Why Language Matters When We Talk About Professional Trauma and Fatigue

Sass Boucher
2 days ago
5 min read

Sass Boucher

PT&F isn’t about giving you a label, it’s about making sense of the load you carry. Sass explores why the language we use really matters.

Every time we sit down to talk about Professional Trauma and Fatigue (PT&F), without even mentioning bath bombs or candles, Kate and I inevitably find ourselves returning to the same questions:

"What language genuinely honours your emotional reality in frontline work?"

"How do we talk about human impact without scaremongering, pathologising, or linking everyday distress into a diagnosis?"

For us, this work began, and continues, with a determination to create language that supports you rather than labels you. When we introduced the PT&F umbrella and our now affectionately named droplets of doom, we weren’t inventing something new. We were developing the term I first coined in my research, 'Looking Through a Lens of Terribleness' a term created to bring together concepts scattered across different professions and present them in a way that felt usable, relatable, and human.

The umbrella model we now use was designed to show this simply and pragmatically (with minimal shades of doom, despite the name).

In essence, we wanted to answer a very simple question:

"How do we talk about the impacts of being human, being in a workplace, and being in a helping profession… without shame, judgement, or minimisation?"

Where our existing language came from, and where it is now.

The concepts you may recognise, burnout, compassion fatigue, secondary trauma, vicarious trauma, moral distress, moral injury, didn’t emerge from one place. They evolved across decades and professions. The understanding behind them has shifted too.

Illustration of the Professional Trauma & Fatigue umbrella showing three layers of impact and droplets representing emotional load in helping roles.

Historically:

Burnout framed stress as a personal failure.
Compassion fatigue suggested caring too much.
Secondary and vicarious trauma focused mostly on therapists.
Moral distress emphasised nurses, military and emergency services unable to act in line with their values.

But today, contemporary research across health, social care, psychology, occupational science, and organisational studies paints a different picture:

burnout is occupational
compassion fatigue is about prolonged emotional exposure
secondary trauma is a normal response to witnessing suffering
moral distress is rooted in systems, cultures, and contexts

In other words:

This has never been about individual vulnerability. It has always been about human beings in human work.

Each concept adds something helpful, but none of them explained the whole picture.

That’s the gap PT&F was created to fill.

Not a diagnosis. Not a judgement. A shared understanding.

Professional Trauma and Fatigue isn’t a diagnosis.It isn’t a pathology, and it isn’t a new label you need to carry.

Illustration of two people under the umbrella labelled professional trauma and fatigue.

It’s an umbrella term, literally representing the layered complexity of emotional load across helping roles. The graphic didn’t come from branding; it came from wanting to give you a visual language that makes sense of what you might already be feeling (and maybe even smile at a little).

PT&F brings together the three layers of impact:

Human impact — your history, empathy, body, nervous system
Workplace impact — culture, pace, pressure, expectations
Work impact — trauma exposure, relational intensity, emotional labour

It gives you a way to talk about:

the chronic weight of holding others’ pain
the erosion of boundaries when everything feels urgent
the emotional residue of witnessing distress
the moral tension when your values collide with the system
the fatigue that is more than tiredness
the subtle changes you notice in yourself

None of this is about diagnosing you!

It’s about validating your experience.

Because humans are affected by human work

A central truth sits underneath everything we teach, write, and support:

"You cannot do human-facing work without being affected by it."

This is not a flaw.

It is not being “too sensitive.”

It is not proof that you aren’t cut out for the job.

And it is certainly not something you can fix with a scented candle, a bubble bath, “protected time,” or a corporate wellbeing week (no matter how enthusiastically marketed).

It is the natural consequence of meeting trauma, distress, conflict, risk, and emotional intensity, day after day, inside systems that are often stretched, reactive, or under-resourced.

Who we mean when we talk about “helping professionals”

When we talk about “helping professionals,” we believe that if you sit with,

support, guide, hold, or listen to human beings in pain, stress, trauma, loss, crisis, or complexity, even briefly you are in a helping role.

That might be as a counsellor, psychotherapist, social worker, mental health practitioner, teacher, early years worker, youth worker, nurse, midwife, paramedic, carer, housing officer, family support worker, police officer, pastoral lead, domestic abuse advocate, charity worker, supervisor, manager, volunteer, or someone in community or grassroots roles.

"Your job title matters far less than the relational nature of your work."

Paid or voluntary, clinical or non-clinical, frontline or behind the scenes,

"your work has an impact, and that impact deserves attention, understanding, and language that makes sense"

Until we recognise this as impact, not inadequacy, we cannot meaningfully support ourselves and each other.

And until we name the shame that forms around emotional responses, we can’t loosen its grip. (Trust me, Kate and I have been holding on for seven years.)

What we hear so often generally sound similar to this:

“I should be coping better.”

"Everyone else seems fine.”

"Maybe it’s just me.”

"I'm a social worker / teacher / nurse its part of my job."

PT&F helps you name what’s happening. It helps you notice the build-up earlier in yourself, and in others, before it becomes overwhelm, withdrawal, or crisis. Most importantly, it helps you talk about it without blame.

Language that supports, not blames

Our hope has always been that Professional Trauma and Fatigue becomes a shared, compassionate language across teams and organisations, a language that clarifies rather than confuses, validates rather than shames, and prevents rather than reacts.

Shared language means we can:

recognise signs early
ask for support without feeling like you’re failing
understand the emotional load within your team
see emotional safety as part of operational safety

Naming things early opens a pathway to prevention instead of repair.

We’re not giving you a new label. We’re simply trying to prevent those in these roles from becoming disposable.

We hope that we’re giving you a way to talk about something that has always been there, and if you’ve ever sat in one of our training rooms, you’ll know that we try to do that in the most human, gently humorous (we like to think so), and relatable way we can.