ABSTRACT
Shared trauma is the multi-modal response of clinicians who have been exposed to a collective disaster, both through personal experience and through the trauma narratives of their clients. In comparing the results of social work clinicians exposed to a man-made versus a natural disaster, important differences were found. Several well-known constructs have been put forward to understand the impact of working with traumatised clients. When the clinician and client share a personal traumatic experience, such as having been sexually abused in childhood, there may be opportunity for mutual reparation and growth but also boundary confusion. Shared trauma and shared traumatic reality are often used interchangeably in the professional literature. The construct of shared trauma has continued to garner interest and empirical validation in the professional literature. Resilience was found to be a mediator between the relationships between insecure attachments, traumatic life events and shared traumatic stress.
