Why professionals require their own toolbox and self-care
October 2018.
Amstelveen, The Netherlands.
Sitting in the condo on the sofa sobbing. Drowning in questions, grief, potential imminent loss, no local support, and anger. SO MUCH ANGER.
Then a friend reached out and saved my life with just a few words. “Watch this TedTalk because it will give you words to what you are going through.” My friend was talking about caregiver/compassion fatigue, anticipated grief, and loss.
A little context, my (then and now late) Dutch husband Johan was in the hospital again and we all knew he was going to die. I had so many feelings and no words. No one around us understood what I was feeling. I was told I was overreacting. Then a friend who had taken care of her husband for many years before his death made it all clear.
That clarity wasn’t quite what I expected. It shook my reality in both a personal and professional way.
The TedTalk
How to Manage Compassion Fatigue in Caregiving | Patricia Smith
Patricia Smith began talking and the first story she told rocked me to my core. She spoke of Charles Figley, a chaplain in Vietnam who first coined the term compassion fatigue in 1995.
My world stopped. I couldn’t breathe. I thought this was about being a caregiver and all the stress and responsibility of caring for my seriously ill husband while also living part time on another continent and all the feelings I had about the life we were supposed to have, the shattered dreams, and his impending death.
In fact, the video was about that but her words drove a stake through my heart and soul – I was also a caregiver to my military research and book clients and students. With all this on my plate – personal and professional – who was filling my cup? Did I have the tools to take care of myself properly? I wasn’t sure, even though I had been doing intense energy healing and ancestral healing work since 2012. At that point I started reading, researching, and talking with others about these related topics. I also learned about a new type of trauma. Vicarious trauma.
Vicarious Trauma
Vicarious trauma is the emotional and psychological distress resulting from indirect exposure to the traumatic experiences of others. This can occur in helping professions like therapy, healthcare, research, writing, law enforcement and similar service jobs.
I had one of those jobs and had been acting as someone who listened and held space for all my genealogy and military clients and the trauma we uncovered. While I wasn’t a therapist, I had to develop the skills to provide resources, in-depth explanations to why things were what they were in war, and hold that quiet space while a client broke down in tears over the information.
Add to this, by 2018 I had read hundreds of Individual Deceased Death Files (IDPFs) and countless battle narratives. All that death, every day basically, while also visiting European battlefields, cemeteries, speaking with people in Europe, and processing their emotions as an empath with some but could be better boundaries, took a toll. It just hadn’t hit me how hard until October 2018.
The question now was – how do I move forward without completely exhausting myself, having a breakdown or dying with my husband?
The Empath and Trauma
As a highly intuitive and sensitive person, I was feeling and sensing and processing everyone’s emotions. Not everyone is empathic and intuitive, but if you are, this probably resonates.
This was especially true while I was working with specific clients who were open to the spiritual side of their research, or who asked for more than basic facts. In Europe I seemed to be more energetically open, even with boundaries. I was able to sense energies and souls/spirits everywhere. I’ve written a lot about that on my websites and Substack articles. It wore me out. See one article: Ancestral Communication Part 4: The Dutch Mother in-law
All this work, whether personal or professional was wearing me out. Exhausted, emotional, and triggered. New self-care tools were required and I sought them out. Actually, the right teachers, books, and tools showed up along with energy healers so I could continue my own healing while also holding better space for my clients.
Understanding the Trauma
Self-care and tools are important, especially for those of us who run groups, classes, and take clients. Coming from a military research standpoint, these are things I must be aware of, but similar things apply to any researcher.
- I’m the first to see what’s in the records. Casualty and death reports, burial records and family letters, POW files, discrepancies between the client story and military records, unit narratives with battle details, and hospitalization records all land on my desk before the client has braced for them. How and when I provide the discovered information can make the difference between a meaningful, context-provided discovery and a destabilizing one. Knowing how trauma responses look (flooding, cognitive dissonance, shutting down, anger, sudden urgency, going quiet) lets me recognize them pace the information release accordingly. For some clients this means a phone call and for others, it is an in-depth research report.
- Clients rarely ask me only a research question. “Where did my grandfather serve?” is often really “Why was he the way he was, and why am I like this?” Since 2017, more of those types of clients and students have shown up to work with me. If I did not learn and understand trauma – my own and in others, how could I possibly answer the questions that have surfaced? How could I have provided additional resources and space to process?
