Trauma at Work: Reframing Experiences to Sustain Engagement
基于无国界医生组织的73篇日记、146次访谈等数据，研究专业人员如何在持续创伤和士气低落的环境中，通过时间重构（锚定过去或未来）来重新解释经历并调整能动性，从而维持工作投入或转向系统性变革。
Experiencing trauma in extreme contexts (e.g., areas affected by war, famine, or disease) can undermine professionals’ ability to cope, and remain engaged, with work. Prior research has highlighted coping strategies, such as detachment from trauma. However, less attention has been given to how professionals cope in demoralizing contexts, where trauma is persistent, detachment is difficult, and hope for impact erodes. Drawing on 73 diaries, 146 interviews, field observations, and archival data from Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), we show how professionals cope by temporally reframing their experiences—anchoring in the past or future to reinterpret their experience, and reorienting their agency to sustain engagement in the present. Building on construal-level theory, we identify three reframing pathways that enable professionals to remain engaged over time. Such temporal reframing influences not only how professionals cope but also whether they return to fieldwork or redirect purpose to broader systemic change and policymaking. We contribute to the literatures on trauma and coping by theorizing temporal reframing as a cognitive-emotional coping approach that reorients disoriented agency and explains divergent pathways of sustained engagement or redirected purpose.