Insights · Trauma-informed leadership
Trauma-informed leadership: leading people who carry wounds
Every team has people who carry old wounds. Most of the time you do not see them. Until a reaction is far stronger than the situation seems to warrant, or a colleague becomes someone everybody tiptoes around. Trauma-informed leadership does not mean turning your company into a clinic. It means being sensitive to trauma, and taking it into account in the way you lead.
By Dirk Jan Versluis, registered psychologist (NIP). Updated 15 November 2026.
Contents
What trauma-informed leadership means
Trauma-informed leadership means that, as a leader, you take the phenomenon of trauma into account. You are sensitive to it. That does not necessarily mean you actively do much with trauma. It is above all a matter of awareness: when trauma is present, can you sense it? And do you have the capacity to take it into account in how you lead?
This is different from working on your own history as a leader, which we write about in leadership and trauma. Here the question is how you lead when you know that your people carry wounds too. Leadership generally serves a business or organizational goal, and to reach it you rely on the people in your organization. Therapeutic skills can be useful when you know trauma is present on the work floor. That does not mean you should start running a psychiatric clinic.
Three ways trauma enters the workplace
There are forms of trauma that show up directly in your leadership:
- Traumatizing experiences at work. An accident, aggression from a client, the sudden death of a colleague, a round of layoffs. Events that hit people hard while they were doing their job.
- Private patterns that come to work. Old wounds from someone’s personal life that enter the workplace. This is where the line between work and private life fades.
- Collective trauma in the organization. When the company itself has been through something that settled in its body: a crisis, a betrayal, a founder who left abruptly. Read more in the ECA Leadership Framework.
How to recognize trauma in an employee or team
The basic signal is disproportion. There is a gap between what is happening, the trigger, and the response. The response feels too intense, too loaded or too emotional for the situation.
This is partly subjective. There is no benchmark for a normal, proportionate reaction. But you can feel when something is clearly off balance. And you often see a second signal: colleagues experience this person as difficult or complicated. That does not make them unpleasant colleagues. But a certain caution tends to grow around them.
- reactions that are much stronger than the situation seems to call for
- colleagues who start tiptoeing around someone
- the same kind of conflict returning with different people
- withdrawal or shutting down when pressure rises
- a team that has become cautious since a particular event
What goes wrong when a leader does not see it
When a leader misses it, something unfolds in silence, with a dynamic of its own. The trauma energies a person brings with them can repeat their pattern at work, and that pattern is usually driven by pain.
The result is what we call pain frequencies in the body of the company. The team, the department or the organization becomes contaminated, as it were, with the trauma traces of one person. Not because anyone wants it, but because nobody sees what is happening.
A leader is not a therapist
So what does belong to your role? Start with what comes to the surface in the work context. Behind it lies another reality, the reality behind someone’s front door, and that is confidential. You do not know exactly what people have been through, or which therapies they have had. Sadly, sometimes those therapies have caused harm of their own.
Sometimes the things people carry inside are too shameful to talk about. There may be fear of consequences at work, or deep shame around a psychiatric diagnosis or a particular trauma. Someone may have experienced sexual trauma and never told anyone, which is understandable, out of fear of how others will see them. That reality belongs in the safety of a therapy room.
In an ideal world there might be no secrets at all. But people also have a right to their privacy. As a leader, you mainly deal with what you can perceive in the reality of the business. To be able to discuss that, you need a very good relationship with the person. And that requires psychological safety.
Psychological safety: accessible, responsive, engaged
Psychologist Sue Johnson, one of the founders of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), described three qualities of an emotionally safe relationship. They translate remarkably well to leadership:
- Accessible. Can your employee come to you?
- Responsive. Do you really listen, and respond to what you hear?
- Engaged. Do you show that you care about them?
For someone who grew up with emotional neglect, a leader with these three qualities can mean a great deal. They are not used to that kind of attachment behavior from someone in charge. You can become a genuinely important figure for them.
It is also worth knowing the opposite. You may offer real safety and still meet distrust. Someone may keep you at a distance because you come too close, or because they have been used to managing on their own for so long that they automatically avoid you. That in itself can be a trauma pattern. If you are in the relationship in a psychologically safe way and you get an atypical response, that is diagnostically important. You would expect people to respond well to safety. When they do not, there is usually trauma underneath.
Paradoxically, trauma sometimes shows more clearly in a relationship with someone who is safe and available than with a harsh, unpleasant boss. A psyche that is used to surviving can cope surprisingly well with harshness.
Where the popular approach falls short
The popular trauma-informed approach can fall short when it puts too much emphasis on trauma, as if it were a concept that needs emancipating. It can become fashionable, and then it actually gets in the way of contact with the whole person.
Someone who has been through a lot of trauma, or better said, who has survived it, is above all a person with a soul’s path and a life story. They are not defined by trauma. You do not want an identity to form around trauma: that fixes things in place unnecessarily.
In fact, you often see the opposite. People who experienced a form of captivity, in a figurative sense, become seekers of freedom. People who were never allowed to think freely develop themselves in intellectual freedom. Others find a purpose in what they lived through. That is why we always approach trauma from the perspective of personal development: inner growth, the path of the soul, and not too much focus on the trauma itself.
What you can do tomorrow
- Notice disproportion with curiosity. When a reaction is bigger than the situation, ask yourself what might be underneath, instead of judging the person.
- Be accessible, responsive and engaged. Make it easy to come to you, listen properly, and show that you care.
- Respect the front door. Talk about what shows at work, not about someone’s past. Leave the rest to the therapy room.
- Look at yourself as well. Your own patterns shape how safe you are for others. Read more about your own history as a leader.
At Triunify
Seeing patterns in people, in leaders and in the company
We start by looking for patterns in three places: in individual employees, in the leader, and in the body of the company itself. With the Deep Pattern Assessment we map the patterns beneath someone’s leadership, including the traces of trauma.
We coach leaders, and we help them learn to sense their team, their organization and their company, so that they can feel in their own body where trauma patterns are held. And where it helps, we work directly with teams.
Free and confidential, 45 minutes, online.
Frequently asked questions
What is trauma-informed leadership?
Leading with awareness that people may carry trauma, and taking that into account. It is above all a matter of sensitivity: can you sense trauma, and can you lead in a way that does not reinforce it?
Does a trauma-informed leader need to be a therapist?
No. A leader works with what shows up at work. What lies behind someone’s front door is confidential and belongs in a therapy room. What a leader can offer is a safe relationship.
How do you recognize trauma in an employee?
The main signal is disproportion: a reaction that is much stronger than the situation seems to warrant. Often colleagues also become cautious around that person.
What makes a leader psychologically safe?
Sue Johnson, one of the founders of Emotionally Focused Therapy, named three qualities of a safe relationship: being accessible, responsive and engaged. They apply to leadership as well.
Can trauma-informed leadership go too far?
Yes, when trauma becomes the center of attention or part of someone’s identity. People are more than their trauma. We approach it from the perspective of personal development.
Read also
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