Three weeks ago, I ended up in the emergency room convinced I was having a heart attack.
The chest pain had started days earlier—a tightness that wouldn’t release, difficulty taking a full breath, pain radiating down my left shoulder. I told myself it was nothing. Maybe I’d overdone it at the gym. Maybe I’d slept wrong.
I kept meditating.
I kept teaching.
I kept holding space for others.
I tried to breathe my way through it, the way I’ve taught thousands of people to do. But on Sunday, when my doctor’s office was closed and the pain refused to let up, my husband said gently but firmly, We’re going to the ER.
After five hours of tests and long stretches of waiting, the cardiologist came back with relief in his voice: my heart was fine.
I should have felt grateful—and I did.
But I was also confused.
If my heart was healthy, what was my body trying to tell me?
Recognition: The Role of Vicarious Trauma In Bearing Witness Without Choice
If you have been paying attention to the world around you over the past months, you may be carrying more than you realize.
Images of devastation in Gaza.
Israeli families living with constant fear of attack.
Political violence and ICE shootings at home.
Rising Islamophobia and antisemitism fracturing communities, relationships, and public life.
The countless Black, Indigenous, and other people of color whose deaths rarely make headlines, whose names we never learn.
And the ongoing humanitarian crises in places like Sudan, Yemen, and Iran—where suffering continues largely outside the frame of sustained media attention.
If you find yourself feeling unusually tense, exhausted, reactive, numb, or unable to turn away—even when you want to—it may not be a personal failing. It may be a natural response to prolonged exposure to suffering.
For many of us, this witnessing is relentless. Each morning brings new stories, new images, new reasons to feel alarmed or heartbroken. Even when we are not directly affected, our nervous systems are taking it in.
If you find yourself feeling unusually tense, exhausted, reactive, numb, or unable to turn away—even when you want to—it may not be a personal failing. It may be a natural response to prolonged exposure to suffering.
There is a name for this: vicarious trauma.
Vicarious trauma refers to the psychological and physiological impact of sustained empathic engagement with others’ pain. Our bodies and minds do not clearly distinguish between what we experience directly and what we absorb through continuous media exposure, graphic imagery, and ongoing moral urgency.
Staying informed matters.
Bearing witness matters.
But exposure without the capacity to process what we are taking in carries consequences—often beneath our awareness.
Withdrawal: When Turning Away Feels Necessary
For others, the constant stream of suffering can feel overwhelming or futile, leading to disengagement instead. We scroll past headlines, turn off the news, or tell ourselves we need to focus on our own lives. At times, this discernment is necessary. Rest, boundaries, and self-care matter. But when disconnection becomes our primary response to vicarious trauma, something else quietly erodes.
Many people turn away not because they don’t care, but because they feel powerless. What difference could I possibly make? In the face of global crises, individual action can seem insignificant, even naïve. Shutting down can feel like the only way to survive.
Yet we live in an interconnected world where complete disconnection is an illusion. And when we disengage for too long, we don’t just lose information—we lose contact. Contact with what is happening. Contact with our own values. Contact with the small but meaningful ways care can move through us. What begins as self-protection can quietly become a loss of agency and connection.
Vicarious trauma doesn’t just make us sad or tired. It reshapes how we see the world.
Research shows that it disrupts core beliefs about safety, trust, control, intimacy, and meaning. It shows up cognitively, emotionally, physically, and behaviorally.
People experiencing vicarious trauma often report:
- Brain fog and difficulty concentrating
- Heightened anger, anxiety, or emotional numbness
- Sleep disturbances and chronic exhaustion
- Hypervigilance—always bracing for the next blow
- Physical symptoms like headaches, gastrointestinal issues, and chest pain
And yes—ER visits.
But there is something more essential that is lost when we burn out or shut down.
Vicarious trauma explains the cost to our nervous systems. But underneath that is something more subtle—and more consequential: a loss of contact with our capacity to respond.
What gets lost when we engage on default—whether by over-consuming information about suffering or withdrawing from it—is not just nervous system regulation.
We lose contact.
Contact with the body as a source of intelligence.
Contact with our felt sense of what is actually needed now.
Contact with our agency, beyond outrage or withdrawal.
Contact with our capacity to sense where our care is most skillful.
