The Role of Spirituality in Understanding and Coping with Traumatic Stress in Humanitarian Aid Workers

The Headington Institute CE course The Role of Spirituality in Understanding and Coping with Traumatic Stress in Humanitarian Aid Workers is available online for free! Click here to download a free PDF version of this course. See below for course introduction and information on how it's structured.

If you are a mental health professional and would like continuing education credit for this course you can order this online by doing the following:

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The Role of Spirituality in Understanding and Coping with Traumatic Stress in Humanitarian Aid Workers

(165 pages, 6 C.E. credits)

Course introduction

Humanitarian aid workers are a unique population of people dedicated to improving dignity and quality of life in the face of disaster and struggle. Expatriate and national humanitarian aid workers daily engage with people around the world who are suffering. They have, at least for a time, committed their lives to helping others who are enduring great pain. They encounter violence, poverty, homelessness, famine, sickness, earthquakes, tidal waves, hurricanes, and death. In all this, they face humanity in its most raw and vulnerable moments. Because of this encounter with disaster, many of these workers have suffered their own trauma, if not directly, then vicariously. And it is from this place of close, and often long-term, contact with disaster and loss that they speak to us in therapy.

As psychologists who desire to serve traumatized humanitarian aid workers, it seems important not only to engage with them on a psychological level, but on a spiritual level as well. Due to the nature of their work, humanitarians often wrestle with the types of spiritual questions that have been embraced by all of the great religious traditions. If, as psychologists, we avoid these questions, we may fail to meet our clients where they find themselves. Further, we may miss some powerful and regenerative healing forces that our clients may need. In fact, cultivating a personally meaningful and relevant sense of spirituality provides the humanitarian worker with a profound resource to help in the preparation, experience and aftermath of traumatic exposure. Indeed, those mental health professionals who are educated and trained to address the spiritual questioning of traumatic stress can facilitate positive coping and promote psychological and spiritual growth in humanitarians.

Humanitarian aid workers, by virtue of their close contact with pain, tragedy and death, find themselves deeply engaged with spiritual questions. They might grapple with the meaning of suffering, and the personal import of that suffering. They might wonder if there is a God, or wonder about the nature of that God. Or, they might be struggling to find another frame of living and being in the world that is set apart from any religious perspective. The questions may be less directly about God but more generally spiritual. For example, how to heal and live beyond indescribable losses and grief.

These spiritual questions require courage in us as psychologists to have the heart and the wisdom to journey with our aid worker clients through their exploration, into healing and hope. Humanitarian aid workers, as clients, will likely challenge us and stimulate our own spiritual and personal growth. This course seeks to broaden and deepen our capacity to make use of spirituality in treatment, for improved coping and added resilience in our clients.

Course structure

Chapters 1 through 3 provide a more theoretical overview of humanitarian work, trauma, spirituality and coping. Then, beginning with chapter 4, we enter into the applied section of the course, exploring therapists’ personal spirituality and specific ways of integrating spirituality into treatment. Within these applied sections, we also provide specific suggestions for spiritual practices for coping and growth. Throughout the course, there are exercises and questions for your own reflection.