It’s Mental Health Awareness Week this week, and the drive this year is to “Take Action”.
I have already written about the neurological toll of homelessness on the people experiencing it this week, you can read that here: https://substack.com/@kcahomelessness (feel free to drop a follow while you’re there…) so I wanted to talk this week about STS (secondary traumatic stress) or vicarious trauma.
To work in the helping sectors is to be driven to affect change, whether that’s for 1 person or the entire world, and if that’s achieved by sitting with someone in their space or by taking direct action towards the change that makes the difference, sometimes with certainty and sometimes with nothing more than hope, the that’s what it takes.
Working alongside between 5 and 10 people who have suffered trauma everyday; listening to their stories, seeing their faces, their injuries, their inability to keep still and watching them jump at loud noises, ever alert, while maintaining a professional, yet warm, empathetic and non-judgemental distance holds a person trauma-adjacent every working day.
We also work hard to keep our boundaries, try and take time to reflect, and protect ourselves so that we can get up the next day and bring much needed hope to someone new but there is inevitably some transmission.
The people we support have to live the acute and sometimes chronic effects of their trauma every day, but the people who work here live with a little bit of everyone’s and that get’s heavy as we work towards everyone in Kingston living in a safe and stable home, able to build a happy life.
We often discuss what it takes to work at KCAH, and one of the traits we always come back to is that empathy (different to sympathy, watch this for more on that), you need to be able to put yourself in their position to understand another person, and it is only by truly connecting with someone that you can begin to offer the right support, raise a smile, or put the spark back in their eyes.
So, if you plan to take action this week, I might suggest that’s to check in on the people who help for a living, see what they’re carrying, sit with them, ask them how you can help.
