Vicarious Trauma Theory

Tragedy struck on a peaceful October Thursday morning. A gunman by the name of Chris Harper-Mercer went to the Umpqua Community College and shot seventeen people, and nine of them didn’t survive. He appeared to be targeting Christians specifically. In one instance, he ordered the Christians in the room to stand. He proceeded to say, “Good, because you're a Christian, you're going to see God in just about one second” he then shot and killed those people (Ford & Payne, 2015). The gunman was a student at the college, and wasn’t particularly threatening, although he did suffer from a mild form of Autism. The shooting ended when he shot and killed himself in a classroom. One of the most horrible aspects of this crime is that there was no clear

The workers that helped the survivors were at risk of being exposed to the trauma themselves. Vicarious traumatization is, “a transformation in the helper’s inner sense of identity and existence that results from utilizing controlled empathy when listening to clients’ trauma-content narratives” (Vicarious Trauma Institution, n.d.). This happens when a medical professional is exposed to the trauma, and it gets put onto them. This can happen to anyone surrounding a trauma. Police officers, doctors, and even psychologists can experience vicarious traumatization. In this situation, I think everyone was affected by it. Like I said before, the medical professionals are extremely susceptible to this because it’s a very scary event. They may put themselves into the student’s shoes and really empathize with them creating vicarious traumatization. With any school shooting, vicarious traumatization can happen very easily. It’s such a publicized event, it’s hard to not be exposed to it. And this shooting was extremely publicized. The top News Networks like CNN, NBC, and even the New York Times wrote about it. There are videos on youtube, and stories from survivors. I don’t think the event was over-exaggerated because we had to talk about it. With an event like this, people have the right to learn about it. No one wants to give the shooter credit, but recounting something of this nature has to