13. Humanitarian pre-traumatic stress: roadmap to become good at feeling bad
The Rewired for Good podcast | Episode 13 | 30 January 2025
Notes
Humanitarians and aid workers in general are no strangers to uncertainty and fear. But with funding suspensions, general confusion and political shifts, many aid workers are experiencing an overwhelming sense of fear, anxiety, and pre-traumatic stress.
In this episode, we explore how to:
- identify pre-traumatic stress,
- become pros at feeling bad so we can
- think clearly through the crises our sector is facing,
- and redirect our energy to best support our needs and those of the people we serve.
Transcript
Hello comrades, sisters and brothers in arms, how are you? I'm guessing most of you listening aren't doing exactly great. The announcements of the single largest donor country of the humanitarian sector have created widespread panic and pre-traumatic stress all around. These are times to freak out for sure. And therefore, these are times for super strong ninja levels of brain management.
That's why we're here. That's why I'm here. Thank you for tuning in.
My voice is still recovering from a recent pneumonia. Sorry about that. Some people have told me they feel like it's a slightly sexier voice than my usual voice. Phoebe Buffay, are you there? Smelly cat, smelly cat, what are they feeding you?
All right, onwards and upwards people.
This episode is a bit of a sequel to the previous one. It's going to be a bit more tool focused, a bit more self coaching focused. The previous one was more of a rallying cry, personal pep talk. If you haven't listened to it, I invite you to go and give it a listen. I got pretty good feedback and I thank absolutely everyone who took the time to write and to tell me that they liked it and that it was exactly what they needed to hear. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I try, I really do try my best to, um, to support you in the distance.
I am seeing a lot of perplexity here. I'm seeing a lot of state of shock. The announcements are confusing and contradictory. There's announcements of exceptions and waivers and how to get them and it's unclear who's affected and what's affected and for how long and to what degree.
I see a lot of very good analysis out there and some inspiring advocacy, but I do see a lot of negative emotion all around, quote unquote negative emotion.
It's perfectly normal with this overnight funding freeze and stop-work order avalanche. It looks like 43% of the funding recorded on the UN's financial tracking service, which is of course a platform that's full of gaps because it's based on, on voluntary declarations, but that, that platform seems to think that 43% of the funding we use in the humanitarian sector comes from that one country alone.
So we should probably be freaking out. You won't hear me say this very often, but we should be freaking out. We totally should. This is one of the few times where worrying is probably a bit useful.
And I feel like a lot of what we're going through reminds me of March 2020, the early days of COVID-19, when we were swimming in confusion and lack of information and fear and pre-traumatic stress. What I want you to get out of this podcast episode is a clear roadmap on how to handle how shitty everything feels today. I'm not looking to make you feel better. I want you to feel however you want to feel and own it and manage it so that, as a community, we can be smart and strategic and not let our emotions bring us down at the expense of the critical work that we need to do to survive and to get out of this conundrum.
So step one, if you feel worried, stressed, afraid, confused, panicked is do not, I repeat, do not shove positive thinking down your throat. Instead, become really good at being worried, stressed, afraid, confused, panicked, or whatever it is that you're going through.
There will be a time to "not let this good crisis go to waste" and "find the opportunity in this tragedy" and all of that, right? But not today.
Today, we have all our very good reasons to feel like crap and we should own them.
We talk a lot about post-traumatic stress in the humanitarian sector. Pre-traumatic stress is less talked about, but it is a thing in the field of psychology. A lot of people refer to it when it comes to the climate change crisis, for example. And of course, it's pretty self-explanatory. It's the stress that comes from anticipating bad things that could happen. Fear ahead of potential future fear. Anxiety ahead of potential future anxiety, stress ahead of potential future stress, hardship over potential future hardship. Suffering ahead of suffering.
For you today, it might be because you got sent home without a job and you don't know when your next income is going to come or where it's going to come from. You don't know how you're going to pay your bills.
For others, you may still have a job today, but the freeze might affect you directly in the future and you know it. And importantly, it is right now affecting your plans, your programming. And that's pretty upsetting.
