Student teachers meet a variety of ethical dilemmas when dealing with distressful situations in teacher education. The aim of the present paper was to examine how student teachers cope with ethical dilemmas that were part of their work placement education. A constructivist grounded theory study was conducted. Symbolic interactionism was used as a theoretical perspective and not as an explanatory framework. It states that subjective meanings are co-constructed and interpreted between people in interaction. As such, and in line with a constructivist standpoint, the data was co-constructed between participant and researcher. Twenty-two student teachers were interviewed about distressful situations in teacher training and identified ethical dilemmas in the data were then analyzed with grounded theory methods such as coding, constant comparison and memo-writing. According to the findings, the distressful situations that students reported involved ethical dilemmas concerning students and teachers. In relation to students, the ethical dilemmas concerned, among other things, meeting students who lived under poor conditions and seeing students being bullied. Ethical dilemmas evoked by teachers that student teachers met or witnessed during work placement education were, for example, derogatory talk about students and their families, and sexism. According to the analysis of how student teachers cope with the distress that the ethical dilemmas evoked, the most prominent coping strategies were to position oneself as a change-agent, to position oneself as a part of a group, and efforts to separate oneself from the distress