Beating Provider Burnout with Vicarious Resilience, Jenny Hughes, PhD & Sarah Sudhoff (3 hr)
Workshop Description
Witnessing the suffering of others can shape our psychological world in profound ways. For clinicians, caregivers, artists, and anyone deeply engaged with the experiences of others, empathic engagement can lead to vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress, or burnout.
This 3-hour workshop introduces an evidence-informed framework for understanding these responses and explores the concept of vicarious resilience—the growth, meaning, and renewed perspective that can emerge through witnessing the resilience of others.
Using the narrative of an artist who experienced vicarious trauma through her creative work, alongside broader examples from helping professions, participants will learn to recognize key indicators of both vicarious trauma and vicarious resilience. The session concludes with practical strategies for managing the emotional impact of trauma exposure and intentionally cultivating moments of insight, connection, and resilience in everyday work and life.
Learning Objectives: At the end of this course, participants will be able to:
Identify three signs and symptoms of vicarious trauma and vicarious resilience
List three evidence-based clinical techniques that foster vicarious Resilience.
Discuss how these methods can be implemented to enhance both provider wellbeing and client/patient outcomes.
Select vicarious resilience strategies for inclusion in a personalized resilience plan supporting their ongoing professional development.
FORMAT: Workshop with PowerPoint presentation
EVALUATION: Standard Evaluation Form
Jenny Hughes, PhD is a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in the treatment of trauma and PTSD. She holds multiple faculty appointments and practices Brainspotting, EMDR, Prolonged Exposure Therapy, and Cognitive Processing Therapy. As the founder of the BRAVE Trauma Therapist Collective, Dr. Hughes helps trauma therapists be human again as they learn how to manage vicarious trauma and enhance vicarious resilience together. She is the author of The PTSD Recovery Workbook and Triggers to Glimmers: A Vicarious Resilience Journal and Workbook.
Sarah Sudhoff is a Houston-based artist, educator, and nonprofit leader whose work sits at the intersection of visual arts, community engagement, and social practice. She is the Founder and Director of Ramona Residency, the first artist residency in Texas dedicated to artist mothers, and Co-Founder of Throughline Collective, an artist-run space in Houston. With over two decades of experience in photography, arts administration, and higher education, Sarah has held leadership roles at institutions including the Houston Center for Photography and the Texas Photographic Society. Her work has been recognized by the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Houston Arts Alliance, and Photolucida's Critical Mass Top 50, among others. She holds an MFA in Photography from Parsons the New School for Design and a BA from the University of Texas at Austin.