Trauma-informed Coaching

“Whether we realize it or not, it is our woundedness, or how we cope with it, that dictates much of our behavior, shapes our social habits, and informs our ways of thinking about the world.”

— Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Trauma in today’s world

Working in a trauma-informed way hasn’t only become relevant since the collective trauma of a global pandemic. The Australian Institute for Health and Welfare states that 57 to 75% of Australians will experience a potentially traumatic event in their lives. We’re also building more awareness around so called ‘small-t trauma’ or micro trauma – small but often repeated experiences that are easy to dismiss, ignore, or accept as ‘part of life’. But they leave us with emotional wounds, lead to problematic coping mechanisms or diminish our ability to trust others and ourselves.

How we communicate, connect and cope in life

Some of the challenges my clients seek coaching for include the search for meaning, navigating transitions or burnout, ineffective stress responses, and stuckness in patterns like perfectionism, self-doubt, overworking, disconnection from others or people-pleasing.

Sometimes, the experiences that shape how we communicate, connect and cope seem so negligible or common that we don’t to attend to them. Other times, our early experiences hold the key to how we see the world. Either way, these experiences shape our nervous system, and create emotional and behavioural patterns that can get in the way of living the life you want to live.

I use trauma-informed methods in my coaching, facilitation and training to help you gain awareness of these underlying dynamics so that lasting change is possible.

Stress is part of life…

This is true and we all have heard about good and bad stress.

Good stress alerts, activates and engages you to face a challenge. It’s a perfectly well-designed response when pressure comes in short bursts.

Chronic stress, however, including chronic workplace stress, leaves the same imprint on your brain and body as trauma.

While processing traumatic events that sit at the root of behavioural or emotional patterns might not be the primary coaching goal, I can hold our coaching work with the competence and compassion of someone who has worked with complex trauma.

Trauma-informed leadership

The demands on leaders have skyrocketed during the pandemic, leaving many exhausted, isolated and in circumstances that can activate their own trauma responses.

Trauma-sensitive leaders understand their own trauma patterns and are aware of systemic and collective trauma dynamic.

With trauma-informed coaching, I offer you a support system to learn, reflect on your own experience as well as the dynamic you see playing out in your team or organisation. It can help you adjust how you communicate, or respond to pressure and lets you see workplace processes or policies in a different light.

"You have very fine antennas in deciding and asking for what feels good and is helpful in any specific moment during the session. In comparison to other coaching, I thought this was a kind of a new combination: hard facts with soft facts. Business related and yet looking at the soft facts too. It goes a bit deeper I thought. I love the fact that you have a hard-core business background yourself; that makes you a great counterpart in the conversations, and you combine techniques and tools on the one side with your sensitivity for topics and undertones on the other side."

AR (Coaching client)