Witness Trauma: Coping with the Pain of Others

Many of us are experiencing witness trauma right now. This type of trauma can occur from watching news or scrolling through social media. It’s crucial to take care of yourself in these situations, as your well-being is just as important.

Understanding Witness Trauma

Imagine a schoolyard fight. Someone is being beaten, and you’re watching, frozen in place. You see the injustice, you’re emotionally involved, but you can’t stop it. This is a serious trauma for your psyche.

Witness trauma is a psychological trauma that can occur when a person witnesses a dangerous or life-threatening situation, even if they are not directly threatened. It can have a delayed effect: the event may be over, but the traumatic experience remains.

Why Does Witness Trauma Occur?

In any stressful situation, our adrenal glands produce the stress hormone cortisol. Its main task is to form protective reactions to external threats.

When a person receives a powerful dose of cortisol, the self-preservation instinct kicks in, and they start acting according to one of three scenarios: fight, flight, or freeze. For example, if they hear an air raid siren, they might hide, run, or go build barricades and fight. In other words, they release negative energy.

But what happens to those who receive the same dose of cortisol but are not directly in the war zone? More often than not, they remain inactive: sitting on the couch and watching the news. When your friend is being beaten, and you can’t physically intervene because you’re “tied up,” you experience this trauma fully. The same happens when you can’t help.

Your cortisol has no outlet, and the accumulation of this stress phenomenon leads to chronic anxiety, emotional overload, cardiovascular diseases, stomach ulcers, insomnia, and other chronic diseases that truly ruin lives.

How to Recognize Witness Trauma

Witness trauma results from strong emotional involvement in a situation. The traumatization process begins when a person loses the boundaries of empathy and compassion, becoming fully immersed in the tragedy.

Feelings that may arise include:

Fear and horror (“This could happen to me and my loved ones too”)
Joy and relief (“I’m okay, I dodged a bullet”)
Helplessness and powerlessness (“I can’t do anything to help”)
Guilt and shame (“I continue to live, but they don’t”)
Anger (“How could this happen?”)

These feelings are normal when experiencing tragic events and are not necessarily criteria for witness trauma. However, often, time passes, the traumatic event is pushed out of memory, but the consequences of the experienced shocks remain.

You may have witness trauma if you feel:

Long-term sadness, grief, or melancholy, and you often cry
You experience panic attacks, sleep disturbances, or headaches
Other anxiety-depressive and psychosomatic symptoms

What to Do?

There’s no single recipe for protecting yourself from witness trauma. What works for one person may not work for another. However, the following are generally important:

Accept that this is the current reality.
Reduce the amount of incoming information to avoid re-traumatization and feeding the trauma with an abundance of news and emotional posts from others. Observe more, judge less.
Don’t devalue emotions—neither your own nor others’—and support each other.
Maintain your daily routine and continue with your usual activities, planning for the near future. Make daily decisions that allow you to feel in control of your life: where to go, what to wear, where to eat.
Get enough sleep and maintain a balanced diet.
Turn emotions into productive actions: exercise, write, draw, play with children (contain your emotions), help those you can help.
Don’t isolate yourself from others. Find like-minded people, meet, talk. Be together and maintain social connections.
Take care of yourself, organize rest, and separate your experiences from those of others.

The Importance of Action or “Gnaw on the Stick”

If you can’t adapt to the situation, can’t stop it, can’t run away, and can’t predict when it will end, it affects your body and mind much more destructively than even stronger stressors that you can do something about.

Controllability and uncontrollability of stress are entirely subjective. A person needs to know that they have such an opportunity.

A brilliant experiment demonstrating this effect was conducted in 1999 by Japanese scientist Masatoshi Tanaka. He subjected rats to various stresses, such as electric shocks, which they couldn’t avoid. One group of rats couldn’t do anything, while the second group also couldn’t do anything about the electric shocks but had a wooden stick they could gnaw on until the shock stopped.

The rats with the stick suffered much less from stress.

If we merely observe, our psyche is destroyed. Inaction destroys the psyche. Action breeds confidence. If you can’t do anything, gnaw on the stick. Come up with something to make your stress subjectively controllable.

Humans have many wonderful ways to gnaw on the stick. In fairy tales, there’s often a promise that the hero’s problem will be solved when they wear out seven pairs of iron shoes. In practice, this means that solving the problem takes time, but simply sitting and waiting is completely unbearable and destructive to physical and mental health.

It’s much better to wear out those iron shoes and gnaw on iron bread in the meantime—you’re busy, you have fewer stress hormones, and they don’t destroy you.

Therefore, it’s more biologically sound to do something you can control. Many advise doing good deeds now. Humans are social creatures, and in conditions of stress hormone accumulation, they must find an outlet in mutual aid—this is salvation for your psyche.

Volunteer, help homeless cats, donate clothes and food to those who have lost their homes or simply to those who are having a hard time. A bucket of water that you bring to a burning house won’t extinguish the house, but it will greatly help you preserve yourself and the ability to help further, to somehow move this world towards better.

Another option is to do something useful for your future and the future of your loved ones. Dive into learning English, read a book with your child every day, walk with your loved one in the park, sew a dress, knit a bag—anything. If it makes sense to you, it can help your psyche. Plus, it will bring benefits.

It’s important not to take on someone else’s guilt or destroy yourself. No one will benefit from this. It’s crucial to preserve yourself and your psyche for good. Remember that saving others and getting out of difficult circumstances begins with the ability to mobilize and help, first and foremost, yourself.

For more information, you can refer to the Encyclopedia of Trauma.