School Staff Carry Students’ Emotional Pain: A Study of Secondary Trauma

Teachers and school support staff across Ireland and the United Kingdom are carrying a psychological burden that closely mirrors post-traumatic stress disorder, driven not by events they witnessed themselves but by the trauma their students confide in them, according to a new qualitative study published in the Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma. The research, led by Paul Gordon of Queen’s University Belfast together with Martin Dempster, John McMullen and Donncha Hanna, offers one of the most detailed experiential accounts to date of secondary traumatic stress in schools, and concludes that the problem is less a failure of individual resilience than a failure of the systems in which educators work.

Secondary traumatic stress, or STS, was first conceptualized by psychologist Charles Figley in 1995 as the natural emotional and behavioral response to learning about a significant other’s traumatic event, with symptoms that can be “nearly identical to PTSD.” The disorder arises from indirect exposure: hearing details of abuse, neglect, bereavement or violence rather than experiencing them directly. Symptoms typically include intrusive re-experiencing, avoidance of trauma reminders, negative alterations in mood and cognition, and shifts in arousal and reactivity. Because the updated DSM-5 recognizes that secondary exposure can, in some cases, meet full criteria for a PTSD diagnosis, the construct has gained clinical weight, yet its definition remains contested, overlapping with related ideas such as compassion fatigue and vicarious traumatization. That conceptual muddle, the authors argue, has made it difficult to understand how secondary trauma actually manifests in schools, where measurement tools developed for nurses and counselors may not fit.

To capture the lived experience, the team conducted semi-structured online interviews with 11 school personnel drawn from the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and England. Participants included teachers, pastoral and safeguarding leads, special education staff and principals, with experience ranging from three to more than twenty years, and from both primary and secondary settings. The interviews, lasting roughly an hour each, were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis within a constructivist paradigm, meaning the researchers treated reality as socially constructed and knowledge as co-created between researcher and participant. The approach was predominantly inductive, with codes and themes built from the ground up from participants’ accounts, though informed by Figley’s framework, Stamm’s Professional Quality of Life model and DSM-5 criteria for secondary exposure.

Four major themes emerged from the analysis. The first, “A System Under Strain,” describes an institutional environment in which workload pressure, performative “tick-box” training, absent supervision and a culture that discourages help-seeking reinforce one another. Participants described one-off trauma-informed training sessions that were never mentioned again, supervision meetings that functioned as box-checking exercises, and a shame-based climate in which admitting struggle carried professional stigma. One participant criticized the language of “resilience” as an individualizing human-resources term that obscures systemic causes of burnout, remarking bitterly that “an individual burns out. The system doesn’t burn you out.” Another noted the imbalance of institutional priorities, arguing that school culture should not be “90 percent academic and 10 percent how to be a person.”

The second theme, “The Intrusive Weight of Trauma,” documents the personal toll in strikingly clinical terms. One former pastoral lead described being unable to shake graphic mental images from a parent’s disclosure, comparing the experience to “watching Hammer Horror films in my head,” an account the authors link to the DSM-5 intrusion criterion. Others reported sleep disruption, nausea, tearfulness, and reactivation of their own past traumas; one participant recognized the physical sensations of her father’s heart attack resurfacing when she learned a student’s father had died similarly. Guilt emerged in multiple forms: retrospective guilt for not feeling worse, comparative guilt when looking at their own children, and guilt over not knowing about a student’s suffering sooner. The effects persisted for years, with one teacher describing a still-physical response to an event a decade old, and many described carrying students’ despair into their home lives, in the phrase that gives the study its title: “you are left holding their despair.”

The third theme, “The Nurturer and The Fixer,” explores how professional identity shapes vulnerability. Staff who saw themselves as parental figures, buying food and shoes for pupils, extending care beyond the classroom, reported deep satisfaction when they could help but heartbreak and identity threat when they could not. For some, becoming a parent themselves prompted a healthy detachment, reframing teaching from an all-consuming identity to “just what you do.” The authors draw on social identity theory to argue that when a professional self rooted in relational care collides with persistent powerlessness, the result is not mere emotional distress but a fundamental threat to identity, compounded by institutional cultures that prioritize performance metrics.

The fourth theme, “Navigating the Burden,” catalogues the improvised coping strategies staff deployed in the absence of formal support. The most valued resource was informal peer connection with colleagues “all in the same boat,” while employer-provided counseling hotlines were widely distrusted as performative. Some practiced compartmentalization, “putting it in a box”; others journaled, sought private therapy, or, in one candid admission, coped with wine after work. Confidentiality constraints often prevented safeguarding staff from discussing cases with colleagues outside their privileged circle, forcing them to say “I’m fine” when they were not. Notably, most participants also reported positive experiences, including a sense of making a difference and, in one exceptional case, vicarious resilience, an uplifting transformation gained from witnessing students’ own strength.

That exceptional case may be the study’s most consequential finding. One participant, who worked in schools for an external agency rather than a school itself, received regular formal supervision, psychoeducation about vicarious trauma, and a protected weekly well-being hour. Her account stands alone in describing adequate support, and the authors argue it demonstrates that the principles of trauma-informed care, usually framed as student-facing, apply equally to staff-facing organizational structures. Under the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s framework, her supervision and protected time promote safety, team-based collaboration fosters peer support and mutuality, and active psychoeducation enhances transparency and empowerment. Where those structures existed, staff appeared buffered; where they did not, the strained school system became, in the authors’ words, “fertile ground” for secondary traumatic stress to take hold.

The study also carries diagnostic implications. While participants’ accounts clearly reflected intrusion and alterations in mood and arousal, one criterion was conspicuously absent: avoidance, in the strict post-DSM-5 sense of actively steering clear of people, places or things reminiscent of the trauma. The authors suggest this may be structural rather than incidental, since teachers cannot simply avoid the students at the center of their concern, echoing earlier findings that avoidance “was not prominently identified” among public-school educators. They also propose a new concept, “mirrored trauma,” to describe how staff whose personal histories resemble their students’ experiences, growing up amid volatility, for instance, may find their own trauma reactivated even as that shared history enables deeper empathy. Whether this mirroring protects or harms, they note, likely depends on how well the individual has processed their own past.

The researchers are careful about limits. The sample of 11 participants spans three jurisdictions with distinct governance structures and historical legacies, including Northern Ireland’s Troubles, but the analysis treated the group as a whole, and the findings are not statistically generalizable, though the authors argue they are transferable to similar populations. Social desirability bias remains possible, and some participants may have minimized or lacked awareness of their symptoms, a phenomenon the literature attributes in part to the “grandiosity” of the teaching role.

Even so, the implications are pointed. The authors call for a shift from reactive, individualized well-being initiatives toward proactive, structural supports: protected supervision, team debriefing, integrated psychoeducation and minimum standards embedded in policy rather than left to institutional goodwill. Without such systemic change, they warn, the emotional labor of supporting trauma-exposed children will continue to fall on individuals unequipped to bear it, with consequences for staff retention, student outcomes and the capacity of schools to serve the growing number of children affected by adversity. The study’s participants, in their own words, were not asking for resilience training. They were asking for a system that does not leave them alone with the weight.