Today, as I sit in the warm sun in my favourite spot in a café, with my partner telling me every detail about the new garden room we plan to build, I hear a baby screaming. In that moment, I try to continue nodding, acknowledging his ideas, but in my head, I want to see the child. I want to know if that child is being cared for. I look intently outside the door, but I don't move from my position so as not to seem disconnected from my partner's grand plans. In fact, I hear only fragmented words, nodding too many times for it not to be noticed.
When I hear that cry, it flashes me back to all the children I’ve encountered as a Health Visitor. This is what burnout and vicarious trauma look like for an NHS Health Visitor. It all sounds so grand, but I had no clue. I thought I was just doing my job. At the end, my partner asks me more intently, "Are you okay?" and tears come to the surface, though they do not fall, as I continue to accept my emotional fate.
My job for the past 20 years has finally broken me, and that too makes me feel sad. I’ve been signed off work because I accepted that the way I feel isn’t right. I had no idea what it was until one night when my partner tried to hug me. I clenched my teeth, feeling angry and annoyed. I lay there and said firmly, "Please stop." I’m going to be honest—every time you hug me, when I close my eyes, I can see my caseload of children in my mind’s eye. I can’t stop it all from creeping in. But he knew. It was the first time I admitted it to myself and said it aloud. That night, I felt fragile, sleeping lightly as I contemplated what, how, why, and when my next actions should or would be. In the back of my mind, a voice kept saying, "I just don’t want to do this anymore. I just want to stop".
I recalled an incident a few weeks before when I had been juggling emails, work commitments, and the children. When my daughter asked to change her boots to shoes, I shouted, “I CAN’T DO THIS, I CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE.” I cried and apologised a million times. She was gracious as I told her, “It’s not you, it’s me,” because it wasn’t her. It was the burden I carried inside myself of how I felt. In hindsight, there were clues, but I didn’t see them then—until that night when it became clear.
The next day, I called the GP who said, “What you have is vicarious trauma. You need trauma counselling; you need support with that.” After being signed off sick from work and completing trauma counselling, I resigned. I sent one sentence to an institution I had belonged to for 20 years and was proud to work for. Now, when I sit in a sunny spot in a café and hear a child cry, all the children, parents, and people who have been hurt, neglected, mistreated, misunderstood, ignored, or not listened to come flooding into my consciousness. And I sit still, deep inside myself, waiting for them to pass.
To this day, I still feel that those emotions for others have buried a part of me. The sadness I held in my role, the trauma I encountered—unrecognised, unappreciated, and undealt with—left me feeling fractured. So I must accept that my choice, my vocation, my career, and my job have taken a part of me, with signs I couldn’t see or recognize for myself.
And that is why I have set up Peace of Mind. You may not know what, why, or how, but through talking and processing, the burden can be shifted together.
