Trauma Informed Leadership
For those of you who know me – you may or may not know my childhood story and how that made me who I am today, both good and bad!
I have an ACE score of 7/10.
ACE stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences and is a measure used in clinical settings to assess mental and physical health risk.
The higher the score the higher the risk of many health conditions. (You can read more here)
I’m trying to get better at sharing a little bit of my story of my 7/10 with my coachees, where relevant, because I notice it helps them feel they are in a safe space to open up and share and that I understand what it might be like for them.
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are events during childhood that are stressful and may impact upon mental and physical health having effects in childhood and future adulthood.
Examples of ACEs include abuse (physical, emotional, sexual); neglect; living in a household with domestic violence, substance or alcohol misuse, or criminal behaviour; or living with a caregiver with mental illness.
A UK Study, found that over 50% of participants had experienced at least one ACE, and 25% had experienced two or more.
There is significant relationship between the number of ACE categories exposed to, and each of the adult health risk behaviours and diseases.
Participants who had experienced four or more ACEs had a 4–12 times increased risk of drug abuse, alcoholism, depression and suicide attempts; a 2–4 times increased risk of poor self-rated health, being a smoker and a 1.4–1.6 times increase in physical inactivity and severe obesity
If we extrapolate this data and I overlay what I hear my clients talk about, there are many people walking around in organisational life who are all very outwardly successful people and seemingly high functioning who are also struggling with stored up and unprocessed trauma related to early childhood experiences. These unhealed traumas may especially be present during transitions or anytime we don’t feel safe.
Amongst my well educated and experienced clients, what I started to notice, is that many had not heard of the ACE index and therefore not realised that their starting point in life might be having an unknown effect on their leadership impact or potential.
What that means is there might be many people walking around your organisation with high ACE scores and carrying around trauma wondering why they can’t function in the way that other people do. Why do they have such self-doubt? Why do they struggle to speak up? Why can’t they fully engage in certain situations? There can be many reasons why people struggle and being trauma informed as a leader, manager, coach or HR team really helps and matters.
As one senior leader told me:
“Everyone looks at me and says well you are successful so you are OK, it can’t have been that bad. But inside of me I still feel anxious, and my heart starts racing every time I know conflict is looming, I’m starting to make the connection to my reactions and my high conflict childhood and the punishments I received”
Even though that leader is now approaching 50, he still can feel his trauma response in his body, his thoughts, and emotions the way he felt when he was his much younger self. He has to work hard to open up and feel safe. Working with me was the first time he’d even heard of ACE scores and it all started to make sense to him.
What do we mean by trauma?
“Trauma is not what happens to you (e.g. the experience), it's what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you. Trauma is that scarring that makes you less flexible, more rigid, less feeling and more defended." - Dr. Gabor Mate
Understanding your Adverse Childhood Experience Score
Your own ACE score is one way of coding the level of trauma you experienced as a child, and therefore the longer-term impact on your health, wellbeing and leadership.
As I mentioned my ACE score is 7/10 – that’s quite high and I’ve had to do a lot of work to heal, grow and evolve from it.
It makes me have to work harder to manage myself in high conflict situations and makes me predisposed to say yes and use overworking as a strategy to gain acceptance.
But these experiences have also given me the gift of a strong sense of compassion for others, resilience, growth and fueled my quest for purpose and meaning in my life and work. It’s no accident when I connect all the dots backwards that I chose to study psychology and business!
So what is the wisdom here for us all as leaders?
The first step is acknowledging and having compassion for yourself and others. Then building our awareness and educating ourselves around trauma informed approaches to leadership, coaching and care.
When you think about yourself and your organisation, how many leaders or employees do you think are walking around seemingly high functioning but with high ACE scores wondering why life is harder for them than others?
How many people are easily triggered into their reactive selves a lot or overwhelmed by different situations or even worse unknowingly projecting their own trauma onto other people?
How could we normalise some of these conversations at work and also recognise trauma is real? It exists and we need to be aware and informed about peoples life experiences.
Here are a few other pointers:
Psychological safety isn’t just a buzz-word, its a real need for many people in organisational life. Not everyone is going to feel the same level of comfort sharing themselves openly
Facing into your life story can happen at any stage in life and usually happens when some other life transition is going on, journey into parenthood, divorce, redundancy, even a step up into a bigger role. Anything unsettling can cause us to re-experience some of our Adverse Childhood Experiences
Let’s stop asking ourselves and others what’s wrong with you when people aren’t ‘delivering’ and start asking what happened to you? Being curious and compassionate when we find ourselves in difficult situations with people can unlock a new conversation
Let’s have the intention to put mental and emotional health much higher up our organisational agendas because it can change lives, unlock potential and growth and essential we are all humans not resources
there isn’t anyone you couldn’t love once you’ve heard their story - yours included!
For my coaching clients, I have the absolutely gift of holding space to hear their stories. I’m so proud of each and every one of them who explore their pasts to gain connection to their present and future and grow more.
Through understanding and owning our stories we understand ourselves and each other and we gain the ability to connect with consciousness, compassion and care.
This is courageous and brave work. Wouldn’t you want to be led by a leader who is really doing that great work on themselves?
Through connecting more to what happened to us, and how that informed our beliefs, values, behaviours and assumptions (our lens of life) we become clearer around what coping strategies we developed to keep our younger selves safe.
Now we are grown ups, and leading others, we can then decide what to keep and what no longer serves us now. This helps us unlock our new stories and maybe find some growth in what happened to us.
Much love and support, Carla x
Resources to support you
Please click here for more resources on Trauma and Adverse Childhood Experiences
We are also undertaking a confidential study around how Adverse Childhood Experiences impact leadership. All responses will be treated in the strictest of confidence.
If you would like to reflect on your own ACE Score and how it might impact your leadership we’d invite you to complete our 6 minute survey here.
If in the process of completing the survey, you feel you need any further support please get in touch with us or click here for supportive resources.
