# What is vicarious trauma?

- **Episode:** [108](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/108.md) (2024-06-20)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** vicarious-trauma, trauma, mental-health
- **Time:** 11:38–12:41 (start 698s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/108?t=698](https://truthliesandwork.com/108?t=698)

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[11:38] Dimple Dhabalia: Yeah. So vicarious trauma is basically where you experience trauma symptoms, even though you yourself didn't experience the trauma. So you're exposed to other people's trauma or stories of traumatic events, and you start to experience the trauma as though you had lived through that experience. It's interesting because not everyone experiences vicarious trauma, right? And so I think a lot of this has to do with, again, what we were exposed to in our childhood. I think that if we experience some kind of major trauma as children, then we are more susceptible to experiencing things like vicarious trauma or secondary traumatic stress, um, or post-traumatic stress as we get older
[12:26] Al Elliott: We are gonna go back to this idea of how childhood can influence your work choices in just a second. But as we mentioned in the beginning, there was a specific moment Where Dimple knew she needed to make a change. Let's go back to the interview where Leanne gets Dimple to open up about that night in the hotel room