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I recently had the privilege of serving as a committee member of a doctoral dissertation at Grand Canyon University. The candidate was Crystal Tutein, a disaster recovery official with the American Red Cross who lives in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Her research examined senior disaster relief officials who survived Hurricanes Irma and Maria while simultaneously leading recovery efforts for their community.
It was one of the most compelling research studies I’ve reviewed in my career. Not just because of the dramatic stories of the individuals. But because Tutein’s research surfaced something the literature had rarely explored before.
Two Storms. One Population. No Framework.
In September 2017, the U.S. Virgin Islands was struck by two Category 5 hurricanes, Irma and Maria, just 12 days apart. The devastation was total. Roofs gone. Neighborhoods erased. Families displaced.
Many of the people responsible for leading recovery efforts were living through the same disasters themselves, all at the same time.
These were senior emergency management officials who lost family members, buried loved ones, stood in food lines, and went months without power. All the while, they needed to step up as leaders in their communities, helping others through trauma that they were, themselves, experiencing at the same time.
One participant lost his father. He buried him. And went to work the same day. “Nobody really knew what I was dealing with,” he told Tutein. “But I had a job to do.”
The research literature has consistently overlooked this dynamic. Studies on disaster recovery treat survivors and emergency leaders as separate populations with different needs, different support structures, and different psychological trajectories. But in small communities, and in many organizational contexts, those boundaries blur.
And when they do, something happens that our support systems are not designed to handle.
When Helper and Survivor Are the Same Person
Tutein’s central finding is a new conceptual framework she calls HSVC, short for Helper-Survivor Vulnerability Convergence.
HSVC names what happens when the helper and the survivor are not two different people, in two separate roles, separated by two different experiences as victim versus first responder. They are the same person, having the same integrated, dual-experience at the same moment in time.
One research participant captured it in five simple words: “Your responders are actually victims.”
Tutein describes this person as an “invisible victim,” recognizing similar patterns across all her participants. These leaders performed their full professional disaster recovery roles required of them while suppressing their own survivor experience. They were visible as leaders. But invisible as people who had just experienced devastating loss on par with everyone else around them.
When it comes to disaster relief and recovery, overlooking the helper-survivor experience is a design failure. Our entire framework for supporting disaster recovery officials was built assuming the helper and the survivor are two different people—one strong and resolute, ready to intervene, the other helpless and in need of support.
But what happens when one person possesses these dual roles?
Growth During Trauma
Tutein’s research extends our understanding of post-traumatic growth (PTG), the framework developed by Tedeschi and Calhoun that describes how individuals can emerge from catastrophe with greater strength and meaning.
PTG has traditionally been measured retrospectively, something that happens after the trauma recedes. Tutein’s data extends that definition.
Tutein discovered that meaning-making and healing happens in real time through the act of leading. One official whose roof was gone, whose neighborhood was unrecognizable, whose family was displaced, said simply: “I’m not a victim here.”
This comment wasn’t denial. It was a deliberate choice to keep agency alive when everything external felt out of control. “The leading was the meaning,” Tutein writes. Participants weren’t waiting to heal. They were growing through service, extending PTG into concurrent, real-time experience.
The dynamic also connects to the concept of Experiential Intelligence (XQ), the idea that lived experience generates a form of knowing and individual capacity that education and training cannot replicate. Disaster survivorship coupled with leading support efforts creates a visceral knowledge base no classroom can produce. But existing frameworks had never quite accounted for it.
The Resilience Development Opportunity
Tutein’s groundbreaking research highlights an opportunity for all leaders and organizations within and beyond disaster contexts.
Current disaster relief frameworks treat embedded local officials identically to deployed external responders, as if going home after a shift means returning to rest and safety, not to the disaster zone. Critical incident stress management models focused on preventing psychological distress after traumatic events assume a clear boundary between the responder and the affected community. After the hurricanes in the U.S. Virgin Islands, for example, boundaries were blurred.
Whether in a disaster recovery context or not, when a leader loses a parent, goes through a crisis, or absorbs significant personal loss, they are often expected to maintain full professional performance while privately bearing the weight of their experience.
We rarely ask our leaders if they, themselves, need support. We rely on them to demonstrate fortitude and provide it to others. Strong job performance is not evidence of emotional well-being. Some of the most capable, dependable, and resilient people in an organization may also be carrying the heaviest invisible burden.
Organizations can apply the insights from Tutein’s research through three practical strategies:
- Proactively identify dual-role employees during crises. When organizational disruption hits—natural disasters, layoffs, community tragedies—some leaders are both responsible for the response and personally affected by it. Name this. Support it structurally.
- Redesign support systems for dual-role convergence. Stop building programs for either survivors or leaders. Consider people who are both simultaneously. EAP programs, coaching, and mental health resources should account for those who cannot afford to appear vulnerable and who may be providing the resources themselves.
- Train everyone to see the invisible victim. Strong job performance is not evidence of wellbeing. Someone carrying significant loss can appear fully functional for a long time. Proactively creating support networks and promoting psychological safety to allow anyone to seek support helps shift organizational culture toward making invisible victims visible.
Tutein’s HSVC framework will likely open a new stream of research and organizational support needed for the future. Her research reveals new opportunities to better support the dual-role responder, so they become visible within the field of disaster preparedness and more broadly recognized as a critical success factor in fostering greater leadership and organizational resilience.
