What is trauma-informed coaching? Realizing
Trauma is everywhere we look: COVID, systemic racism and sexism, gun violence and mass shootings, natural disasters, the war in Ukraine—the list goes on and on. People are stressed and hurting, and that stress and hurt is showing up at home, in our workplaces, in our communities, and in society as a whole. Even if we think we’re doing OK personally, we can’t escape trauma’s effects. Today, everyone needs to be trauma-informed. Especially coaches.
What is trauma-informed coaching? Because coaches aren’t psychotherapists, trauma-informed coaching doesn’t treat trauma. People who need to heal more deeply should work with psychologists or therapists alongside their work with a coach.
But trauma-informed coaching can still be tremendously helpful. In this series of posts, I would like to describe and clarify what that help looks like and why it matters.
As a guide, I’ll be looking at what the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) calls the “four R’s” of trauma-informed care. The SAMHSA writes:
A program, organization, or system that is trauma-informed realizes the widespread impact of trauma and understands potential paths for recovery; recognizes the signs and symptoms of trauma in clients, families, staff, and others involved with the system; and responds by fully integrating knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures, and practices, and seeks to actively resist re-traumatization.
Since they appeared in 2014, the four R’s have been vital in helping all kinds of professionals both inside and outside the traditional “helping professions” to reimagine their practice. In this and the next several posts, I’ll explore each of the four R’s in turn, starting with the first R: Realizing.
Before we start, please note that any discussion of trauma—even a discussion like this one that won’t dive into specifics—might raise something in you. If it does, be gentle with yourself and look for ways to support yourself if you need it.
Realizing the impact of trauma asks us to see trauma as part of every human story. This principle of trauma-informed practice means recognizing what trauma is and acknowledging that it might be more widespread than we think.
We often use the word “trauma” to refer to painful experiences, especially the sorts of experiences of violence and loss that make news headlines. But while it’s true that trauma does originate in experiences of pain and hardship, seeing trauma in simply terms of difficult experiences doesn’t quite capture what trauma is about, for three reasons.
First, trauma experiences don’t have to be massive events in order to affect us. Psychologists Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre remind us that trauma can be quiet, too. This is especially true in childhood trauma, in which kids don’t get the love and care they need when they need it. And it’s also true of the chronic experiences of living and working in oppressive systems, as well as being cooped up in our houses for months on end because of the pandemic.
Second, traumatic experiences, in and of themselves, don’t necessarily lead to trauma. Bessel van der Kolk, whose The Body Keeps the Score swept into the New York Times nonfiction bestseller lists during the pandemic, argues that what’s most important is what happens after we experience a painful event. How much agency do we feel we have? How much love and support do we have from family and friends? What opportunities do we have to make sense of what happened to us? How well can we find our way back to normal?
This insight is key because it explains how two people who experience the same event can have two completely different experiences, and how episodes that seem minor in retrospect can have an outsize effect on us. If we feel trapped, unloved, and unsupported, if we don’t have anywhere we can feel safe, if we don’t have the space to think through and process what happened, and if we don’t know how find our feet again on our own, we will experience painful events—even things that other people don’t think are that big of a deal—as trauma.
Third, trauma is about what’s happening now, not then. “Trauma is not the story of something that happened back then," van der Kolk says. "It’s the current imprint of that pain, horror, and fear living inside people.”
When we can’t put ourselves back together again, he continues, trauma continues to live on, not only in our minds but especially in our bodies. Trauma fragments us. It changes how we react to stress, fills us with shame over our powerlessness, numbs us toward ourselves and others, and transforms how we perceive the world around us. This sense of disconnection and aloneness can be so woven into our everyday experience we assume they are just the way things are.
Together, these three points give a good working definition of trauma as an overwhelming and immobilizing experience whose pain we just can’t seem to shake and whose influence shapes how we think, feel, and live.
Those wounds are common. Van der Kolk writes that we used to see trauma as an isolated experience affecting the lives of an unlucky few. However, over the past several decades, researchers from a variety of fields have come to understand trauma as endemic to human society.
“Research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shown that one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engages in physical violence,” van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score. “A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or hit.”
These traumatizing experiences don't have to be massive or chronic to be traumatizing. A single encounter lasting just a few seconds can transform a life.
Trauma can also come from experiences within our environment. Fires, wars, floods, hurricanes, climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic have all affected us in profound ways.
We don’t even have to experience the event directly. Heller and LaPierre note that having a family member who has been incarcerated or who struggles with significant mental illness or substance use disorder can lead to trauma. Intergenerational and cultural trauma emerge from historical experiences of racial and cultural oppression, sexism, genocide, violence, and loss that were never processed and continue to shape how people live decades, even centuries, later.
All of this challenges us to become aware of how widespread trauma is. To be sure, this doesn’t mean everything in human life is trauma or any painful event will continue to live on as trauma. If we have the space and support to process, we can adapt and grow. But despite our profound capacity for resilience, woundedness is endemic to the human experience. And that woundedness can shape our entire lives.
Trauma’s presence can be subtle, but its effects are profound. And we need to pay attention to those effects if we and our society are going to heal. If we think our trauma impacts us alone, we’re wrong. If we don’t understand how trauma influences us, we will take those effects into our families, workplaces, and communities. We’ll hurt others, whether we intend to or not.
And the hurt we’ll create will be profound.
Yet, even as we recognize how widespread trauma is, van der Kolk urges us to recognize that there is more to the story. Reflecting on New Yorkers’ responses to the 9/11 terrorist attacks with Ezra Klein, van der Kolk emphasize that trauma we experience and inflict on others is only part of the human experience. Through working together and caring for each other, overcoming the shame and isolation trauma can bring, we are capable of healing and transforming adversity into something more, something beautiful.
My belief in the possibility of individual and social transformation in the midst of trauma drives my work with leaders. As a coach, I don’t treat trauma directly as a psychotherapist would, but I work with people who are striving to make things better for themselves, their organizations, their communities, and the world.
In that work, realizing the prevalence of trauma in society most often takes the form of educating clients about the existence of trauma and the role it might be playing in their challenges. For many clients, especially high performers who believe nothing “bad” has ever happened to them, understanding how widespread trauma is and how deep its influence can be is a wake-up call.
They can see their co-workers in new ways.
They can lead organizations and manage conflicts with a fresh perspective.
They can understand social problems differently.
And they might come to realize how trauma may have touched them, too.
If you would like to know more about how I work and can help you grow, please reach out to me here.
