ABSTRACT
The most important factor for how second victims fare is support. Social support and other interventions that can be offered to the practitioner by the professional, organizational, and personal environments are critical for avoiding many of the symptoms of second victimhood. But seeking support and discussing the experiences and emotional implications of an incident may not come naturally. It may even carry a stigma of weakness. In many of the professions that produce second victims, hiding the intensity of feelings and emotions (i.e., keeping one’s cool) is adaptive and necessary in the course of normal work. This is what characterizes professions such as firefighting, policing, emergency response, healthcare, and many jobs in the military and aviation. Communicating in emotional detail how awful it feels to have discharged a police weapon is probably not helpful for resolving the situation at hand. Professional “cool” is expected of air traffic controllers too; there is little space on the radio frequency for emotions and they would be in the way of getting the message across and the job done. And while compassion is a powerful ingredient to good doctoring, maintaining some psychological distance and avoiding identifying too closely with the first victim are critical for long-term professional and personal survival.
