Beatha Coaching

This is an extended version of a short piece I recently posted on Substack. If you would like to connect with my writing more frequently Substack is the place to do it. You can subscribe free and receive my shorter pieces into your inbox every weekday.

I had an interesting conversation with a fellow coach recently. She asked me about a definition of trauma that would be acceptable in the workplace. We all understand trauma as it relates to severe life events, but what about the everyday experiences of overwork, discrimination, and precarity, that can combine to create conditions of trauma at work? My usual go-to is Pat Ogden. The founder of sensorimotor psychotherapy as both field and approach, Ogden identifies trauma as the outcome of any experience that exceeds the bounds of our regulated window of tolerance, resulting in the disabling of cortical activity and the triggering of instinctive defences, including extremes of emotion beyond what would be considered usual for the individual (Ogden, 2021). My definition of a trauma is therefore any experience or event that overwhelms our nervous system’s ability to cope, and trauma is the resulting dysregulation. In this sense, trauma is distinctly physiological. 

When facing a stressor of any kind, our nervous system is designed to respond flexibly, react and then reset. Low-level stressors can include a minor deadline, running late, feeling slightly but not overwhelmingly under pressure, learning a new skill, and can also include excitement such as during sports or sexual connection. As we go up the scale of stress, our nervous system responds with increased reactivity, stimulating more of the release of neurochemicals such as adrenaline and cortisol that generate energy and muscle response. When we hit a certain threshold of stress arousal without release, we tip over into a freeze where heart rate, respiration, and activity levels actually slow, putting us into a protective state that feels numb and spacey rather than racing and alert. If at any point on this scale the stressor is removed, our nervous system resets and we come back into rest and digest where we can recover and focus on a wider variety of stimuli again. These are normal functions of a healthy autonomic nervous system or ANS (autonomic meaning it operates without the need for conscious thought or decision making), and our window of tolerance is the space between highly activated (hyperaroused) and freeze (hypoaroused) in which we can safely operate without the ANS needing to take over. Trauma overwhelms this system, pushing us into either extreme state or yo-yoing between the two without sufficient time in the window to recover and reset. It can also narrow the window of tolerance, making it harder to stay within it (for more on the stress-trauma continuum see Stanley, 2019). I would describe this state as overwhelmed because we are no longer appropriately regulated – for example, we might be in a situation that calls for calm problem solving but instead be hyperaroused, feeling scared and angry, and expressing strong or potentially inappropriate emotions without our normal ability to exert self-control.

What this means is clear to me, but is that clear to a non-specialist? My colleague’s concern was with the use of the word overwhelm. She felt that people would fail to come forward for support in the workplace if doing so implied they could not cope. I think this discussion points to an interesting linguistic tangle, a semantic argument in the most literal sense, where words have different meanings depending on your context.  I understand overwhelm to be the result of a conglomeration of external factors that have built up in such a way that our nervous system is under severe pressure and unable to spend enough time in rest and digest, a situation that will ultimately lead to burnout if not alleviated. For my colleague, though, overwhelm could be used to imply a lack of inner resilience – the idea that we must be able to cope with whatever external circumstances we are faced with and find sufficient inner resource to contain our reactions. There are stories here that are worth unpicking, a narrative of work and what being a worker should look like. Her concerns also highlight modern discomfort with the fragility of our bodies. We want them to function as living machines doing exactly what our brains tell them. But, we are not put together like that. Indeed, most of the time we are acting primarily from procedural knowledge, that is from implicit stored memories of how to do certain things and respond to certain stimuli that enervates our bodily responses without requiring conscious thought at all. Our prefrontal cortex usually checks in with what the body is doing more to access information than to send it instructions. Indeed, as Gabor Maté has shown, we cannot simply continue to endure high levels of stress or trauma without profound embodied consequences – the body will ultimately put a stop to efforts by our brain to push ourselves beyond our limits (see Maté, 2019).

If we understand trauma in this more holistic setting, seeing ourselves not as brains floating around above sacks of fluid and bone, but as whole beings operating from a body-wide network, can we encounter the idea of overwhelm more inclusively? If you have a virus rampaging through your lungs and immune system, your brain cannot process complex reasoning at its usual rate, however much you push it, because it doesn’t have its whole network functioning healthily. If you are struggling with a hormonal balance in your endocrine system, your brain will not have the capacity to make as many connections as rapidly as you need it to because it will lack the right neurotransmitters. If you are constantly assaulted by experiences at work that make you feel rushed, uncertain, and unsafe, your nervous system will start to fire and misfire at a rate and regularity that will exhaust it, ultimately resulting in body-wide shutdowns.

Overwhelm is not about weakness, it is about attrition. Our definition of workplace trauma needs to take this into account. I have great concerns about so called ‘resilience trainings’ that are often offered in lieu of individualised mental health support (and I do understand the logic for companies looking to reduce employee sick days and minimise costs). As a coach, supporting clients to identify and make full use of their own inner and external resources is a key part of my work. However, how much resilience training is trauma informed? Failure to change the systems that people are embedded in even if those systems are resulting in profound wear and tear on their nervous systems is a form of culpable damage by the workplace, and training staff to leverage their resources to resist the effect of stress is not a sufficient response, either for those individuals or for the company in the long-term. Any environment in which an employee’s ANS needs to be fractionally or significantly in a heightened state of alertness much or all of the time is pushing people toward trauma and long-term health problems. My definition of workplace trauma is therefore, any state of long-term nervous system dysregulation including burnout that has resulted directly from workplace conditions without attempts being made to alleviate the cause. A little wordy but hopefully it serves to cover the key points. 

If you feel like you are struggling with the effects of workplace trauma, what sources of help are you accessing? And what information would it be helpful for me to provide here, or on my YouTube channel? Do get in touch using the form below, I would love to hear from you.

1. Ogden, P. (2021) ‘The different impact of trauma and relational stress on physiology, posture, and movement: Implications for treatment’, European Journal of Trauma and Dissociation 5/4.
2. Stanley, E.A. (2019) Widen the Window: training your brain and body to thrive during stress and recover from trauma (London, Yellow Kite).
3. Maté, G. (2019) When the Body Says No: the cost of hidden stress (London, Penguin Books).