For me, I am affected by the freeze right now in my job, in a bit of an indirect way, but I am lucky because I'm not solely reliant on my humanitarian employer to pay my bills. So thanks to this privilege, I guess, I get to have a much more higher level macro form of worry, which is "what on earth is going to happen to the millions of people that are reliant on humanitarian aid to be alive tomorrow?". I also think about what kind of world we are creating, we have created, how has democracy led us here and other metaphysical philosophical ramblings.
So I think it's all very justified and we do get to feel however we want to feel depending on how we are analyzing the impact of the current situation and from which angle.
I think we are taught from a very young age that we shouldn't feel bad, that being sad isn't dignified, that being angry isn't constructive and doesn't look good, especially if you're a woman. And that being worried isn't productive. And a lot of us, when we seek life coaching or therapy, it's because in some way we want to learn to feel better more often. That's really great.
But to me, that's not the point of the work. It's just an added value that comes from doing the work, but it's not the point. For me, and this may be the Buddhist part of me talking here, the human experience, the human condition are meant to include days like these, times like these. If you remove days like these, life becomes pretty boring.
So for me, the value of learning to understand yourself better through life coaching, through therapy, through thought work, through thought management, through emotional management, through somatic exercises and other practices is to get to see where your power lies, where your room to maneuver is when you can't control the world, so you can think clearly and smartly, even when your emotions are pretty negative, so that those negative, again quote-unquote negative emotions don't spill over and affect or ruin other aspects of your life.
And so what I want to share here is how to be really really good at feeling bad right now. How to be comfortable with feeling bad because when you master that skill you don't have to avoid any aspect of your life anymore. You don't have to escape it ahead of time to avoid negative emotion. You get to live it fully on your terms with all its messiness and uncertainty. You don't have to relinquish control to crappy emotions. You don't have to let negative emotions make decisions for you and guide your life. You don't have to be afraid of them. You don't have to be afraid of living life fully. You get to play big because you're not afraid of feeling bad, because you're good at feeling bad.
Think about it: When you become good at feeling awful, you don't have to be afraid of most things. You don't have to be afraid of losing your job or falling in love or quitting your job or being rejected by an employer or a partner. You don't have to be afraid of failing either. The reason why we are afraid of all those things is because we don't want to feel bad. But if we know how to feel bad, like a ninja, sky is the limit.
And when you become good at feeling awful, you also don't have to use bad coping mechanisms to get out of it either. I mean, you don't have to if you don't want to. Like coping mechanisms like overeating, overdrinking, using drugs, watching TV late into the night at your own expense, sleeping around with people you don't even like just to feel something different than sadness and worry and loneliness and stress. I'm not saying of course that any of these behaviors are bad.
But if it's not what you want to do because it has other negative consequences in your life and you don't want to do those things, then you get to not resort to those things because you are comfortable with feeling like crap, because you become a pro at feeling bad without reacting to it.
So how do you become good at feeling awful and worried and stressed, especially for things that haven't happened yet?
It's actually really incredibly simple. It's not easy and I continue to fail regularly at doing it, though I am getting better at it. But it is very simple and it is available to you right now and anytime.
You just have to allow it to be there. "Oh, hey, here's the wave of negative emotion and here's how I can welcome it and understand it and let it teach me things about what I want, where I stand, where I'm going and the decisions I've made so far and the new decisions I want to make, and what matters to me?"
Repeat after me, it's very simple: "This is what there is today. I feel like crap. I feel worried. And it's OK".
There's no need to run away from it. Be with it.
So in this case of widespread pre-traumatic stress across the sector, because of all the crazy sudden announcements, confusion, uncertainty, back and forth, instead of trying to control the outside world so you can feel better, first, learn to be in control of your feeling bad.
At the end of the day, feeling bad is pretty harmless.
I want you to imagine you're swimming in the ocean, and there's a beach ball floating next to you. Imagine this beach ball contains all your stress, worry, outrage, despair, whatever it is you're going through. And it just shows up floating next to you. I want you to watch it float next to you. If you try to push it down under the water to ignore it, it's going to pop back up and splash your face in a very forceful manner. It will have control over you instead of the opposite.
