Helping professionals understand the emotional costs of their work. For decades, research has documented the psychological toll of working alongside people who have endured trauma, adversity, and profound loss (Figley, 1995; Pearlman & Saakvitne, 1995). Burnout, secondary traumatic stress, compassion fatigue, and vicarious traumatization now shape how the field understands the occupational risks faced by clinicians, educators, physicians, nurses, social workers, peer specialists, and other helping professionals. Most recommendations for sustaining professional well-being, however, focus on what happens outside the helping encounter: exercise, mindfulness, consultation, healthy boundaries, adequate rest, time with family, and other forms of self-care (Scott et al., 2023). These strategies remain valuable and well supported. Still, they leave a consequential question largely unanswered: How might the helping conversation itself become a source of renewal for helping professionals, transforming work that is often emotionally depleting into work that is also restorative?
That question began to take shape when Hernández, Gangsei, and Engstrom (2007) studied psychotherapists working with survivors of political violence and torture in Colombia. Alongside the emotional costs of trauma work, therapists described being transformed by their clients’ courage, perseverance, spirituality, and ability to rebuild meaningful lives despite extraordinary adversity. Hernández and colleagues called this phenomenon vicarious resilience, describing the positive transformation that helping professionals may experience through exposure to clients’ resilience and adaptive coping. Their findings suggested that clinicians are shaped not only by the suffering they encounter, but also by the resilience, perseverance, and adaptive coping they observe. In doing so, the study provided an important counterbalance to a literature that had focused almost exclusively on the psychological costs of trauma work.
This shift also points to one possible explanation for how vicarious resilience develops. Helping professionals encounter not only the effects of trauma but also people’s capacity to adapt, persevere, and move forward. Solution-Focused conversations deliberately bring these capacities into view by encouraging people to identify strengths they had overlooked, the value of relationships they had underrecognized, and possibilities they had not yet imagined. As people rediscover their strengths, resources, and progress toward preferred futures, helping professionals repeatedly encounter resilience, growth, and possibility that might otherwise pass unnoticed.
Co-Constructing Vicarious Resilience
From a Solution-Focused perspective, vicarious resilience may emerge through co-construction. Franklin et al. (2024) and Lutz (2025) describe Solution-Focused Brief Therapy as a way of listening in which each question grows from the person’s own words. As people describe their lives, they often mention moments they may not notice themselves. “I packed my bag and made a plan to leave for a safe place.” “I woke up and went to a meeting.” “I fed my children while enduring the pain” Rather than letting these moments disappear into the larger story of trauma, addiction, or illness, the Solution-Focused clinician pauses. The person’s own words become the next question. “How did you decide to make that plan?” “What helped you walk into that meeting?” “How well did you care for your children while managing your pain 1-10?” As people think about those moments, they begin describing decisions they made, people they protected, and small acts that carried them through circumstances they once believed would overwhelm them. The conversation gradually shifts from what happened to them to how they coped and endured.
By the end of the day, the clinician has listened to far more than stories of suffering. They have listened to people do what is needed for their children, manage cravings, do the next right thing, ask for help, and acknowledge their feelings with acceptance. These moments surface within the conversation. Over time, repeated invitations to question these ordinary acts of perseverance begin to shape how helping professionals experience their work. The stress of the daily grind is counterbalanced by noticing with appreciation what people are capable of, even under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. This repeated experience offers one possible explanation for how Solution-Focused Practice cultivates vicarious resilience.
Hope Theory provides another perspective on how Solution-Focused conversations may contribute to the development of vicarious resilience. Snyder, Irving, and Anderson (1991) describe hope as consisting of two components: agency (the belief that change is possible) and pathways (the ability to identify a way forward). Solution-Focused questions naturally elicit both. People begin to recognize what they have already managed, discover resources they had overlooked, appreciate what they are doing, and identify meaningful next steps, particularly through scaling questions. Hope comes into focus as people see themselves as capable of influencing what happens next. This shift has implications for both helping professionals and the people they support.
Repeated participation in these conversations may also influence the questions helping professionals ask themselves. Instead of dwelling only on what went wrong, they may begin wondering, How did I get through today? What helped me keep going? What would my children say I did well this week? What is happening that I’d like to keep happening? In helping others recognize the strengths and actions that carried them through adversity, clinicians may gradually become more likely to recognize those same qualities in themselves. This parallel process offers one possible explanation for how Solution-Focused conversations cultivate vicarious resilience.
Implications for Practice and Future Research
If this hypothesis is supported, the implications extend well beyond psychotherapy. Because Solution-Focused communication is fundamentally conversational rather than profession-specific, its principles can be applied in a transdisciplinary way across healthcare, nursing, medicine, education, child welfare, peer support, emergency response, palliative care, and other helping professions. Scott et al. (2023) argued that professional self-care should become a teachable skill integrated into everyday work rather than remaining solely an individual responsibility outside the workplace. Solution-Focused communication offers a practical way to operationalize that recommendation by embedding opportunities for professional renewal within routine helping conversations.
Future Directions
An important question remains unanswered: Do the conversational processes that characterize Solution-Focused Practice contribute to the development of vicarious resilience? If they do, which conversational processes are most influential? Preliminary work has begun to explore the relationship between Solution-Focused Brief Therapy and vicarious resilience (Pérez Lamadrid & Froerer, 2022), yet whether such a relationship exists and the processes through which it might develop remain largely unexplored. The development of the Vicarious Resilience Scale (Killian et al., 2017), together with subsequent confirmatory factor analysis supporting its psychometric properties (Killian et al., 2026), now provides a means of examining these questions empirically.
Future longitudinal and experimental studies could investigate whether helping professionals trained in Solution-Focused communication demonstrate greater increases in vicarious resilience than those without such training. More importantly, this work could identify whether the conversational processes that characterize Solution-Focused Practice, including intentional questioning, collaborative language, and the co-construction of preferred futures (Franklin et al., 2024; Lutz, 2014, 2025), contribute to those changes and, if so, which processes are most influential.
Answering these questions would extend the science of vicarious resilience beyond documenting its outcomes toward identifying the mechanisms through which it develops (Hernández et al., 2007). If supported, this work would provide an empirical foundation for integrating Solution-Focused communication into professional education and workforce development as a practical, teachable, and transdisciplinary approach to strengthening professional well-being. More fundamentally, it would suggest that the conversational processes central to Solution-Focused Practice may contribute not only to client change but also to the development of vicarious resilience in the professionals who facilitate those conversations.
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