Chapter 10: A Critical Supervisory Framework for Mitigating Indirect Trauma in Higher Education Practice

Empathic engagement with others is a core component of all helping professions. The courageous act of connecting with, and holding space for, the experiences of others can take a significant toll, leading to potential negative outcomes for a practitioner’s physical and psychological well-being (van Dernoot Lipsky, 2010). Though student affairs has long been considered a helping profession, the potential negative impacts of practitioners’ empathic engagements with students have not been welldocumented (Lynch, 2017; Lynch & Glass, 2019; Stoves, 2014). Given challenges that the student affairs profession has faced with attrition and burnout for several decades (Howard-Hamilton et al., 1998; Mullen et al., 2018), exploring this phenomena and protective strategies to reduce these negative impacts is critical. One promising protective strategy is supervision, which has reduced negative impacts of indirect trauma for those performing empathic work in clinical settings (Berger & Quiros, 2014; Thompson et al., 2014).