Turning Point: What I Learned from my Healing Journey
The connection between leadership and trauma has always been personal for me. The day my therapist diagnosed me with PTSD was both a relief and a turning point that takes on more significance as I look in the rearview mirror. The relief came from having a name and an explanation for what I was experiencing. The turning point was leaving a career I loved. I thought this diagnosis meant I could never make it as a leader or in a regular office environment — that I couldn’t handle the stress, the demanding hours, or the workplace politics surrounding senior leaders. I was twenty-eight, at the beginning of my work life.
Because I was experiencing PTSD in an environment where trauma was not a routine part of the job — we were not saving lives, or facing combat, or fighting wildfire — I was an outlier. At the time, it made sense for me to leave the work environment in order to heal and regroup. I was able to eventually return and reclaim all the things I love about work — the friendships, the challenges, the complexity, the humor, and the learning.
But I will also say that my healing process was very lonely. I took time away from work, but that also meant I took myself away from the structures and relationships that were meaningful and supportive for me. When reading a draft of my colleague Gretchen’s book, Journey Through Trauma, something leapt out at me — part of the preparation phase of healing from repeated trauma is being engaged in meaningful work while you are healing, whether it’s your actual work, or volunteering, or anything that gives you a sense of engagement and connection with the world. Looking back now, this is the one thing I would change about my healing journey: to not go completely into isolation while healing. It was hard on me and my marriage, and ultimately the healing took longer than it needed to.
At the Center for Trauma and Leadership, we work with leaders who are experiencing burnout and PTSD from trauma or vicarious trauma while on the job, often doing work they love and have trained for years to do well. The current model of support from most organizations is to send them off to a therapist on their own, or they take a leave of absence like I did. And both of these things can be helpful — we are huge fans of therapy — but we would argue that time off and therapy alone is not enough. We believe that leaders are done a disservice when they are sent off to deal with PTSD symptoms only on their own.
When trauma is a routine part of the job, leaders and teams need structures that help them integrate traumatic experiences as part of the job, in community with each other. Being able to discuss and process traumatic events as they occur can help the symptoms of burnout and PTSD from setting in. I know all too well how it feels to be living life as if electric currents are coursing through your body and everything feels harder than it should. If we are asking leaders to operate in environments where trauma is present, we should also support them in ways that help them manage the natural after-effects of traumatic events.
In our programs, Gretchen and I take the hard-won lessons of being survivors of repeated trauma and marry those lessons with everything we’ve learned from studying psychology, from our careers as leaders, and decades of working with leaders across fields. We love the world of work and want leaders to be able to stay in their chosen professions, feel competent in supporting themselves, and empowered to create environments for their teams where everyone can do the work they love while also managing and integrating the impact of trauma.
As we launch the Center for Trauma and Leadership, I find myself at a new turning point in my life and career — one that I couldn’t have imagined when I began my healing journey all those years ago. I appreciate every single friend, colleague, leader, and teammate who was part of my wildly circuitous and hard-scrabble journey to get here. Thank you.