The Recovery I Didn’t Budget For

The UN has actuaries who classify duty stations by hardship.

There are letters, categories, and differential pay. Somewhere, someone (who is really book smart) with a spreadsheet has formally acknowledged: this posting will take something out of you.

And then you finish the posting, and the same system that classified your hardship expects you back at full capacity by roughly the end of an R&R cycle, or the beginning of a new position, 10 days after you left your last mission.

I was having lunch recently in Bangkok with a friend who also works in the humanitarian sector, and we reached the same conclusion. The duty station was hard. The recovery from it is so much longer than expected, and honestly, nobody is fully back yet.

It’s not really acceptable to say these things out loud, well, I’m saying them today!

“It was hard” is a complete sentence.

Here’s the cultural script most of us absorbed: you took the posting, you knew what you signed up for, other people had it worse, so suck it up and move on.

I spent ten years in Micronesia and Bangladesh, so I’ll say plainly: you can try to suck it up and move on. I did. It doesn’t really happen that way.

Prolonged stress in a hardship posting isn’t a mindset issue you can out-attitude. It lives in the body: in sleep that doesn’t restore, in a nervous system that stays braced long after the threat is gone, in cortisol that won’t settle down just because you changed time zones.

And the crazy thing is, actuaries agree with me. They wrote it down. They just wrote it in the comp tables instead of the physical and mental well-being conversation.

What does recovery actually look like:

A few things I’ve learned, from my own years in response and from the people I coach:

It can be longer (maybe a lot longer) than you think, and that’s normal. Recovery doesn’t respect the posting cycle. You can be two assignments down the road and still be processing one from years ago. That’s not failure. That’s how nervous systems work.

It’s weird. You’re cruising along, having good months, then a bad week comes out of nowhere. People often panic during a bad week. I thought I was past this. It happened to me recently.

“I’m fine” is a survival skill, not a status report. In a hardship posting, “I’m fine” keeps you functional. The problem is that the habit doesn’t switch off when the posting ends. You keep reporting fine long after the fine has left the building. And honestly, what even is “fine” when monsoon season arrives, and the water is up to your waist, and you get sick every time you eat out?

Don’t forget, your body is keeping its own score. You can think your way to “that chapter is closed” while your shoulders, your jaw, and your sleep are still filing paperwork on it. This is why my coaching practice includes functional movement, because some of what a hard posting leaves behind isn’t reachable through conversation alone.

Where coaching fits:

Coaching isn’t therapy, and recovery from severe experiences sometimes needs clinical support, and I’ll always say so when I see it. But there’s a broad range of situations where coaching is exactly the right tool.

A confidential space where “it was hard” is treated as information rather than a confession. A place to figure out whether you’re tired, done, or changed, three very different things that feel identical from the inside. Rebuilding capacity when magically feeling like yourself again isn’t happening on its own. And when you’re ready, deciding what your next posting (or your next chapter) looks like. And yes, that can be scary.

None of this is shiny. Recovery rarely is. But it’s real, it’s workable, and it goes better with some company.

If this is you:

If you’ve come out of a hardship duty station (or any situation that has just sucked the life out of you) and you’re wondering why you’re not “back to normal” yet, hear this: you’re not broken, and you’re not behind. You’re recovering from something your own organization formally classified as hard.

Give yourself at least the credit the actuaries gave you.

I coach humanitarians and professionals in high-pressure environments, integrating ICF coaching with functional movement, because recovery happens in the mind and the body, usually in that order’s reverse. Let’s talk.

And if you’re not ready to talk yet, start with The Mission Reset, the tools I used in Bangladesh to stay sane.