Global Treehouse Therapy & Coaching

Support for humanitarian practitioners

Hello and welcome! The following outlines the support we provide for international or national staff who work in the international humanitarian sector.

Please note that services are remote and can be done via Google Meet, Zoom, Teams, Whatsapp, Skype, or telephone. The fees for national staff are reduced, and we will help you to advocate for reimbursement from your organization prior to initiating any service.

Therapy

As humanitarian workers, often supporting distressed people, you are vulnerable to burnout and/or vicarious traumatisation. Both can be understood as the undesired consequences of care in the face of relentless suffering.

Burnout is the physical, emotional and cognitive consequences of long-term involvement in emotionally demanding situations. It generally has a gradual onset and progression. It can present as disconnection or emotional numbness or even animosity towards the people you have initially set out to assist.

Vicarious traumatisation may result from bearing witness to the trauma experienced by an individual or group. It often has a more rapid onset of symptoms than burnout. It can present similarly to post-traumatic stress with intrusive thoughts, withdrawal, feeling vulnerable, a loss of confidence, despair, anxiety, and sleep problems.

Almost anyone working with traumatised people or their stories will be affected at some point – this is normal. It is important to recognise the symptoms and have strategies to deal with them. If it feels like your typical ways of coping are no longer working, you may want to consider additional support.

Dr Muni Olia

Since 1995, I have been volunteering/working for humanitarian organizations, both locally and internationally. I understand the challenges of working in the field - personally, professionally, and systemically. It is a privilege for me to be able to support those who care for others.

Development coaching

As a humanitarian practitioner, you might find yourself working in highly pressurized and emotionally charged team environments where line managers are constantly fire-fighting and have little bandwidth to provide structured, objective coaching support. As many in the sector are driven by a strong humanitarian imperative, the focus on professional and personal development is often secondary to delivery of assistance. This can lead to frustration, poor performance and ultimately truncated careers leaving the sector worse off in the long run. If you are seeking to navigate professional challenges and enhance your personal performance, I provide structured, focused coaching to realize your goals.

Mentoring

Navigating organizational cultures and career pathways, resolving intra/inter-team conflict, and managing complex workloads can be a lonely and daunting place, especially for national staff. The combination of competition for scarce roles, high turnover of staff and ever increasing levels of scrutiny can result in your feeling you have limited options to seek out knowledgeable guidance and non-judgemental advice. My mentoring provides independent, practical and informed guidance on how to advance through the challenges you may be facing. This could include identifying skillsets and competencies to improve job performance, developing organisational career pathways, and signposting to available resources and best practice.

Ted Tuthill

I am an operations and people manager with over 20 years of experience operating in NGOs, the private, public and academic sectors. As a British/American, white man with a generalist skill set in the international humanitarian sector, I grappled with the knowledge that I was undermining the important task of realizing the localization agenda and de-colonization movement. Thus, I intentionally removed myself from undertaking international deployments for anything other than sudden onset responses where local capacity was critically degraded. I am currently an Emergency Management Specialist for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) working domestically in the US but am committed to supporting colleagues around the globe - particularly national staff - to strengthen the global humanitarian movement.