All leaders have unknown or unacknowledged drivers that fuel behavior. Sometimes, we have attitudes, words, and actions detrimental to ourselves and those we lead. Our inner critic screams, “You’re not good enough.” Sometimes, we chastise ourselves for failing to see how, in the moment, we did the best we could. Instead, we tell ourselves, “You’re a mess, too sensitive, angry, pushy, or needy.” A significant driver is our difficulty identifying what our real needs are. As leaders, we struggle with overt and covert messages to deny our needs, so there’s often a chasm between our head and our heart.
The Role of Needs in Leadership Trauma
Need is God-given inner yearning to be known, loved, and cared for. We were born with needs. However, we sometimes lump legitimate needs, including connection now and in childhood, with being needy or our temptations and sins. While these may be responses to unmet needs, we must be aware of them. When our true need to attach in healthy ways has been thwarted, anything or anyone may hold the false promise of relieving our pain. We must understand our needs do not get nailed to the cross. Our deepest needs are to be acknowledged and worked out in a relationship with God.
The Importance of Community in Healing
We also need fellow believers who are becoming fully embodied and whose faith is spiritually grounded and lived out daily. In The State of Your Church, a research book from The Barna Group, a pastor and author shared, “We need sages to advise us, leaders to direct us or hold us accountable, peers to remind us that we aren’t alone, healers to dress our wounds and companions who carry us when we can’t carry on.” The fact is whether we work in a Christian or secular setting, all leaders desperately need this.
Stages of Recovery from Trauma
The Lord and trustworthy friends can meet us in what we feel is a mess. In relationships, we find the grace, compassion, and courage to see, hear, and speak messy truths about how we lead and how we can heal. Dr. Judith Lewis Herman writes that recovery from trauma can unfold in stages. She notes, “The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central focus of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life.” More recently she added justice as the fourth stage (Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror; New York: Basic Books, 1992). In this book, Dr. Herman and others offer helpful frameworks that undergird our approach to healing leadership trauma.
Much of the attention in popular discourse during the leadership crisis focuses on the toxic leader. We see employees and followers call out a leader and resign en masse to guard or tend to their own mental health. Studies have categorized several leadership styles. We’ve encountered them or identify with one or a combination, which is usually the case, but before we dive in, let’s address how many leaders are dealing with trauma.
Bessel van der Kolk wrote in The Body Keeps the Score,
Trauma causes people to remain stuck in interpreting the present in light of an unchanging past. The scene you recreate in a structure may or may not be precisely what happened, but it represents the structure of your inner world: your internal map and the hidden rules that you have been living by.
Defining Leadership Trauma and Its Triggers
Leadership Trauma is when a leader’s current struggles in life and work trigger flash-forwards of a feared future. We’ve expanded the definition of leadership trauma to also include how current stressors may trigger flashbacks of past trauma. Those triggers may cause us to reexperience past hurt and trauma psychosocially, emotionally, physically, spiritually, or interpersonally. If leaders do not attend to this reality, they are especially susceptible to reenactment, which is when trauma in our past that has not been resolved follows us into new situations that remind us of the past.
Breaking the Cycle of Reenactment in Leadership
Most of us naturally believe that somehow, we can fix it, make it better, or we can respond differently, causing the person or the situation to change. Consequently, the leader may “ignore their own suffering and may dehumanize themselves to ‘get through it.’ . . . They can then stay in unhealthy or dysfunctional situations far longer than they should, layering damage on damage and risking dehumanizing those around them in turn” (Arzhang Kamarei, “Trauma May Explain The Suffering of CEOs, Leaders, & Startup Founders,” Kamarei Advisory). We may punish or self-sabotage to deny the awful truth that our power is limited. Then at some point we realize how much we need the Savior to heal and transform how we lead.
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Taken from Healing Leadership Trauma by Nicholas Rowe, PhD and Sheila Wise Rowe. MEd. ©2024 by Nicholas Rowe, PhD and Sheila Wise Rowe. MEd. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