Contact with our ability to stay human without hardening.
This isn’t just trauma.
It’s a disconnect from our humanness.
Oppressive systems don’t need to silence us when exhaustion and reactivity will do the job for them.
We find ourselves caught in cycles of constant witnessing or reactive outrage, or else turning away and numbing out.
And when contact is lost, connection suffers.
Connection with others.
Connection with purpose.
Connection with the part of ourselves that knows how to respond wisely.
Vicarious trauma explains the cost to our nervous systems. But underneath that is something more subtle—and more consequential: a loss of contact with our capacity to respond.
When we’re dysregulated:
- We confuse intensity with impact
- We lose the ability to imagine creative responses
- We default to attack, despair, or withdrawal
What’s at stake isn’t just our well-being. It’s our capacity to imagine—and enact—responses that actually reduce suffering.
Oppressive systems don’t need to silence us when exhaustion and reactivity will do the job for them.
Collective Capacity: How Not to Lose Each Other
When this loss of contact happens at scale, movements fracture. Allies turn on one another. Nuance feels like betrayal. Strategic thinking gives way to moral reflex. The very capacities required for sustained change—discernment, patience, relational trust—begin to erode.
When we are no longer in touch with our discernment, everyone can start to look like a threat. The act of listening itself can feel like moral failure. We confuse intensity with impact, and urgency with wisdom.
This loss of contact doesn’t just exhaust us personally. It diminishes our ability to work together.
When we are no longer in touch with our discernment, everyone can start to look like a threat. The act of listening itself can feel like moral failure. We confuse intensity with impact, and urgency with wisdom.
I’ve seen this up close.
At one point, someone was publicly attacking me online—not because we disagreed about the need to end suffering, but because I was trying to hold complexity rather than take a single side. I was called complicit. My integrity was questioned. Moral failure was assumed.
Instead of reacting, I practiced inner calm, compassion, and equanimity—not to bypass harm, but to stay in contact with my own values of deep listening and seeking to understand. The next day, that same person reached out to say: “I’m sorry to have misjudged you so harshly. I’ve been exhausted, and I lashed out.”
This person wasn’t malicious. They were overwhelmed. I recognized that feeling immediately—that same overwhelm is what had landed me in the ER. The suffering they had been witnessing was real. The vicarious trauma is real. Without tools to return to contact, that pain had nowhere to go but outward.
I’ve witnessed this pattern repeatedly.
When I had tried to draft a Town Council resolution that called for ending violence while also acknowledging security concerns on all sides, it was rejected—not because people disagreed with the facts, but because in the midst of collective disconnection, holding both-and felt impossible.
This is how movements lose their strength—not through genuine disagreement about goals, but through operating from disconnection rather than from our deepest wisdom that comes from listening with care and seeking solutions that include all.
Sustained change requires more than passion. It requires capacity: the ability to engage and retreat, to stay open without collapsing, to remain connected to one another even when the work is hard.
When we lose that capacity, we don’t just lose effectiveness. We lose each other.
Rest: The Ground That Makes Practice Possible
Recently, I was invited to a friend’s house for dinner. Simple food. Easy conversation. Board games. And yet, as I sat there, I felt a wave of guilt. How could I be laughing when so many are suffering? I noticed a flash of irritation toward the others at the table—why didn’t they seem as affected as I was? Didn’t they care?
Then I caught myself.
This guilt, this judgment—it wasn’t skillful. It wasn’t making me more effective or more compassionate. It was simply isolating me, pulling me away from the people right in front of me.
Rest is not what we do when the work is finished. It is what makes sustained engagement possible. When we gather, we are restoring contact with the aliveness that oppressive systems rely on extinguishing.
So I made a choice. I allowed myself to be there. To taste the food. To play the game badly and laugh at myself. To let the warmth of friendship soften something that had gone rigid inside me.
It was quietly liberating.
The next day, I returned to my work with more energy, clarity, and steadiness—not because anything had been solved, but because I had remembered what it feels like to be human alongside other humans.
This is not escape.
This is restoration.
Rest is not what we do when the work is finished. It is what makes sustained engagement possible. When we gather with like-minded people—not to organize or persuade, but simply to cook together, laugh, play, or enjoy one another’s company—we are not avoiding the work. We are restoring contact with the aliveness that oppressive systems rely on extinguishing.
