and the performance of your organisation. Even the most seasoned professionals aren’t immune – vicarious trauma can affect anyone.
When you’re the one responsible for safeguarding staff well-being, it can feel like an impossible weight to carry alone.
You don’t have to wait for a crisis to take action.
Act now.
Protect Your Employees’ Well-being and Your Organisation’s Success.
Lead with care. Lead with confidence.
Build a culture of care.
Not crisis.
A Happier, Healthier, and More Resilient Workforce
Sustain your team’s well-being and drive your mission forward.
Imagine a workplace where staff on the frontline feel safe and fully supported. Where leaders have the tools, clarity, and confidence to nurture psychological safety.
With the right support, your organisation can build long-term, sustainable resilience. With a stronger workforce, you’ll see reduced burnout, absenteeism, and turnover.
When everyone is more present and connected, team morale and productivity rise. Ultimately, your people thrive and make an even bigger impact.
Workplace Trauma Support for Employees and Organisations on the Frontline
Remote and On-Site Support for Your Team
As helpers too, we get it. We’re here to support you, your team, and your organisation. Not only in moments of crisis, but throughout your professional journey.
Therapist-Led and Managed Services
Our services are designed and delivered by fully qualified, UK-registered, and vetted therapists. Every offering, from 1-to-1 support to team-wide interventions and leadership consultancy, is clinically governed and shaped by practising clinicians with direct experience supporting individuals and organisations impacted by trauma.
Specialist Support for Frontline & Trauma-Exposed Professionals
In high-risk roles with regular exposure to secondary trauma, the cumulative impact can take a serious toll. Our services provide the support needed to help you stay safe and well, whether you’re on the frontlines or leading those who are. We’ll help you build lasting resilience.
Experts in Burnout and Vicarious Trauma
We specialise in supporting individuals and organisations affected by burnout and vicarious trauma. With a deep understanding of the unique pressures you face, we provide tailored support, resources, and strategies that help you stay well, build resilience, and continue your essential work with strength and confidence.
1-to-1 and Team Support
We provide tailored psychological support and professional development to help individuals and teams manage the impact of trauma exposure more effectively in the workplace. From 1-to-1 sessions to clinical supervision and reflective practice groups, we create safe spaces to debrief, strengthen coping strategies, and stay grounded in demanding environments.
Trauma-Informed Leadership Support
Those who support others need support too. Through 1-to-1 and group coaching and consultancy, we help leaders reflect, think strategically, and address challenges before they become crises. We’ll help you navigate trauma’s wider impact on your team and strengthen leadership practices grounded in clarity, empathy, and care.
Trauma Training and Resilience Workshops
Our psychoeducational training workshops help with building awareness and practical skills to manage the effects of secondary and vicarious trauma. Tailored to public-facing and behind-the-scenes roles, these workshops give you the tools to build resilience, stay well, and remain effective in your role. Prevention is key.
Build a Trauma-Informed, Resilient Workforce
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Schedule Your Free Appointment
Speak with us about your organisation’s needs. Share what you’re noticing, what’s concerning you, and where support is most needed. We’ll take the time to understand your situation, help you make sense of it, and work with you to explore the best next steps.
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Partner with Us and Get Tailored Support
We’ll design a bespoke workplace wellness programme to help your team manage the impact of vicarious trauma, stay well and engaged at work. We tailor our support around the unique needs of your people, your sector, and the realities of your workplace.
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Protect Your People and Drive Your Mission Forward
With the right support systems in place, your organisation can reduce burnout, improve retention, and create a workplace where staff can thrive and perform at their best without compromising their mental health.
Book a Vicarious Trauma Support Consultation Today
Get started by speaking directly with our Clinical Lead.
Protect Your People and Make an Even Bigger Impact
Vicarious trauma doesn’t just affect a few individuals. It ripples through teams, leadership, and entire organisations.
We’ve seen firsthand how secondary trauma can spread quickly when left unsupported. Containing its impact requires more than isolated quick fixes. It demands a whole-system approach.
With backgrounds in psychotherapy, trauma, and organisational psychology, we understand the complexity of frontline work and know what’s needed to stay safe and well.
That’s why we offer a partnership, not a one-off service. We walk with you every step of the way so you can navigate challenges more easily, protect your staff, and stay focused on what matters most.
