Recovery Case Studies

This step towards the process of witness recovery led to a variety of case studies and reports being conducted to evaluate the effects on children when they become exposed to parental violence or death. This leads to the children having a challenging time recovery since it is such a personal trauma, even if experienced indirectly. There are studies that indicate that after experiencing such an event, the children have a difficult time adjusting and coping with the current problem and also the issues, whether related or non-related, that occur after. These children then go to therapists who are trying to come up with ways to better help the children. Group counselling sessions were introduced to check if they had any impact on how the children
cope or adjust with the trauma. According to Jaffe, Wilson, and Wolfe in Promoting changes in attitudes and understanding of conflict resolution among child witnesses of family violence, investigations of child adjustment in a family of domestic violence revealed that children are more likely to have frequencies of having externalizing (e.g. aggressiveness, delinquent) and internalizing (e.g. withdrawn, anxious) behaviors. This leads to disruptive behaviors in school environment and doesn’t allow for the children to heal before witnessing another domestic dispute. This in turns leads to permanent damage to the children and not allow for a positive recovery process. This was a major development for professionals who wanted to become involved in the conversation of methods to help these indirectly traumatized children.
Although experiencing trauma, whether directly or indirectly, is sometimes inevitable, there have been professional opinions publicized illustrating possible methods to start the recovery process in these individuals.
As stated by Thieleman K and Cacciatore J, professionals who work with traumatized victims are more likely to encounter “compassion fatigue”, “burnout”, and “secondary trauma”. However, studies have proven that mindfulness has helped protect professionals against these unfortunate consequences, improve compassion satisfaction for both the professionals and clients, and function as an effective self-care strategy (Witness to suffering: mindfulness and compassion fatigue among traumatic bereavement volunteers and professionals). By introducing mindfulness into the healing process of distressed individuals, it creates a calm environment which benefits the professionals by allowing them not to get emotionally and mentally drained, ultimately interfering with the amount of positive support and rehabilitation that can be provided. This also implies benefits to the clients because they are able to work proficiently on recovering from their agonizing incident with the feeling of being judged or their issues being
inconvenient.
There have been a variety of case studies conducted to evaluate different aspects of indirect trauma. One of which is the case study recorded by Tierens M, Bal S, Crombez G, Loeys T, Antrop I, and Deboutte D, which compares the indirect traumatic experience of an event to that of a direct victim. The factors that influenced this study were the differences in psychological problems between the two groups and whether individual characteristics, such as sex, gender, family support, etc., can attribute to the variability of trauma symptoms beyond the witness vs victim agenda (Differences in posttraumatic stress reactions between witnesses and direct victims of motor vehicle accidents).