Mission-Driven Occupational Trauma: The very real and often minimized “costs of caring”

Adobe Stock Images

Mission-driven organizations make policies, processes, communications, and decisions that align with the organization’s core values and further its defined mission, which usually has an underlying ethos of care and protection, and a spirit of service embodied within it. Ironically, it’s often within these same mission-driven organizations that staff experience the most occupational and organizational trauma because the ethos of care and protection provided to the people the organization serves is rarely extended to the staff doing the work.

I created the term “mission-driven occupational trauma” because I couldn’t find any one term to reflect the unique costs of caring faced by individuals working in high-stress, trauma-exposed fields. In addition to the common bit T and little traumas and burnout experienced across many sectors, humanitarians work often consists of exposure to trauma and violence, long working hours, back-to-back deployments, and extended periods of time away from loved ones and friends which can result in:

• Vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress — trauma that arises from exposure to other people’s trauma
• Post-traumatic stress — unprocessed trauma resulting from life-threatening or highly distressing events
• Moral injury — acts that transgress our deeply held moral beliefs or expectations
• Compassion fatigue — a combination of physical, emotional, and spiritual depletion from caring for others
• Critical incident stress — highly stressful situations or traumatic events that overwhelm our ability to cope

High levels of stress, exposure to trauma, and the stigma and shame of mental health in cultures that minimize the impact of trauma and reward staff for “pushing through,” create the conditions for humanitarians to suffer in silence rather than seek help to heal. Left unchecked, these inherent occupational traumas not only have a negative impact on our physical and mental health and relationships (personal and professional), but they impact ability to do our jobs effectively — ultimately hurting the mission.

Do you work in a mission-driven organization? Are you now, or have you in the past, experienced one or ore of the mission-driven occupational traumas listed here? What if any support did your organization provide to help you heal?

Tomorrow we’ll begin to dive deeper into these forms of trauma, starting with vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress.