What Is Trauma-Informed Coaching?

I used to wish there was some kind of therapy for “people that don’t really need therapy but can’t seem to get their shit together”. I said as much to a close friend of mine, and she agreed. Neither of us could pinpoint anything particularly ‘wrong’ with us. Nor – more pertinently – could we figure out any ‘reason’ for us to be such…mildly middle-class fuck-ups. Successful, sociable and sorted on the outside. Wracked with anxiety, self-loathing and a desperate sense of failure on the inside. Reader, we both massively needed some therapy.

However. In some ways I’m glad I didn’t go down that route, because I ended up finding coaching. Talk therapy would absolutely have helped me unravel my emotional landscape. It would have made me see that my thoughts and behaviours were perfectly normal. Therapy would have given me the tools to manage my anxiety and cope much better with my life circumstances. But coaching gave me more forward momentum. Coaching says, “OK, so that’s what happened (or didn't happen). But where will we go now?” Coaching asks, “this is where we are, but where do we want to be?” Undertaking coaching is incredibly brave, because it’s a leap of faith from what is to what could be. It leads you into unexpected places. It gets you facing your fears and smashing through them – not without quite a few tears, in my personal experience. But then I do love a good cry.

A trauma is anything that leaves an imprint on the body’s safety alert system, and can range from chronic, low-level stress to a major, acute threat to life.

Coaching that’s trauma-informed gets into the root of those fears with care and attention to a client’s whole story. It takes into account the stressors and unresolved traumas that are unique to a person over their lifetime. A trauma is anything that leaves an imprint on the body’s safety alert system, and can range from chronic, low-level stress to a major, acute threat to life. Some people are able to pinpoint certain stressors, while others may not remember. For some, the most impactful stress they have experienced might have happened before the age of three or even while in the womb. Childhood stress can leave the most lasting impact, and is often overlooked when we’re trying to figure out why we’re struggling in adulthood.

Childhood stress can leave the most lasting impact, and is often overlooked when we’re trying to figure out why we’re struggling in adulthood.

Which is the insidious thing about trauma when it’s left unresolved. It can leave us with a story of who we are that’s entirely false. Trauma can leave us with belief systems that limit what we’re truly capable of. We might consciously have ambitions and desires and hopes and dreams, but if we don’t feel safe on a subconscious level to see them through, we will struggle to reach them. Imagine the mind is like a computer. The conscious mind is just 5% of what's going on – kind of like the user interface, it’s what you can see onscreen. The subconscious mind, the other 95%, is all the coding and processing going on at the back-end. It props up the entire system without us being aware of what’s going on. The degree to which we hold certain beliefs might not even enter the conscious mind – which can make it all the more confusing when we get stuck in patterns that uphold them.

Trauma can leave us with belief systems that limit what we’re truly capable of.

The basis of these patterns is often fear. The sympathetic nervous system – the branch of the autonomic nervous system that’s responsible for our fight-or-flight response – is tuned into anything it understands as a threat to our safety. Its responses aren’t rational, especially when unresolved trauma has left its mark. Anger issues (fight), anxiety (flight), low moods and depression (freeze), along with regular emotional overwhelm and feelings of panic are all signs of nervous system dysregulation. So are addictions like smoking, alcohol dependency, disordered eating and workaholism. The addiction is used as a crutch to ‘manage’ the emotional pain at its root, which is why trying to stop certain habits can feel so damn bleak.

So just as Dr Gabor Maté says “ask not why the addiction, but why the pain”, trauma-informed coaching asks not “why the failure,” but “why the fear?” We work to begin regulating the autonomic nervous system first, using a combination of historical and emotional clues to figure out where things have gone off-kilter. Layer by layer, we clear away the limiting belief systems – the fear stories, the shame conditioning, the not-enough-ness – and establish the internal safety required for true clarity to emerge around what desires and dreams are truly at the heart. We develop not just the mindset, but the resilience to go out and chase those dreams and ambitions and hopes and desires. It’s a reclamation of the mind-body system, from being ruled by overdeveloped survival instincts to being driven by a desire to thrive and connect and succeed – feeling deeply safe and worthy to do so.

Find out more about coaching that hits deep, or drop me a message in the form below to arrange a chat.