Other people’s worst days: secondary trauma in legal practice

By Sonja Cilliers and Maryke Swarts, PMRI · 12 September 2026

The criminal practitioner who has read the post-mortem report three times. The personal injury attorney who knows the details of the accident better than the family does. The labour practitioner who has sat through a hundred disciplinary hearings in which someone’s livelihood ended. The family practitioner and the children’s affidavits. This is ordinary legal work, and it is done by people who are expected to be unaffected by it.

The clinicians who work with first responders and social workers have a name for what happens to a person who is repeatedly exposed to other people’s trauma: secondary traumatic stress, sometimes called vicarious trauma. The legal profession has largely not adopted the term, which means practitioners who experience it have no word for it and usually assume something is wrong with them.

What it looks like

The signs are recognisable once named. Details of a matter intrude when you are doing something else: in the car, at dinner, at three in the morning. Sleep changes, either too little or a heavy sleep that does not refresh. A growing avoidance of certain kinds of matter, or certain kinds of client, without a clear reason. Irritability that arrives faster than it used to. A flattening, where things that used to register no longer do, which is the nervous system protecting itself by turning the volume down on everything. And a change in how the world looks: a practitioner who has done ten years of matrimonial work can find it hard to believe that any marriage survives, because the ones that survive never came through the door.

None of these means the practitioner is unsuited to the work. They mean the work is doing what it does to a human nervous system, and that nothing has been put in place to counter it.

Why the brain does this

The brain does not distinguish cleanly between a threat experienced and a threat vividly described. When a client recounts an assault in detail, the listener’s threat system activates, at a lower level than the client’s but in the same way. The images are stored with the emotional charge attached, which is why they can return uninvited. Repeated over years without recovery, the system settles into a higher resting state of alarm, and the signs above follow.

This is a physiological process, and it responds to physiological measures. It is not resolved by deciding to be tougher, which is the profession’s usual prescription and the one that produces the flattening.

What helps

The single most protective thing is recovery between exposures, and the profession is structured to prevent it. A practitioner who moves from one harrowing consultation to the next with no interval is doing to the nervous system what a runner would be doing by never stopping. Short intervals count: a few minutes after a difficult consultation before the next task, a proper break at lunch away from the desk, an evening that is not spent with the file.

Naming it counts. Practitioners who know what secondary trauma is, and that it is a predictable consequence of the work rather than a personal flaw, report the intrusions less and recover faster. In firms where the senior people speak about it plainly, juniors ask for help earlier.

Talking counts, and so does the choice of listener. A colleague who does the same work and can hear the detail without being harmed by it is worth more than a well-meaning friend who has to be protected from it. Some firms in high-exposure areas of practice arrange a regular debrief for exactly this reason.

And where the signs have been present for months, a professional conversation helps, in the same way a physiotherapist helps a runner who has ignored a strain. That is not an admission; it is maintenance of the instrument the practice depends on.

PMRI runs sessions for firms and legal departments on stress physiology and recovery in high-exposure practice areas. The first conversation is without charge.