What is trauma-informed coaching? Responding
In this series, I’ve been talking about the SAMHSA’s “four R’s” of trauma-informed care and connecting them with coaching. In week one, I focused on the importance of realizing the depth and extent of trauma. (Spoiler: Trauma’s influence is much deeper than you think.) And in week two, I discussed the importance of recognizing how trauma shows up in our lives, relationships, and bodies. (Spoiler: Trauma isn’t something that happened in the past. It’s what’s happening right how.)
This week focuses on the third R: Responding to trauma. This R is potentially the most unsettling so far because while the previous two R’s are simply about acknowledging and noticing, it asks us to do something about the trauma we see around us.
But responding to trauma doesn’t require us to “save” or “rescue” anyone. When trauma emerges in ourselves or others, we need to respond with curiosity, compassion, and connection.
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.
Writing recently in the New York Times, Native writer and academic David Treuer tells the story of his parents. His father was an Austrian-born Jew who escaped the Holocaust, while his mother was an Objiwe who grew up in the harsh conditions and intergenerational cultural trauma of her reservation to eventually “become the first American Indian woman lawyer in Minnesota and the first American Indian woman judge in the country.”
Treuer writes movingly of their lives, marriage, divorce, and deaths. Throughout his article, his parents’ trauma also comes into stark relief. We can see it in their stories, their combative and stormy relationship, and their addiction to smoking, among other things. We can even see it in how Treuer’s father slept:
My father’s sleep had been something epic for him and for those of us condemned to need him while he was sleeping. As kids, when we woke him up, he did so with terrified energy. His hands shot out to the sides and his eyes bounced around the room wildly, and he asked, “What WHAT WHAT IS IT?” I always thought his frustration had to do with me and what I wanted. I didn’t understand his panic had more to do with him.
These five sentences tell so much about how trauma shows up in families, how it affects the relationships between parents and children, and how easily it can cause shame.
The question, of course, is what to do about it. As Treuer’s passage suggests, it’s easy to blame ourselves or others when trauma becomes visible. To be sure, trauma can lead people to cause real harm. Treuer’s father woke up in ways that his son found frightening, and acknowledging that fact is important. But we can’t stop there.
In a perfect world, we would go back in time to help them both address their shared trauma. And in an even more perfect world, we would go even further back in time to keep Treuer’s parents’ trauma from happening to begin with.
Of course, we can’t to any of those things. But Treuer himself does something powerful. He moves to a place of curiosity about his father that helps him understand what was happening in a different way. In my trauma training, we discussed how when we’re curious, we take a break from shaming ourselves or others just long enough for us to deepen our awareness.
Curiosity is always available to us. What if, the next time you catch yourself doing something you despise—screaming profanity at someone who cuts you off during rush hour, beating yourself up for days because of a mistake, eating too much, missing your workout, yelling at your kids—you took a moment to explore your experience? Ask yourself:
What emotions are you feeling? Angry, sad, tired, hungry—or many things at once? (Check out a list of 87 emotional states and experiences here.)
What are you experiencing in your body, and where? Is it a tightening in your chest? Butterflies in your stomach?
What’s going on around you?
How might this response—dysfunctional as it is—be trying to help you?
In the process, we can learn to experience ourselves and others with more compassion. In her recent book Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown defines compassion as “the daily practice of recognizing and accepting our shared humanity so that we treat ourselves and others with loving-kindness, and we take action in the face of suffering.”
Drawing from the American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, Brown describes compassion as a courageous movement that begins when we learn to relax our defenses just long enough to see the other person in their suffering. In compassion, we’re not trying to “fix” or “solve” another person’s trauma. Rather, we’re striving to be with someone whose struggles frighten us because they remind us of our own vulnerability.
Practicing compassion toward ourselves can be even harder, because our own frailty can be even harder to recognize and bear.
Throughout his essay, Treuer strives to make both of these moves. Acknowledging his parents’ trauma makes it easier to see them as people in their complexity, and it also helps him understand the patterns he has carried into adulthood, too.
Embracing our humanity in this way lays the foundation for connection. Brown defines connection as “the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.”
This definition calls to mind another New York Times story about a tree in New Zealand. Actually, it’s not really a tree but a stump of one. Ordinarily, we would walk by it, assuming that it was dead. But two ecologists passing by noticed that it wasn’t dead, but alive. And it turns out there are many trees like this:
Naturalists have observed living tree stumps in New Jersey, the Sierra Nevadas, British Columbia and elsewhere. But for more than 150 years, how the stumps survived without leaves for photosynthesis was a mystery.
The article suggests these trees survive because “they’re connected through an underground plumbing system formed when their roots naturally fused, or grafted, together.” The dense interweaving of roots allows for trees to support each other when they need it most.
That story is a testament to the power of connection, how people, through their curiosity and compassion, can graft themselves to others just long enough to make a difference.
Treuer’s story reveals how we can connect with others who aren’t physically here with us. In understanding his parents’ stories, he could enter their lives in a new way and see them—and himself—differently. That connection was healing for him. And reaching backward in time, it may have been healing for them, too.
Coaching is an opportunity to practice these skills in a complex world dealing with extraordinary pain. How can you be curious with yourself and with others? How can you treat yourself and others with compassion? And how can you connect with yourself and others differently and see your lives as roots intertwined, sustaining each other long after you’re gone?
If you want to explore these questions, coaching might be for you. Contact me here to take the first step.
