My professional development investment for 2024 was completing the Trauma-Informed Coaching Certification program (TICC) with Thomas Hübl and Amy Elizabeth Fox, after hearing both of them multiple times on the Coaches Rising podcast. While I was familiar with many of the concepts shared in the program (Immunity to Change, Internal Family Systems (covered in chapter 3 of my book), polyvagal theory), my experience was profound in uncovering and starting to deal with some of my own unprocessed trauma.

Let’s start by defining trauma. Most people think of trauma as having life-threatening or abusive experiences, what practitioners would call big-T Trauma. This program instead defined trauma as any experience which our bodies could not fully process at the time it happened. That would include big-T Trauma experiences, but could include what seem like minor experiences if you were not equipped to handle them.

Not being able to process the experience matters because The Body Keeps The Score, as Besser van der Kolk’s book described it. Anything that activates our survival instincts leads to a flood of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline designed to activate our system to take action to survive the situation (fight or flight are the most common, but some people react with freeze or fawn). If we are unable to do so, that elevated response is stored within the body, leading to accumulated stress over time. Other animals don’t do that; when they experience a survival situation, their body processes the hormones so they can literally shake it off and return to their baseline state, as described by Robert Sapolsky in his book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. But humans hold onto the stress.

These accumulated trauma experiences show up later in life as people getting triggered to display disproportionate reactions to situations. I liked how Pete Walker described this phenomenon in his book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving as an emotional flashback. In those moments of triggering, we are no longer our adult selves, but we are acting as the child we were when we first experienced that situation. When a 50-year-old CEO is screaming at his team, he is not acting as the rational adult, but as a 3-year-old throwing a tantrum (Julie Diamond calls this acting from a low-power identity while holding a high-power identity the most fundamental misuse of power in her book, Power: A User’s Guide).

And that’s why becoming more trauma-aware is so important even if you’re not a practitioner, because trying to reason with the CEO in that moment will never work; he will not be able to act as a rational adult until you find a way to first calm down his inner 3-year-old. But even placating the toddler inside will not solve the problem, because the next situation where he doesn’t get what he wants will re-trigger him into that tantrum. His reaction is frozen from the time of his first experience of that situation, and he will not respond to such situations appropriately as an adult until he processes the original trauma.

That processing is the heart of any trauma-informed healing work. The person has to go back to that original experience, and feel the feelings that were unmanageable at the time: the fear, the sadness, the anger, whatever arises. When those feelings are fully felt, the body processes them and the person can let go of their automatic reaction that was deeply protective of their survival in the moment, but no longer serves them.

I’ll share a personal example from my processing in the program this year. When I was a child, my desires and feelings were rarely honored and respected, as my mother had her own agenda for what I should be doing. So it made sense for me to learn that I should just do what I was told because that was what earned me approval and love from my mother. When I got angry or sad or scared, she told me that I didn’t really feel that way (a form of parental gaslighting) as a way to protect her sense of herself as a great mother (survival strategies all the way down). So I learned to bottle up those feelings inside and never express them, as that was the way I found to manage the situation as a child. But those feelings never got dealt with: the rage I felt at never getting to do what I wanted to, the terror I felt at not being in control of my own life, the sadness of not feeling supported by my mother.

How do those never processed feelings show up today? My son was five years old this year, and often behaved like a five year old – pushing boundaries, contradicting me, teasing his sister, etc. And when he did so, all of those feelings came flooding out, especially rage at feeling “disrespected” and not in control. So if I wasn’t mindful, my inner child threw a temper tantrum, letting loose on my son the way I never could with my mother (as she did with me in response to her own upbringing with my grandfather). But that’s deeply unfair to my son and a mis-use of my power over him as a parent. I learned that not feeling in control is a trigger for me to fall back into that five-year-old self and let out the rage that has been simmering inside for decades.

Being aware of that reactive pattern is not enough, though. I can’t be hyper-vigilant at every moment, and I am easily triggered into that angry child state, especially when I’m tired or hungry or otherwise under-resourced. So part of my healing work is to process those original feelings, and feel the terror and sadness I felt as a child so they can be released from my body.

