What is the role for attending to trauma in coaching, particularly in responding in the Covid-19 crisis? Trauma-informed coach. Julia Vaughan Smith reports
Trauma-informed coaches bring to their practice an understanding of trauma, how it presents in coaching and how to respond.
They are not doing therapy, nor do they work with clients with post-traumatic stress disorder; they maintain coaching competence boundaries. They work with people like us and clients who want personal or professional change. Two myths about trauma are “successful people are not traumatised”, and “trauma has nothing to do with coaching”. Neither is true.
Coaches who are trauma-informed say that perspective has a major impact on their practice and client outcomes. It can be valuable in helping us understand our responses to any situation, including Covid-19, and enable us to be more effective coaches in general.
Understanding trauma dynamics
Those in the trauma field understand trauma to be a lasting neuro-physiological process. It isn’t the event, but the impact of our external environment on our internal body systems. These experiences are commonly from the relationships in our earliest years, from conception. The trauma impact occurs when the child’s ‘fight and flight’ systems act as if their life is endangered by converting to a ‘freeze and fragment’ response.
This is the same neuro-physiologically, whether the environment is physically abusive or if the child’s dependency needs for food, touch, safety, warmth, loving attunement and stimulation are insufficiently met. For some, such a response might be from events in adult life, for example, being involved in a terrorist attack or being raped.
Here are two examples of clients’ trauma survival strategies that show up in coaching:
“J is a middle manager, experienced and effective in her role but works with an external coach on her work relationships. She over-works and is near burn-out. In the first session, she said she experienced long periods of separation after birth as her mother had a long-term physical illness. Under great pressure at work, she gets up at 5am each day to run for an hour, using caffeine to sustain her. She suffers from lack of rest and high stress responses. She realises she is short-tempered and impatient with colleagues and subordinates.”
“S is a training manager in a large company, getting internal coaching from an accredited coach. The coach finds him challenging. She says, ‘He talks a lot about things that don’t seem relevant to what we are supposed to be working on. He just takes over. It leaves me very frustrated and thinking that I am failing as a coach, that I am just not doing a good job. He says he wants to continue with the coaching, but it doesn’t seem to go anywhere.”
These examples indicate to the coach that this might be part of a trauma dynamic. J’s overwork, almost compulsive exercise and burn-out are survival strategies. S’s survival appears to be avoidance and distraction; while his coach’s are to blame herself and rescue the client.
Trauma includes continual heightened levels of stress and anxiety, which affects all of us and of course may be highly relevant in the context of the current crisis, particularly for those working on the front line. For some, these levels of feeling unsafe and stressed are so familiar they are taken as ‘normal’. J is ignoring them and the information from her body that it needs rest.
To survive the impact of trauma, in addition to survival strategies, we develop a survival self. All survival responses are attempts to keep us safe in an environment that feels unsafe. For example, when we are left alone for long periods as a baby, we learn that expressing our needs doesn’t work, no one comes, so we develop an independence and ways of blocking our emotional responses. Or, if our parents assume a negative critical stance towards us, we attempt to be perfect or to repress parts of ourselves they don’t seem to like. We try to shape ourselves to avoid the sting of that criticism. These survival adaptations in the ‘there and then’ persist into adult life and play out in our work and home lives.
J’s coach has additional information about J’s history and the traumatising impact of separation from her mother for long periods of time. S’s coach doesn’t have autobiographical information. However, many of our earliest experiences are not available to us through explicit, cognitively recalled, memory. We are often not able, therefore, to say what happened to us, but our body systems carry the impact.
Trauma-informed coaching uses biographical information that is available as data to help clients make links between their ‘here and now’ with their ‘there and then’. We remain working in the present.
The internal trauma dynamic is best described in the model of the three selves present in trauma shown in Figure 1 (below). The trauma self carries the deeply repressed and fragmented implicit memories and feelings of the traumatising experience(s). These will include shame, rage, terror and deep loneliness. The Survival Self, which emerges to keep these trauma parts deeply repressed and are trauma defence strategies. The Healthy Self, which is unaffected by the lasting trauma, is where we feel safe within ourselves, and able to take healthy decisions.
