Vicarious Trauma as Empathic-Contagion Wrong Attractor: Secondary Traumatisation, Compassion Fatigue, and the Ground State of Bounded Empathy

This paper applies the Displacement Framework to vicarious trauma, analysing it as a wrong-attractor state in which repeated empathic exposure to others' trauma disrupts the helper's own cognitive schemas about safety, trust, and meaning. Using displacement cost D(ξ), accumulated displacement Φ, and basin geometry, we show how empathic merger creates a transmission pathway through which the traumatised other's displaced state accumulates in the helper.

Nine propositions formalise the empathic contagion mechanism, worldview disruption as basin deepening, risk factor multiplicativity, supervision as displacement processing, and return paths through bounded empathy cultivation. Published as part of The Phronesis Issues preprint series.