Trauma-Informed Leadership

At the age of 42, I became the CEO of a global women’s rights secretariat. I had studied and worked for this moment every day since I was 18 years old. I took classes, I read books, I earned certificates, I shadowed mentors. I could build and manage a budget, strategy, and team to glowing review. I was more than qualified, but in 2021, when the offer finally came I felt wholly ill-equipped.  

Trauma had always been present, not just in my work, but in my workplace. It’s what led several of us to become women’s advocates in the first place. Yet we believed and behaved as if we both could and should leave our trauma at home. Then 2020 cracked nearly everyone I worked with—truthfully, everyone I knew—open. 

I could no longer deny, diminish, or downplay the sensed sadness and simply keep going for the ‘greater good.’ The shame was palpable; the scars visible; the screams audible. Desperate to do the right thing, to say the right thing, to make things right, but without a proposal I could easily write, I signed up for another course. This time on trauma-informed collaboration.

It wasn’t what I expected, wanted, or thought I needed. There were no right answers. Nothing I could do for anyone else. Apparently, all I could do is recognize and manage my own trauma responses (all anyone can do really). Over the weeks of learning, I would swerve between anger, despondency, and frustration—wildly, but rarely visibly. Afterall, I already knew how to manage my trauma responses—or so I thought. 

I kept asking how to help when I should have been asking for help. At the time, I couldn’t admit that my high office had brought me as emotionally low as I’d ever been. Dragged down by pre-COVID, corporate leases. By decreasing funds with increasing strings. By personalities and politics. By competition to survive undermining collective ability to thrive. By years’ brewing burnout. I wanted to stay down. I wanted to die, even if I didn’t entirely understand why.

I promised my husband I wouldn’t. I had made a similar promise once before—to my stepmom, Denise, when I was 18. I finally—agonizingly—understand what connects the two moments across time. Shame. Not anyone else’s, only my own. Sliding along my veins, winding around my wrists, slicing open my scabs.   

If you’ve heard me speak, you may know I left a violent home when I was young. One of my many CEO-preparatory classes was focused on ‘exponential fundraising’ which taught me to connect my personal story with organizational mission through a tale of ‘challenge, choice, and outcome’—and in 60 seconds no less.

When I share my story, I’m usually told how brave, resilient, and strong I am—both then and now. I always make it clear I had support. That I didn’t do it on my own—hence why you should donate—but it’s impossible to tell a complete story in 60 seconds. I didn’t feel brave, resilient, or strong; all I felt was shame. Not because I came from an abusive situation, but because I left one.  

The day I left is seared in my heart muscle if not my actual memory. All I have are disconnected flashes. I don’t remember packing a sweater or stuffed animal or how exactly I got to my dad’s house. I do remember standing on the porch hyperventilating with tears asking to live there. I remember being grateful it was Denise who opened the door, not my dad. Denise who wouldn’t turn me away. She just brought me inside and held me. It would be years before I let her do that again. 

I rarely tell this next part of the story. The part I remember with perfect clarity. The day after I left, it was my mom on the porch in tears, begging me to come back home. I had forgotten it was Mother’s Day. Still, I did not budge. The day before, I hated her for choosing him. From then on, I hated myself more, for choosing me. Free from that house, I built my own prison. Solitary confinement at home and hard labor at school. Punishment for desertion of my mom and sisters. I took the individual out, while they collectively took the hits.

And I never tell how the story almost ended. At 18, I tried to take my life. I was luckily saved by Denise, and after confessing to her my secret shame—that I’d make the same choice to leave home again and again—I started to heal. Part of my healing came through my work. I vowed to never leave anyone behind again. Through changes in policies and programs, I’d help other women and girls to go and go on.

For more than 20 years, I thought I had. I then found out someone in my family was again being abused by their partner and had been for a long time. When I tried to intervene, they told me they wouldn’t turn their back on family. They wouldn’t abandon someone they loved. They wouldn’t hurt someone who was already hurting. They weren’t me. The only thing that I stopped was their speaking to me. Shame. 

At the same time, my colleagues started speaking out more—about how we were not living up to the values and principles we espoused, how the work was toxic and retraumatizing. Shame. I felt like a fraud. I couldn’t get out of bed on the days I didn’t go to work. My husband and friends begged me to make a change, but it wasn’t their voices I heard in my head. It was my family’s. I decided to stay and make change with—and for—the team. 

And admittedly for me too. I was grappling with being a white, American woman and whether it was my time or place to lead—if it had ever been. At the same time, I wanted what I had long worked for—to be CEO—and I resented being newly on the receiving end of open judgement about the color of my skin. Shame—for both my want and my resentment. 

While not personally under attack, not initially, my sector was. The work that was my lifeline from age 18 was now described as saviorism, colonizing, and harmful. Shame. Family members were right. I hadn’t been hurt badly and for long enough to be legitimate in my efforts. Moreover, I was a bad person who did bad things. 

Amid my shame spiral—which looks like productivity if you don’t look at it too closely—I was named CEO. The same kid who tried to fix her family, but really herself, by getting all the A’s, organizing all the clubs, volunteering all the hours, was now atoning by updating all the policies, acting on all the complaints, moving all the money, diversifying all the partners. 

It was a trauma response and, despite appearances or outcomes, wasn’t healthy. Because once again, while many people thought I was doing the right thing, the brave thing, many others saw it as betrayal and not my place. Shame. Shame. Shame. This time reaching down my legs, tugging at my ankles, threatening to pull me from low to permanently under. 

Thankfully, I didn’t isolate myself the way I had as a teenager, and not only my husband, but many friends and colleagues, held out their hands until I was ready to let go. Not of them, not of my life, but my shame. And when I let that go, I was able to let go of the organization I led. 

I finally accepted there were no right answers that would lead to everyone and everything being set to rights. For all the degrees, certificates, and performance appraisals, it came down to the mirror test. And no one else could hold that mirror up, only me and only when I was ready.

I not only saw myself, but I heard my own voice again. The one that told me to leave, the one that told me to do the work, the one that told me to intervene. The one shame had drowned out. While I would change aspects of how I went about decisions, I don’t regret them. I would still make them. Again and again. And that voice had been telling me to close shop for a long, long time. 

The decision to close doesn’t negate all the good that came from the work. I am proud of what was accomplished. At the same time, that good doesn’t mean we overlook or brush aside all that wasn’t. Nor does it mean that the approach to the work and the people who do it cannot and should not change. 

But you can’t force anyone to change. Not if you can’t do it yourself and especially not by shaming them. In telling this story, in telling on myself, I’m not telling you what to do. I don’t know what is right for you or your organization. 

What I do know is that organizational beginnings and endings, transformations and turn arounds are not simply paper processes. They are emotional processes—for everyone involved. And you can’t paper over the complicated emotions that are driving the behaviors if not the actual dialogue. They are in play as much as any evidence, funding, and politics, if not more so, and must be understood and worked through to make any real progress. 

Because the thing with internalized shame is that it oozes out eventually. Spilling over everything and everyone else—usually in unhelpful ways. I don’t want to feel shame, and I don’t want to make anyone else feel it either. So I admit it. I face it. I feel better. I do better.