The proportion of the three selves varies, depending on our individual traumatising history. For example, the healthy self is quite small for some, with larger survival and trauma selves. In others, the healthy self is larger, with smaller survival and trauma selves. Accessing the resources of clear thinking, self-compassion, autonomous action and facing reality within the healthy self are those needed for personal growth and behavioural change.
The proportion also changes depending on the environment in the ‘here and now’, because the present triggers or continues our sense of lack of safety, as in the case of J, S and S’s coach. It might be that the ‘here and now’ environment is life-threatening, as is currently the case for those seriously ill with the Coronavirus or those responsible for their daily care.
The ‘there and then’ of our life experience creates lasting and developing survival strategies for coping in the ‘here and now’. Another misunderstanding is to underestimate the extent to which our earliest experiences continue to reverberate in the present. The past lives through the present unless we do deep emotional work to shift the lasting impact on the neuro-physiology. Many clients working with trauma-informed coaches express surprise that how they are responding to their environment may be rooted in early childhood.
We can’t coach the survival strategies or parts; they have a driven nature to them, appear to be ‘the only way to respond’, and are resistant to change. Coaching often stalls when clients’, or coaches’, survival selves predominate. This leads to frustration, avoidance and confusion.
If we work with clients who are operating through their survival self, we may invoke our own survival parts (as S’s coach did) as our anxiety is triggered by this lack of contact. We may then become over directive, find we are doing all the work, seek to rescue the client, and/or tell ourselves we ‘are not good enough’ or ‘need to get a result’. Both are in an entangled and unproductive relationship.
Survival strategies
These include:
- Dissociation: a numbness, cut off from other feelings, disconnection with what is going on around
- Distraction: avoiding what is really going on and the action that needs taking
- Addictions: to work, running, alcohol, drugs, used to numb feelings
- Denial: a refusal to acknowledge reality
- Control: of self and others
- Depression and anxiety
- Rescuing others and denying our own needs
- Punishing or hurting others or ourselves
- Blaming ourselves or feeling responsible when we are not
- Feeling hopeless and helpless, avoiding taking action
The survival self also carries those beliefs, thoughts and behaviour that were demanded of, or created within us, when children. Examples of such narratives include: I am not good enough, I am not lovable, I am responsible, I am not very bright, I must please others, I must be strong.
Beneath the survival self is the heightened level of trauma anxiety of being unwanted, unloved or unprotected.
You can read more about how trauma is internalised, what kinds of experience cause it, and about the trauma, survival and healthy selves and how they present in coaching in my book, Coaching and Trauma: From Surviving to Thriving (2019).
Trauma-informed coaching and Covid-19
Many of us carry trauma dynamics; it is not rare or limited to certain sections of the population. The current situation with the Covid-19 virus brings an uncertain, stressful and anxiety-fuelled experience for many. We have all had to make a sudden and dramatic shift in our lives. Those working directly with people in the NHS and care sectors know they carry an enhanced risk of infection. Those with underlying health conditions know they have an enhanced risk of becoming seriously ill or dying sooner than they might have done.
The virus itself therefore can retraumatise some, while the public health policy of social isolation and distancing, which is about survival, is likely to be retraumatising by triggering ‘there and then’ experience.
Our sense of safety is determined by our actual experience in the ‘here and now’ (as for health workers and patients) and the lack of safety experienced in the ‘there and then’ which is being reactivated. Those with trauma histories are vulnerable to experiencing heightened anxiety, stress and the enactment of survival strategies and parts. I noticed I started feeling numb (dissociation), then my ‘survival manager’ part took over and I became hyper-active in organising food, my sleep was affected and I couldn’t settle to read. However, I recognise these as survival responses and am able to acknowledge the times I feel anxiety, that is normal, and that I can ensure I stay in my healthy self as much as is possible. That also enables me to be self-compassionate when I slip back to survival.
Observing the responses of others I see denial, as in those who claim ‘not to believe in the virus’, survival parts trying to control or numb events, those who are experiencing catastrophising thoughts, and panic. All these are entirely understandable from a trauma perspective. However, they are not helpful to us as the levels of anxiety and stress that underpin them have a negative impact on our wellbeing, our compassion, and our immune system.
Being traumatised means we were a victim of the behaviour of another; as children this is primarily our parents acting from their own survival self. Trauma is transgenerational.