In the first week of the course, Thomas Hübl asked us to reflect on the following question:

“How beautiful do you feel when you need something?”

That question destroyed me. I felt anything but beautiful. I felt ugly, I felt scared, I felt unworthy which made me feel angry. That makes sense! Needing something was not safe for me as a child, because my emotional needs were not met by my parents. But being in that community of healers during the course meant that I had the support to feel my feelings. They had a team of trauma therapists on hand, and I went to one of them after that question triggered an hour of literally vibrating with strong emotions. I burst into tears as soon as we got to a private area, and cried for most of the next 30 minutes as all of these emotions poured out that I did not allow myself to feel as a child. And I was supported and validated in those emotions in a way I rarely was back then, and that was extremely healing.

I was not completely healed in that moment, but I more clearly saw the pattern of my own reactions, and the strong emotions behind them that I had never allowed myself to feel. With that awareness and more self-compassion, I started to do the healing work to stop blaming others for how I felt and reacted, and take responsibility for my own reactions. I also hired a somatic coach to help me process those childhood emotions stored up inside my body. And I’ve started to see the beauty of the interdependence of humans needing each other; while my counterdependent tendencies made sense in a childhood environment where I received little support, they no longer serve me if I want more connection in my life.

As part of the course, we learned how trauma gets passed between generations – the child learns certain reactions from their parents, and then replicates them with their own children to create the trauma reactions anew in the next generation. My mother developed her patterns to survive her own father’s controlling behaviors. When I started to process my own anger, I saw her with more compassion as doing the best she could as a parent despite the trauma she suffered as a child (including living through the Korean war). And I’m seeing the ways in which I am passing on those patterns to my children despite my efforts to break the chain.

Becoming more trauma-informed inevitably leads to compassion that everybody is doing the best they can. There is a reason they are acting in ways that may look irrational or unhelpful. But their reactions are likely an understandable response to their experiences; if you had gone through what they did, perhaps you would act the same way as well. That’s not to say that we are helpless automatons responding to our environments – we do have choices in how we respond – but it takes support to overcome the survival responses we learned in response to our childhood environments.

And that brings us back to the course. The trauma practitioner’s role is to create the necessary safety and support for a person to process their experiences, just like the course therapist and my somatic coach helped me to process mine. A trained practitioner can see what’s roiling beneath the surface, and ask questions to surface the underlying tension, as Hübl’s question did for me. Once the strong emotions arise, they create the space and time and connection to allow the emotions to run their course. We were taught in the first week of the course to slow _way_ down and be present to what’s happening. That’s the essence of trauma-informed support work – to create the connection with the person in front of us so that they feel safe and supported to process their own experience.

But a practitioner can not enable somebody else’s healing until they have learned to deal with their own trauma. Otherwise, they might get triggered themselves, projecting their own past onto the person in front of them. When a practitioner is aware of their own triggers and can calm themselves appropriately, they can provide the love and support to enable somebody else’s processing and healing. I believe that Hübl’s triggering question was designed to get us to confront our own unprocessed trauma so that we could become the vessels through which others could be healed.

This course felt transformative for me. I felt like I reached a new level of equanimity this fall, handling situations that would have previously been stressful for me with greater calm and capacity. I still get triggered occasionally but I am more aware of my patterns and can more quickly reset when I react from those childhood wounds. I am still a work in progress (personal development is never-ending), but I do feel more at peace with recognizing my own limitations (and needs!) rather than constantly expecting myself to do more and reach an unattainable level of accomplishment without help.

And the course showed up in my coaching as well. I had moments of deeper connection where I notice something flash by, and instead of letting it go, I pause the conversation to slow down what just happened so we can unpack it together. These occasionally lead to transformative insights that the client can use to understand their own patterns more deeply and create new possibilities for themselves. I haven’t fully integrated these behaviors into my coaching, but that’s part of my intent for 2025.

Thank you to all those who contributed to my transformative experience this year, including Thomas Hübl and Amy Elizabeth Fox for leading the course, the staff at Mobius Leadership for managing the course and supporting us students throughout the journey, and my fellow students in supporting me, especially Christy, Jen, Jan Philipp, Christina, and Don’Angelo.