You may feel secondary trauma from all the coverage of mass shootings. Therapists discuss ways to cope

You can't stop thinking about the violence. Social media apps that often distract us from reality are flooded with it.

Whether you're feeling terrified, outraged, overwhelmed, despondent or numb, you may start to feel it in your body — each headline, quote, photo or video producing a physical sensation.

By consuming news of each mass shooting — from Buffalo to Laguna Woods to Uvalde — we are experiencing what experts call secondary and collective trauma.

And as our body is sending us signals, experts suggest that we start to pay attention.

"Symptoms are your body's way of communicating that there's an issue happening," said Amanda Seon-Walker, clinical psychologist and president of the Southern California Chapter of the Assn. of Black Psychologists.

For the last several weeks, we've been left with little space to process one tragedy before absorbing another.

And because many of the victims have been Black, Latino and Asian, members of these racial, ethnic or cultural communities who witness the deaths, even from afar, can feel as if they're happening as close as home.

We asked four psychologists about secondary and collective trauma, how it affects us and what we can do in response to healthily process and cope. Here are their responses.

Q. What should people understand about secondary trauma or collective trauma? Who can that affect?

People should understand that collective trauma is a psychological reaction/response to a traumatic/terrible event; for example, the events in Uvalde and Buffalo, experienced and shared by a group of people. And [it] can affect an entire community, in this case the Latinx