Clinicians in the Middle of It All: Navigating Collective Trauma in a Charged Political Climate
If you’re a clinician right now and you feel more tired than usual, more distracted, more emotionally activated, more aware of the weight in the room, well, you’re not imagining it.
We are living inside a politically charged moment that isn’t just happening around our work. It’s happening inside it.
Clients are bringing fear, anger, grief, confusion, and helplessness into session. Colleagues are quieter, or sharper. Social media feels like a constant nervous system assault. Policies, court decisions, elections, global conflicts, and threats to safety and rights are no longer abstract headlines; they are lived experiences showing up in real time.
This is what collective trauma looks like (Hirschberger, 2018; Saul, 2013). And clinicians are not outside of it.
Collective Trauma Isn’t Neutral, and Neither Are We
Collective trauma occurs when large-scale events overwhelm a community’s sense of safety, meaning, or predictability (Steiner, 2022). Political instability, threats to bodily autonomy, immigration fears, racialized violence, erosion of trust in institutions, these all qualify.
What makes this moment especially complex is that clinicians are expected to:
Hold space for clients’ reactions
Remain ethically grounded and regulated
Avoid imposing values
Continue functioning as stable attachment figures
All while being human beings with our own identities, histories, families, and fears. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s reality.
Neutrality does not mean numbness. Professionalism DOES NOT require dissociation (Tosone, Nuttman-Shwartz, & Avieli, 2012).
The Quiet Ethical Tension Clinicians Are Carrying
Many clinicians are navigating ethical tension that doesn’t fit neatly into codes of ethics:
How do I stay present when a client’s fear mirrors my own?
What does “not imposing values” mean when a client’s safety or rights are directly implicated?
How do I manage countertransference when political realities touch my lived experience?
What is my ethical responsibility when systems themselves feel harmful?
These are not signs of poor boundaries or weak training. They are signs of ethical maturity under strain. Collective trauma compresses our usual distance between “personal” and “professional.” Pretending otherwise only increases burnout and moral distress (Stefana, Fusar-Poli, Gnisci, Vieta, & Youngstrom, 2022).
Why This Moment Is So Exhausting
This isn’t just about politics. It’s about chronic nervous system activation.
When uncertainty becomes constant:
Our stress response never fully shuts off
Emotional labor increases
Decision fatigue sets in
Moral distress accumulates
Clinicians are absorbing:
Client trauma
Community trauma
Media trauma
Systemic instability
And often doing so without adequate space to process any of it. That’s not sustainable — and it’s not an individual failure (Maslach & Leiter, 2016).
What Helps (That Isn’t “Just Practice Self-Care”)
This moment calls for collective, ethical, trauma-informed support for clinicians, not platitudes. What actually helps:
Naming reality: Saying out loud that this is hard matters. Silence breeds isolation.
Contextualizing reactions: Feeling activated doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong, it means you’re human in an abnormal moment.
Ethical reflection, not moral policing: Creating space to think through values, boundaries, and responses without shame or rigidity.
Community over isolation: We regulate better together. Period.
Permission to slow down: You are allowed to adjust expectations in extraordinary circumstances.
A Trauma-Informed Truth We Don’t Say Enough
Client well-being and clinician well-being are not competing values. They are interdependent.
A profession that expects clinicians to absorb collective trauma without acknowledgment, support, or structural care is not ethically sound, no matter how strong its codes are (Hirschberger, 2018; Stefana et al., 2022).
Naming this isn’t political. It’s trauma-informed. It’s ethical. And it’s necessary.
Where The Clinician’s Compass Fits
The Clinician’s Compass exists for moments like this:
Not as therapy for clinicians
Not as political commentary
But as a system and collective voice that helps clinicians:
Make sense of ethically complex moments
Navigate professional roles during social upheaval
Stay grounded without disconnecting
Remember they are not alone in this
Clinicians are our client — because clinicians are human beings living inside the same world as the people they serve.
Closing
If you’re feeling unsettled right now, you’re not broken. You’re responding to a world that feels unsteady.
The task is not to harden ourselves or pretend neutrality means invisibility. The task is to stay ethically awake, human, and supported…..together. That’s how clinicians endure moments like this. And that’s how the profession moves forward without losing its soul.
References
Hirschberger, G. (2018). Collective trauma and the social construction of meaning. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1441. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01441
Saul, J. (2013). Collective trauma, collective healing: Promoting community resilience in response to extreme events. Routledge.
Steiner, P. (2022, January 6). Recognizing collective trauma is step one. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/our-collective-trauma/202201/recognizing-collective-trauma-is-step-one
Tosone, C., Nuttman-Shwartz, O., & Avieli, H. (2012). Shared traumatic reality of social workers and the people they support in war‑torn contexts. In Trauma and humanitarian work (pp. 59–80). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-88789-5_4
Stefana, A., Fusar-Poli, P., Gnisci, C., Vieta, E., & Youngstrom, E. A. (2022). Clinicians’ emotional reactions toward patients: A narrative scoping review of empirical research. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(22), 15403. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192215403
Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111.https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20311