What is trauma-informed coaching? Recognizing
In this series of posts, I’m exploring how the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) “four R’s” of trauma-informed care connect to coaching. In the first post in this series, I talked about how the drama of trauma and recovery plays a role in every human story, whether we know it or not.
This week, I am focusing on the second R: recognizing. In trauma-informed coaching, simply realizing the existence of trauma and the importance of the role it plays in our lives isn’t enough. We also have to learn to recognize how trauma shapes how we show up in the world.
And we recognize trauma by paying attention to all the ways we can adapt to trauma, how it shows up in our everyday lives and even our bodies.
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.
When I think about adaptations to trauma, a sermon by the Black pastor and activist Howard Thurman entitled “The Wider Ministry and the Concept of Community” comes to mind. Preaching in Boston University’s Marsh Chapel in the summer of 1963, Thurman recalls watching workers digging a sewer pipe. He writes:
There was some difficulty, and I went over to see what was going on. And when they laid bare this huge joint of pipe, there was a network of roots that had encircled this pipe for a distance of maybe five feet, and these little rootlets had insinuated themselves into little cracks, and had finally gotten inside the pipe itself and there with all of the nourishment that they needed, the roots just grew and they closed the pipe. And I found that these roots came from a tree that was 500 yards away. That down under the ground they had gotten the scent of the thing that they needed to realize themselves. Now that is the way life is.
For Thurman, the point is simple: Life lives. It endures and finds a way to survive, no matter the odds. As he puts it:
Wherever we observe life, in any of its forms, life is trying to realize itself. It is trying to experience itself, and it seeks to do this, naturally, by getting nourishment and the nourishment enables it to actualize whatever may be its potential. And in its quest for nourishment we see, at the same time, the quest for realization.
Thurman isn’t just waxing poetically on the resilience of life. He’s writing from his own experience as a Black American. The roots, the pipe, and the tree become metaphors for thinking about how Black people, forcibly removed from their homeland—their “tree”—continue to survive amidst profound racial trauma.
And he also captures something important about all people struggling to live through trauma. How, torn from our own trees, we have also searched for nourishment wherever we can find it. How we also have striven to realize ourselves, experience ourselves, and actualize our potential as human beings. Thurman is in awe of the human capacity to survive adversity. And we should be, too.
In much less poetic terms, trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk reminds us that human beings are survivors. We have a knack for finding a way through, and there’s something beautiful in that.
But let’s be clear:
Acknowledging the beauty in our capacity to survive doesn’t mean we should sit by and passively accept the trauma we and others experience.
It doesn’t mean that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.
It doesn’t mean we should make excuses when someone who’s been hurt is hurting others.
And it doesn’t mean we can skip the hard work necessary to bring deep structural change and healing.
Thurman’s point is much simpler and gentler. When we encounter someone who has experienced trauma—even, and perhaps especially, when that person is us—we need to value their capacity to find their own nourishment when they figuratively or literally should have starved. We need to acknowledge their creativity, resourcefulness, and strength. We need to be gentle, aware, and open in hearing what they have to say.
That gentleness, awareness, and openness is important because our adaptations to trauma, what psychologists Lawrence Heller and Aline LaPierre call survival styles, can have deeply problematic consequences for us. The strategies that got us through the crisis won’t help us now. But because trauma, by its very nature, lives on in our bodies long after the danger has passed, those adaptations stick around, too, influencing how we respond to life long after they’re no longer useful.
The deep harm adaptations bring is often as clear as day. Things like substance use disorder, obesity, anger and relational problems, low self confidence, and toxic shame are clearly problematic. But van der Kolk urges us to recognize that these problems, deep and painful as they are, are all too often solutions helping us manage things that are far deeper and even more painful:
Obesity, which is considered a major public health problem, may in fact be a personal solution for many. Consider the implications: If you mistake someone’s solution for a problem to be eliminated, not only are they likely to fail treatment, as often happens in addiction programs, but other problems may emerge.
How can obesity be a solution? Van der Kolk describes how one woman who had experienced sexual violence saw her obesity as making her invisible to men and less of a target for their advances. Her larger size was a shield keeping her safe from the trauma she deeply feared would happen again.
And yet, trauma often begets more trauma. In her book Widen the Window, Elizabeth Stanley writes how the traumas of her childhood became a chronic story of adversity. As a young woman and later army officer, she moved from one traumatic event to another, including sexual assaults, toxic relationships, and near-death experiences.
Stanley’s story reflects another way we adapt to trauma. Stephen Porges, whose polyvagal theory is critical in trauma-informed practice, notes how traumatizing experiences can teach our bodies to see safe relationships and situations as unsafe—and vice versa. Soon, life looks like a tragic version of the movie Groundhog Day, in which we constantly and inexplicably gravitate toward people, relationships, activities, and organizations that cause us pain.
In the words of executive coach Jerry Colonna, trauma can play a big role in binding us to the things we tell ourselves we don't want. And that’s what’s so frustrating about trauma. It warps how we see ourselves and our world, causing us to do things we know are bad for us, further traumatizing not only ourselves but also the people closest to us.
And we can also see the signs of trauma in our physical health. In The Deepest Well, pediatrician and Surgeon General of California Nadine Burke Harris sees trauma as the underlying cause of many common medical problems, from addictive behaviors like overeating, smoking, and substance use disorders to heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, and dementia to chronic diseases like fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, migraines, asthma, food allergies, stomach ulcers, and dozens of other complaints.
Harris isn’t suggesting trauma causes every disease. But she is suggesting trauma emerges as a significant risk factor for many common diseases whose causes seem mysterious. Why is it, for instance, that Black people in the United States have such high rates of high blood pressure? Or why a young boy she profiles stops growing after being sexually assaulted by a family friend? Or why a young girl she treats has severe asthma attacks when her father gets drunk and punches a hole in the wall?
For Harris, trauma represents one of the most important, if not the most important, public health challenges we face today. The title of her book refers to the 1848 cholera outbreak in London, which was traced to a single well. Harris argues that trauma represents a similar well running far deeper and affecting far more people, and she challenges us to pay attention to it.
And that is really what recognizing trauma is about: paying attention. In my coaching practice, I see coaching as a way of paying attention to ourselves and our relationships.
We pay attention to the ways we blame and shame ourselves, the painful patterns we’re stuck in, and the ways those patterns may be harming ourselves and others.
We pay attention to the role other helping professionals can play as partners in helping us change.
And we pay attention to all the ways we have persevered, grown, and survived in spite of what may have happened to us.
What comes up for you as you read this post? Reach out to me here.