- Knowing my scope protects everyone. Understanding trauma includes understanding what you I am not: a therapist. This scope allows me to hold a boundary between research, writing, reflecting, processing what I discover, and recognizing when a client needs a licensed professional rather than another workbook exercise or more military records.
- Ancestral and inherited trauma needs accurate language. Being able to support clients and students means I need to understand that silence, secrets, stress, and altered caregiving in families could have been affected by war and shaped later generations. A professional researcher who understands this can keep students and clients from taking contested ideas as settled fact, and can keep them from concluding “this is why I’m broken” from an unverified inference.
- Understanding trauma and self-care makes me a better researcher. Veterans’ records, genealogy records and the paper trails that don’t exist, secrets, silences, and gaps make more sense when I understand how trauma shapes what people say and don’t say. I understand how they may reconstruct memory, and why the paper trail needs to be jumped off of now and then. Not everything can be proven through paper (think emotional and mental abuse).
I Need My Own Self-Care Tools
- Secondary and vicarious exposure is real. Spending days with atrocity, loss, and suffering, then listening to descendants’ grief on top of it, accumulates. It tends to show up as exhaustion, numbness, irritability, sleep disruption, intrusive images, cynicism, or a sense that you can’t stop thinking about the people in the files. How many of you have experienced this?
- My regulation is what clients borrow. A calm, grounded and self-aware researcher gives a distressed client something to anchor to. An overwhelmed professional one adds to the room’s load, or starts rescuing, over-sharing, or taking on the client’s pain as their own. How often have you overshared or tried to rescue?
- Over-identification is the occupational hazard. Researcher professionals who feel called to this work can slide into carrying the stories as a mission. That works until it doesn’t. Have you felt this work is your mission – to save people or something else?
- Sustainability. The genealogy and military research field has a long horizon. People who don’t build in recovery time, self-care tools, work on their own healing may leave the field, or stay and get exhausted or hardened. Have you felt any of these things? How did you change the situation?
The Changes I Made
As I began studying trauma, dove deeper into my empathic and intuitive abilities and read voraciously about related topics, I developed some new self-care tools.
- My energy healing work increased. I was already working with energy healers, but I increased this slightly. To heal and release my own stuff with the support of another person, and to open me up to additional self-work at home alone.
- I set boundaries around work. I began stopping work earlier rather than work from dawn till bed. I stopped reading so many war books or narratives later in the day so I could have a transition and possibly a calmer night. Although if I’m honest – I was still living part time on another continent with a husband who didn’t die in 2018 but I was on high alert for all the time. My phone going off in the middle of the night, wondering when he would (or if he would) wake up in the morning hampered my rest which didn’t resolve until he died in 2022.
- Grounding and meditation. I increased the grounding, energetic boundaries and meditation. This allowed me quiet time with myself or my ancestors and guides to process. To just exist and be loved. This also increased my capacity to hold space for others.
- Personal Restoration. While only thinking about clients and work and war all the time, led me to rethink my restoration. I began journaling more, reading non-work related books, watching fun shows and movies, and listening to music more. I also began getting outside more often to hike and ground in nature. Little did I know from 2016-2020 while I was in Europe and being outdoors more would prepare me for what was coming in 2020 and beyond.
Where I am Today
There are moments where I will sink deep into this work and totally neglect myself. I will become exhausted and stressed and small things will irritate me. That’s a clear sign I need to take a break. Do some self-care and reconnect with myself and my ancestors and guides.
It’s ok to not make our lives about everyone else.
In the last two years, I have increased my short getaways, done more fun things, hiked more, spent time by the water to refresh my soul, and I started making art. My art is quirky and fun and usually involves silly animals or desserts, sometimes landscapes, but it is a way for me to be creative without working. A way to use more color in my life and just play.
We all need more play in our lives.
As the work I do continues to shift, so will the ways I handle the vicarious trauma. Having an ever-evolving box of tools, books, resources, and access to therapists and energy healers is important for me. Other tools and people may be important for you.
How has this work impacted you as a professional researcher? What have you done to take care of yourself and address vicarious trauma?
© 2026 WWII Research and Writing Center
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