So become the observer of your uncomfortable emotions. Name them, describe them. Notice their effects on your body and on your thoughts.
"I don't feel okay today. I feel lost. I am afraid. I don't feel needed. I don't feel safe. I don't feel wanted. I don't feel hopeful. I don't feel supported. I don't feel impactful. And that's okay. My throat is tight. My heart is pounding. My legs and hands are restless. I keep visualizing worst case scenarios. And that's okay."
When you get in this observer mode, it temporarily relieves you from being in that emotion, and you take some of your power back.
That subtle shift that allows you to switch from being in the negative emotion to being an observer of it allows you to not be in a rush to escape it. And when you're not in a rush to escape it, then everything's okay. "Today, that's what there is. That's fine."
It allows you to prevent it from affecting other areas of your life, lashing out on the people you love, rushed decisions that you might regret, breaking up with someone thinking they're the problem, quitting the job, and then regretting it, sending a nasty email and then regretting it, bad mouthing a colleague and then being embarrassed because you gossiped.
There is no need to let the negativity spread all over, but for that, you have to not feel awful about feeling awful. You'll be more in control and you won't compound the drama that you're feeling internally.
At the end of the day, life was never designed for us to feel good 100% of the time. So let's become really good at not feeling good 100% of the time. That's step one.
Step two is to work on your mental clarity so you can make strategic decisions for you and for your work and for your mission and for this sector and for the people affected by crisis.
In these moments of acute, widespread worry, panic, pre-traumatic stress, it's important to remember that in life, we never have an idea ever of what's coming. Sometimes we think we do, and that's where we get into trouble. And that's what's happening to us right now.
The absence of control over the future is something that a lot of us are experiencing acutely right now. But the truth is that's the permanent state of affairs. We never know what the future holds. We never know what catastrophic event might happen at any minute. We just don't think about it, oftentimes.
And so we get to go about our lives on those days without that hyper-focused sense of gloom and doom that stresses us out and freezes us in place.
So here's the key. I really don't want to sound contradictory with everything I said about allowing negative emotion. That does remain the first step. But then, don't stay in that negative space. We don't have to be worried in order to be smart about what to do to protect our work, our mission, ourselves, and the people we love. The dominating thought right now is we might not be able to handle what's coming. It's very normal given the announcements. I would say it's healthy even.
Let your imagination go there. I think that's a productive space. Drop into the fear. Your mind can't help it anyway. It's its job to find the worst case scenario so that you can act accordingly. Don't fight it. It will wear you out.
Just don't stay there. Use your imagination and your brain power in the same way for the alternative. We don't know what's going to happen in the future. We never know.
What if we could handle it after all? What if we could recover? What if we could save lives? What if we can turn this around? What if we can find solutions at the individual level, at the collective level? What would that look like?
Using sentences with "and" has been very useful to me and the aid workers that I coach. So for example:
- We are afraid and resilient.
- We are freaked out and we can figure this out.
- We are shaken and we have options.
- We are worried and we are resourceful.
- We are at risk of losing our jobs and we are safe nonetheless.
- We feel alone and somehow we know we're not.
You can find opposing truths in everything and holding that duality in the palm of your hand is one of the most powerful things you can do to self-regulate.
Don't try to decide if this is good or bad. It is both at the same.
So my recommendation if you are in the grips of a lot of worry is to write out all of your scary thoughts. Don't lift the pen until you're done and then find other thoughts that are there too inside your brain and equally true for you but less scary. Make sure those thoughts feel true to you though -- again, I am a fierce opponent of toxic positivity shoved down your throat but there are some less pre-
traumatic stress inducing truths inside of you.
And you need to allow it all to balance out so you can unlock clear strategic thinking.
As everyone is freaking out, we have a tendency to look for other people outside of our wisdom to tell us how we should think and feel and act about all of this. And so we read the statements that are being put out. We analyze, we look at the numbers that are being crunched by the specialists.
And I just want to say to you, whatever everybody else is saying, whatever everybody else is feeling: it's okay to be calm right now. It is extremely useful to be calm right now.
