My professional development investment for 2024 was completing the Trauma-Informed Coaching Certification program (TICC) taught by Thomas Hübl, PhD and Amy Elizabeth Fox. While I was familiar with many of the concepts shared in the program, my experience was profound in uncovering and starting to deal with some of my own unprocessed trauma.
Let’s start by defining trauma. Most people think of trauma as having life-threatening or abusive experiences, what practitioners would call big-T Trauma. This program instead defined trauma as any experience which our bodies could not fully process at the time it happened. That would include big-T Trauma experiences, but could include what seem like minor experiences if you were not equipped to handle them.
These accumulated trauma experiences show up later in life as people displaying disproportionate reactions to situations that remind them of the original incidents. In those moments of triggering, we are no longer our adult selves, but we are acting as the child we were when we first experienced that situation. When a 50-year-old CEO is screaming at his team, he is not acting as a rational grown-up, but as a 3-year-old throwing a tantrum.
And that’s why becoming more trauma-aware is so important even if you’re not a practitioner, because trying to reason with the CEO in that moment will never work; he will not be able to act as a rational adult until you find a way to first calm down his inner 3-year-old. Even placating the toddler inside will not solve the problem, because the next situation where he doesn’t get what he wants will re-trigger him into that tantrum. His reaction is frozen from the time of his first experience of that situation, and he will not respond to such situations appropriately as an adult until he processes the original trauma.
That processing is the heart of any trauma-informed healing work, and is what we learned to do through the program. I share more of my own personal journey in my longer reflection at https://lnkd.in/gGR8pv6P for those that want to read more.
Thanks to all who supported me in my journey this year, including Thomas, Amy, the team at Mobius Executive Leadership, and my fellow students including Christy Shi Day, Jennifer May, Jan Philipp Hölz, Christina McFadden (Arteaga) and Don’Angelo Bivens, MS, PCC, CPCC, ORSC.
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