Trauma doing humanitarian work—It’s time to address it

I admire the work that humanitarian aid workers do. But it can come with a big cost personally when they experience trauma on the job. Dimple D. Dhabalia understands this well as a human-centered leadership expert and former immigration asylum worker. Today, she talks about the occupational traumas and mental health challenges that can occur and how organizations can better address these instances when they happen. Dimple explains more in her new book Tell My Story: Challenging the Narrative of Service Before Self.

Guest post by Dimple D. Dhabalia on traumas and humanitarian worker

Occupational mental health challenges and traumas are inherent to humanitarian work. Organizations that want to retain staff, build institutional knowledge, and see sustained success in the future must create a trauma-informed culture. Organizations that fail to adapt to the health and well-being needs of their staff by acknowledging and normalizing the realities of the work will never effectively meet their mission.

Types of trauma

In addition to these more general forms of trauma, humanitarians are susceptible to occupational traumas including the following:

• Vicarious trauma: experience of trauma symptoms that can result from repeated exposure to other people’s trauma and their stories of traumatic events
• Secondary traumatic stress: emotional duress that results when an individual hears about the firsthand trauma experiences of another
• Post-traumatic stress: unprocessed trauma resulting from exposure to life-threatening or highly distressing events that lasts more than one month and affects daily functioning
• Moral injury: perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress one’s deeply held beliefs and expectations
• Compassion fatigue: a combination of physical, emotional, and spiritual depletion associated with caring for others who are in significant pain and physical distress
• Burnout: prolonged physical and psychological exhaustion related to a person’s work

3 ways humanitarian organizations better handle worker trauma and mental health challenges

Becoming a trauma-informed organization takes time and radically hu- man leaders. A few things organizations and leaders can do to get there include the following.

1. Listen and acknowledge

A willingness to listen and acknowledge what another person is experiencing is foundational to trauma-informed leadership. This requires giving people time and opportunity to share their experiences and then validating them through active listening.

Active listening includes empathizing, asking open ended questions, and mirroring back what you’ve heard. This allows the person to realize you’ve heard them and helps foster connection. Listening and acknowledging isn’t about fixing or reframing the situation. It’s about giving someone the gift of presence and ensuring that they feel seen and heard.

2. Create transparency around available support

When a person is experiencing distress or trauma as a result of something that has happened in their own life or in the workplace, they may need access to resources to support their mental, emotional, physical, or relational health and well-being. However, because of the stigma associated with this type of help, people often won’t ask.

Therefore, it’s important to make support broadly available, and to provide information about how to access this support through a variety of platforms, including emails, text messages, flyers or posters, and during all-hands or team meetings. Ensuring that people know what support is available and providing them with the time and information they need to access it makes it more likely that they will choose the intervention that best supports their needs in a given situation.

3. Lead by example

It’s easy to read a set of talking points urging staff to practice self-care or take advantage of available support, but modeling it is far more challenging—yet also far more effective. Leaders set the tone in the organization, and if they’re sending emails at all hours of the night, working late, coming to work frustrated and angry, or regularly blaming, judging, and criticizing others, that behavior will trickle down through the organization.

Leaders need to learn how to regulate and, when needed, reset their own nervous system and to model authenticity and vulnerability by asking for help. Something as simple as taking three long, deep breaths between tasks or meetings, taking a short 10-to-15-minute walk during lunch, engaging in a regular gratitude practice, or saying those three dreaded words—“I don’t know”—can go a long way toward resetting the nervous system and showing your staff that you’re human, just like they are.

About today’s writer, Dimple D. Dhabalia

Dimple D. Dhabalia, a human-centered leadership coach and the founder of Roots in the Clouds and is author of the #1 bestselling workplace culture book Tell Me My Story: Challenging The Narrative of Service Before Self.