Last week, I attended the 9th annual relational coaching conference hosted by the Hult Ashridge Center for Executive Coaching.
I wasn’t particularly attracted by its subject, “Trauma-Informed Coaching.” However, I decided to be curious and attend. It’s the attitude I know and appreciate with Ashridge.
That I wasn’t attracted is linked to the buzzword-like presence of the word “trauma,” especially when it results in victimizing those affected by trauma.
One of the colleagues I met brought a refreshing reaction to this. She described herself as a trauma expert. Her interest in the matter was guided by her own trauma experience, which she qualified as an awakening. For her, it was all about perspective and thus the way one relates to one’s experience.
As the conference unfolded, I started noticing the different definitions of trauma.
George Kohlrieser connected trauma with grief. For him, it had a lot to do with the necessity to let go of an event and reconnect with the joy of life. In his keynote, he integrated several views on trauma. One of which is that trauma is “what happened inside of you as a result of what happened to you.” It’s a definition based on Gabor Maté’s work.
In her workshop, inviting coaches to recognize hidden trauma, Anne Remy described trauma as the individual’s inability to process the event. Whatever body and mind experienced, the individual didn’t have the means to put the pieces together. It’s a broad definition of trauma that ended up for me in a link between trauma and the idea of script as described in Transactional Analysis. In a way, the script corresponds to the stories we tell ourselves.
Like Kohlrieser, Heather Mason connected trauma with the nervous system, explaining how trauma becomes encoded in it. She further explained how new events can trigger the nervous system, and if doing so beyond a threshold, reactivate our old response to the trauma. The current situation is connected with the original experience of trauma. In this context, she explained how practices like meditation could assist in preventing such thresholds from being met.
In a workshop on the craft of the secure base coach, Marnix Reijmerink shared his definition of trauma as “a disrupted connection due to an impactful experience which has not been able to be discharged or healed due to the absence of or unavailability of a secure base.”
The conference ended up being an excellent reminder of the richness of definitions available and, consequently, the vast number of approaches to trauma. Many of which are complementary to the way I think about coaching.