The perpetrator-victim dynamic is part of the survival self. Where the trauma has resulted from physical or sexual abuse, internalisation of the perpetrator-victim dynamic is most heightened; however, it is part of all trauma responses.
Perpetrator energy is present when we feel threatened and we lash out, verbally or physically, at ourselves or at others. It is also present in physical, domestic and child abuse.
Victim-attitude survival strategy is where we sink into a place of helplessness, feeling no sense of our own agency, unable to give direction to our life. We may blame others for our current situation when they are blameless. We project onto them the ‘there and then’ feelings of being a helpless child. Or we blame ourselves, or feel responsible for our situation when it is not of our making.
Most of us are not helpless as adults; we have other healthy resources available to us. It is understandable at times generally, and now specifically, that we should fall into this place of victim-attitude, even though there are practical things we can do and different thoughts we can be driven by.
There is some sense currently that people feel more easily offended or become more judgemental and critical of others: these are survival responses. At the same time, there are those who are victims of circumstance, with job and financial worries, who live alone or in an abusive family. Their feelings of being an actual victim of the environment include despair, rage, shame, aloneness and helplessness.
Supporting clients
Whatever the context is, supporting our clients starts with self-reflection. We are most supportive when we meet our clients from our healthy self. That is our resourceful, creative, self-confident, compassionate and
self-aware part. We are least supportive when we are in survival and wanting to rescue, or deny, control or avoid what is present. We therefore need to attend to ourselves, to explore our feelings and the anxiety or panic we experience, and while allowing ourselves to accept those feelings, to take action to reduce our level of anxiety. If we can do that for ourselves, we are better placed to support clients doing that for themselves.
Some of the ways we have used in the past might be now restricted, for example, spending a lot of time outside in nature. However, we are resourceful and we can find ways that will help us now if we stay with our healthy self.
Being trauma-informed means we:
- can actively listen without rescuing or distancing
- normalise feelings of anxiety and distraction when they appear normal in the circumstances
- recognise anxiety in clients or others who may become critical or aggressive to us, and not respond aggressively or go into self-blame victim attitude
- support clients to recognise that negative thoughts lead to feeling worse, and they can be authentically reframed, changing how we feel. This is not about mindless positivity – that is also a survival strategy
- identify and explore potential survival strategies with clients, including perpetrator-victim-rescuer dynamics
- help clients make links between their ‘here and now’ emotional responses, thoughts and behaviour to life experiences in the ‘there and then’. Use biographical information to inform this
- aim all interventions at the client’s healthy self
- support clients to get in touch with what it feels like to be in their healthy self, where they feel calm and safe. Self-regulation breathing and grounding exercises can help
- support clients to stay in connection with their healthy self for as long and as frequently as is possible. From there they can make and implement healthy choices for themselves, be creative and have self-compassion.
Our role, as always, is to stay in our healthy self, not to over-identify with the client, and to ‘stay coaching’ – to continue with active listening, stay present, ask powerful questions, use your coaching skills and protect the coaching relationship boundaries. Being in survival ourselves will take us away from this, and we will be doing ‘faux-coaching’ or ‘faux-counselling’.
Being trauma-informed helps us understand and work with our own trauma-dynamics and have a different language and perspective to bring to work with our clients. My book, written before the virus emerged, explores this topic in depth with case examples.
- For my blogs on trauma-informed coaching go to: www.coachingandtrauma.com/blog
References
- V Broughton, Becoming your True Self, Green Balloon Publishing, 2014
- B Rothschild, The Body Remembers, Vol 2: Revolutionizing Trauma Treatment, W.W.Norton, 2017
- F Ruppert, Trauma, Angst und Liebe, Kösel, Verlagsgruppe Random House, 2012
- F Ruppert, Trauma, Fear and Love, Green Balloon Publishing, 2014
- F Ruppert, Early Trauma, Green Balloon Publishing, 2014
- J Vaughan Smith, Coaching and Trauma: From Surviving to Thriving, Open University Press/McGraw-Hill, 2019
- J Vaughan Smith, Therapist to Coach, Open University Press/McGraw-Hill, 2006
- www.juliavaughansmith.com
- www.coachingandtrauma.com
