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There is a world —that of multilateral organizations, cooperation agencies, international bodies— that is undergoing a profound transformation today. Restructurings, cuts, programs that are suspended, contracts that are not renewed, teams that are moved or dissolved. Behind each budgetary decision there are people who gave years —sometimes decades— to a mission, and who today watch it being dismantled. There is a pain there that is rarely named, because it does not fit the usual categories of loss.

A grief without a funeral

One does not mourn a person, but something harder to grasp: a program, a mission, years of work, the people who will no longer be cared for. It is a grief without ritual: no one sends condolences for a closed project, nor is there a ceremony to bid farewell to what one believed in. The environment, moreover, asks one to move on —to “adapt”, to “reinvent oneself”— as if nothing had happened. And yet, something real ended, and it deserves to be recognized as a loss before being seen as a mere change of stage.

The survivor’s overload

For those who remain, the transformation has another face. They absorb the work of those who left, with fewer resources and more uncertainty, while grieving colleagues and the mission itself. It is a particular overload: to hold up more, with less, for something that could also disappear. And it usually comes accompanied by a silent guilt —“why me and not them”—, the guilt the one who stays carries when others have fallen.

When identity was in the mission

In this sector, work is rarely just a job: it tends to be a vocation. Identity is woven with a purpose —development, peace, health, rights—, and that gives meaning to entire years of a life. That is why, when the institution wavers, the question is not only economic; it is deeper: who am I, and what was the point of what I did? To lose, or to watch dismantled, that to which one gave oneself shakes something deeper than a post.

Living in uncertainty

To all of this is added a state that wears one down in silence: sustained uncertainty. Suspended contracts, renewals that do not arrive, the limbo of not knowing. To live on guard, with the future on pause, awaiting a blow that may or may not come. That chronic vigilance has a cost —in sleep, in mood, in the body— even though from the outside everything seems to “keep working”.

A place to think through the vertigo

Therapeutic work does not promise to give back what was lost, nor does it offer certainties that no one today can give. It offers something else: a place where that grief without ritual can finally be named; where one can separate, with care, one’s own worth from the fate of an institution that is no longer firm; where one can think in the midst of the vertigo instead of only reacting to it. It is neither quick nor is there a formula —it would be dishonest to offer one—, but it allows one to recover a ground that does not depend on what the organization decides tomorrow.

The transformation of these organizations is real and, to a large extent, is not in the hands of the one who lives through it. But the way in which it is gone through —the grief, the overload, the uncertainty— can indeed find a place to be thought. And from there, with the ground a little firmer, the next step can be taken from oneself, and not only from fear.

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An essay by Carlos Hernán Arango Botero, psychologist. If these lines resonated with you —whether you work or have worked in an organization in transformation, or carry a grief or an overload that finds nowhere to be set down—, you can learn about the accompaniment and take the first step in an initial interview.