When you think back on all the panic that happened around COVID-19, maybe, maybe we could have made the same decisions to protect people, but without all the obsessive fear that we went through watching the news. Eyes stuck on the number of dead, on the number of sick people all day, every day, all over the place.
I remember in March 2020, just as they announced the lockdown, my dad showed up in my house, my 80-year old dad showed up in my house to sit through the confinement with us. And the day he showed up is the day that I developed COVID symptoms. I spent three weeks in isolation, staring at the ceiling of my bedroom thinking for sure I was going to kill my dad. And we cleaned obsessively with bleach, and I isolated myself, and I did my very, very best. But for sure, for sure, there was just no way my 80-year-old dad was going to escape this with me having the virus in the house. Well, guess what? He did escape it. He didn't catch the virus until like 2023. And everything was fine, but I spent three weeks feeling like my panic was incredibly useful. And looking back, I could have done the same thing of cleaning and taking precautions, but without feeling terrified through it.
Remember when emotions are high, good or bad, intelligence tends to run pretty low. So doing this thought work to even out that playing field in your brain, mapping out empowering thoughts that are already in your head, that you already believe so you can access clarity within yourself is extremely powerful.
Find thoughts that keep you smart. Find thoughts that keep you thinking forward, that keep you focused on how to respond strategically versus how to react emotionally.
Maybe this will unlock some really good questions for all of us in this sector and some really good moves, right? I mean, we are a sector that brags about operational independence, yet we are discovering that about 43% of what we do relies solely on one government. And that if that one government wakes up one day and decides that vaccines that prevent diseases and humanitarian assistance as a whole are superfluous, we find ourselves hung out to dry and in deep trouble.
So this is a time to think clearly about how this sudden funding and operational scarcity is revealing our foundational cracks. With this reality check, we need to address those cracks. Those of us working in advocacy and resource mobilization and diplomacy and program design, on proposals, we need to think clearly. And we cannot do that effectively if our thinking is not balanced.
And that's why it's critical today that we become really good at feeling awful and feeling scared while accessing our smartest, clearest thinking.
So that was step two.
Step three is particularly essential for those of you who are finding yourselves idle overnight, without a job, without something to do. But it's also for anyone who really feels in shock.
Do not let your ruminations get the best of you. As hard as this is, I invite you to redirect your focus, your energy purposefully into something that will help you weather the storm.
Seek mental health help if you feel you need it. Don't do this alone. Hire a life coach, a therapist, talk to your friends and family, whomever you trust, talk it out profusely and unapologetically, again, you get to feel awful. These times are hard. And that is why all these people exist, the coaches, the therapists and the friends and the family. That's why they're there. And you can reach out to me for a free chat if you want, and we can find the best way to help you based on what's going on for you, but do not do this alone.
For me, in these times of emotional shit show, I find cleaning and tidying up my messes to be one of the best medicines. It is really good for our brains, because it allows us to not give into powerlessness. It gives us space. Literally.
I also find walking out in the sun or in the cold or whatever weather you have, even the rain, to be magnificent ways to reset my nervous system.
And I find talking to my coach and talking to my friends essential, so I can hear myself think and find mental clarity.
You do you, whatever it takes to take care of yourself and your loved ones, however you deem it most relevant. I just saw on Instagram that a humanitarian friend of mine is using her idle time to learn how to make flower bouquets. I think that's freaking awesome.
So make flower bouquets. Read the book that you started five times, but never finished. Catch up on that latest season of that TV show that you've been missing (friendly advice though, try not to choose a TV show that is so dark that it will further erode your faith in humanity. We have enough of that going on, I think).
And then let's center ourselves on our current basic needs being met and that we tend to take for granted, right? Clean water, access to nutritious food, a roof, heating, clothing, and all of that stuff that we fail to appreciate when our nervous systems are triggered.
My dear friends, we will weather the storm. There is no storm that does not pass. Take very good care of yourself. We will get through this and we will even find ways to come out stronger for it. Until then, don't let this pre-traumatic stress get the best of you.
Stay tuned. I'll talk to you next week.