Let’s build a workplace where no one has to carry it all alone. Reach out and book a call with us today, and take the first step toward lasting support, safer teams, and a stronger organisation.
FAQs | What Is Vicarious Trauma Support?
Vicarious Trauma in the Workplace
Vicarious trauma is a type of stress response that arises from repeated or prolonged indirect exposure to other people’s trauma. It doesn’t involve directly experiencing the traumatic event, but rather being exposed to it second-hand through others’ accounts, materials, or by witnessing its aftermath. This can happen through hearing, seeing, reading, or engaging empathetically with traumatic experiences. Over time, this kind of cumulative exposure can lead to emotional, psychological, and even physical distress in the person bearing witness.
With continued exposure, vicarious trauma can gradually shift how someone sees the world, their work, and themselves.
Vicarious trauma is not a personal weakness. It’s a recognised occupational risk for trauma-exposed teams. When left unaddressed, vicarious trauma can contribute to burnout, higher turnover, reduced capacity for empathy, and a breakdown in team cohesion. That’s why it needs to be treated as a systemic workplace well-being issue, not just an individual one.
Vicarious trauma can affect any profession where people are regularly exposed to distress, suffering, or high-stakes emotional content. This includes:
Health and social care
Doctors, nurses, social workers, paramedics, palliative care teams, and those supporting vulnerable or traumatised populations often carry the emotional weight of patients’ and clients’ pain.
Legal, justice, and safeguarding
Lawyers, judges, caseworkers, child protection officers, and those involved in safeguarding roles navigate traumatic narratives and high-stakes decisions that can take a psychological toll.
Mental health and therapy providers
Psychologists, psychotherapists, and counsellors often absorb trauma indirectly through detailed hearing of clients’ traumatic experiences within therapeutic relationships. This risk is especially high in settings with heavy caseloads, complex trauma cases, or limited clinical supervision and support.
Crisis response and humanitarian aid
Emergency responders, humanitarian workers, and those in disaster relief roles are routinely exposed to acute suffering and collective trauma, often under extreme pressure.
Content moderation and journalism roles
Trust and Safety teams, journalists, and researchers working with graphic or distressing documents, footage, data, or digital content face high volumes of exposure. Even without direct survivor contact or public-facing roles, this puts behind-the-scenes workers at significant risk of vicarious trauma.
Burnout is caused by chronic workplace stress, often stemming from excessive workloads, insufficient support, or unclear expectations. Compassion fatigue is a state of emotional exhaustion due to prolonged empathy for those in distress.
Vicarious trauma, however, is a deeper psychological shift that happens when professionals internalise other people’s trauma. It can affect our sense of meaning, safety, identity, and trust.
Vicarious trauma may often be normalised in high-pressure, trauma-facing roles. This means it can be overlooked or accepted without adequate support. However, accepting vicarious trauma as “just part of the job” can ultimately lead to high turnover, absenteeism (presenteeism and leavism), disengagement, and avoidable harm.
Organisations have a duty of care to protect their teams from psychological injury, just as they would physical injury. Supporting staff means actively helping them to stay safe and well while doing meaningful work.
Leaders, HR and well-being managers may notice signs like:
- Staff becoming emotionally withdrawn, reactive, or cynical
- Increased sick leave or unexplained absences
- Rising interpersonal conflict or team breakdowns
- Decreased performance, creativity, or motivation
- Avoidance of certain cases or client groups
- Emotional numbing, compassion fatigue, or “just getting through the day”
These signs are often mistaken for personal struggles, leading to staff being directed to individual support. However, they usually indicate a broader organisational impact of trauma exposure that requires systemic attention and support.
Our Approach to Vicarious Trauma Support
We offer a comprehensive, trauma-informed suite of services designed to prevent, reduce, and respond to vicarious trauma at the organisational level.
These include:
- 1-to-1 psychological support for staff exposed to sensitive content and traumatic material
- Reflective practice groups to support processing and emotional regulation
- Clinical supervision and debriefing for team leads and employees
- Psychoeducational workshops and training on trauma and resilience
- Trauma-informed leadership coaching and consultation to build psychologically safe teams
- Resources that support organisational learning and continued professional development, like newsletters, educational content, and broader well-being initiatives
We work in partnership with your team to create sustainable, safe systems of care that align with your values and operational goals.