Sometimes, what returns us to contact isn’t a formal practice at all. It’s a shared meal. Music, art, or movement that reminds us we are alive. A walk where we remember that trees still grow and birds still sing—even now.
These moments are not indulgent.
They are essential.
From this restored place, certain skills can help us stay in contact when we re-engage with difficulty.
Skills: Returning to Contact in Real Life
Over years of teaching and research, I came to see that mindfulness as it’s often taught—focusing primarily on meditation and non-judging awareness—is necessary but insufficient for times like these.
Calming the nervous system with meditation is only the first step. Once we re-engage, our default habits return. Without skill, we slide back into reactivity. Even if we can return to a calm, non-judging awareness, it is not enough to navigate nuanced, complex situations, often involving competing needs and worldviews.
Through my study of early Buddhist teachings and contemporary psychology, I began to understand mindfulness as a set of trainable skills—skills that help us stay in contact with what’s alive, even in the midst of suffering. They disrupt our default reactions and help us discern what is needed to respond skillfully.
Three skills become especially essential when we are bearing witness to ongoing crisis:
Inner Calm — Creating Space Without Disengaging
Inner calm is the art of stopping, looking, and letting go for purposes of healing and clarity. It softens the grip of our attachments to habitual hurrying, beliefs, and expectations that hinder our inner equilibrium.
Inner calm involves physical composure and mental tranquility, bringing ease to body and mind alike. In the body, composure is experienced in the muscles and as an overall feeling of ease. In the mind, inner calm creates the space to hold everything without attachment and resistance.
Compassion — Seeking to Understand
Compassion is our innate ability to feel, understand, and be motivated to alleviate suffering in ourselves and others. It disrupts our tendency to act on our automatic judgments about ourselves and others by seeking to understand.
When we lose compassion, we see enemies instead of fellow humans struggling. We attack allies for not being pure enough. We forget that we, too, are worthy of care. We lose our relational intelligence—the capacity to sense how we are affecting others and how to stay connected across differences.
Curiosity — Returning to Creative Capacity
Curiosity is our ability to be genuinely interested and care with the purpose of understanding the situation, even when it’s challenging. It disrupts our confirmation bias by staying open and patient in the face of uncertainty and new information.
Curiosity widens the lens trauma narrows. It restores contact with complexity and helps us sense what might actually help. It’s not about being right. It is about being effective.
Together, these skills interrupt default patterns and reopen the channel between knowing what matters and being able to act on it.
Based on our resources, capacity, and unique gifts, what’s ours to do will be different. There isn’t one right way to meet the darkness. Only many necessary ones.
But here’s what practice has taught me: Skillful response doesn’t look the same for everyone.
Based on our resources, capacity, and unique gifts, what’s ours to do will be different. The parent raising children who can hold complexity. The artist creating work that helps others process grief. The organizer building coalitions. The healer tending to those on the front lines.
There isn’t one right way to meet the darkness. Only many necessary ones.
Reaching to Poetry As Another Anchor
I too have been learning to live with this question—how to stay engaged without collapsing. Sometimes the sifted language of poetry can speak to our deeper needs and longings. This poem by Michael Dubois captures this truth beautifully and resonates deeply.
When Things Feel Dark
by Michael Dubois
When things feel dark, remember what the world needs:
More healers, more helpers, more hate exorcisers.
More artists and poets, more parents ruled by love.
More cycle breakers, more radical resters,
more warriors of peace.
More gardeners who fall deeply in love
with the earth beneath their feet.
More meditators, more educators,
more people willing to use failure as a tool to learn.
More thinkers, more thankers, forgivers and apologizers.
More builders of bridges and homes
with open doors and minds.
The world needs you—
because only the ones who see the darkness
know the importance of turning on the light.
An Invitation to Practice: 3 Ways to Reconnect
In times like these, practice is an invitation to return to what is already alive in us, and to offer that wisely.
Below are three micro-practices from my book, Return to Mindfulness, to foster inner calm, compassion, and curiosity.
May we have the courage to notice when we’ve lost ourselves—and the skill to return.
May we offer what is uniquely ours to give, trusting that the world needs exactly that.
May our practice benefit us and all beings.