Most EAPs focus on short-term support for individuals with mental health concerns. However, they rarely address the organisational factors contributing to these concerns. Our support is trauma-informed, sector-specific, and designed to support teams facing emotionally complex, high-responsibility roles.
Rather than quick fixes, we help build long-term, sustainable strategies. Ultimately, this means you’re embedding a culture of care and resilience.
We partner with organisations to build a trauma-informed approach to staff well-being by taking a joined-up organisational approach – not just focusing on individual support in isolation.
This means identifying risk factors across the system, co-designing practical staff support pathways, embedding trauma-informed policies into everyday practice, and training leaders to sustain these efforts.
We build ongoing partnerships with organisations, supporting them to continuously monitor impact and adapt their strategies as needs evolve. Our approach focuses on meaningful relationships that go beyond simple metrics to create lasting, responsive change.
Our services aim to reduce long-term risks such as burnout, staff turnover and psychological injury, while improving psychological safety, engagement, and team cohesion.
Measuring impact is an ongoing, adaptive process that varies depending on the scope of the service and organisational needs. It typically involves gathering feedback from staff and stakeholders through a blend of consultations, discussions, anonymous surveys, and our clinical expertise to provide deeper insights.
This can include:
- Reflections on engagement, uptake, and barriers to access
- Observations and analysis of patterns, themes, and trends
- Tailored recommendations for systemic improvements
Most importantly, we prioritise listening to those involved and actively engaging them in shaping and implementing change within their own system.
Our collaborative approach goes beyond simple reporting. We focus on meaningful, tailored strategies that enhance well-being, engagement, and resilience.
Ultimately, measuring impact is about maintaining an open, ongoing dialogue and being responsive to evolving needs, ensuring that strategies remain relevant and effective over time.
Yes. We offer flexible delivery options including:
- On site and remote 1-to-1 and group support for teams
- In-person and online workshops or facilitation for team days or leadership sessions
- Hybrid models tailored to shift workers, international staff, or high-demand sectors
We’ll work with you to design accessible, inclusive formats that meet your operational realities.
Both. Whether you’re a small non-profit with a single trauma-exposed team or a large organisation with complex staff well-being needs across multiple teams, we can scale our services to fit.
Yes. Our team brings clinical, cultural, and sector-specific expertise to our partnerships. We understand that trauma doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and that support must reflect the lived realities of different roles, identities, and communities.
Working Together & Getting Started
Our pricing is tailored based on your organisation’s size, service needs, and the level of partnership. After an initial consultation, we create a proposal designed to deliver meaningful and lasting impact.
We understand the value of clear, measurable outcomes.
Employee well-being and trauma-informed strategies bring meaningful benefits that go beyond what simple numerical figures can fully capture. That’s why in our reporting we collaborate closely with you to identify and track key success metrics, such as reductions in staff turnover and absenteeism, and improvements in engagement and morale, ensuring the data reflects the real impact tailored to your organisation’s needs.
We provide ongoing monitoring and reporting that can be aligned with your existing systems, offering both qualitative insights and quantitative data to help you track progress and demonstrate ROI over time.
Start with a conversation. We offer a free initial call to understand your organisation’s needs, concerns, and goals. From there, we’ll propose a tailored support package.
Where to Find Us
Our Mental Health and Wellness Services at YTherapy
At YTherapy, we offer comprehensive mental health and wellness support for helping professionals, including therapy for anxiety, burnout and trauma, with both in-person counselling in London and online therapy options available. In addition to our private 1-to-1 psychotherapy services for individuals, we provide vicarious trauma support for organisations whose employees are exposed to trauma as part of their work. This includes EAP counselling services specialising in burnout and vicarious trauma. We also offer bespoke corporate wellness services, including vicarious trauma training, clinical supervision and reflective practice groups – all tailored for organisations in sectors such as first responder emergency services, healthcare & social care, legal and wellness.
If you’re looking for support for yourself or a colleague, or if you’re seeking to develop a trauma-informed and resilient workforce, please feel free to get in touch by booking a consultation to discuss your needs, or by emailing your enquiry in confidence: hello@ytherapy.com