A Plea

The recent suicide of a prominent CEO has moved me to trembling. I am hoping that we can no longer avoid the urgent need for trauma healing in the domain of organizational development and leadership cultivation. Without that we are at ongoing risk of sustaining further tragedies.

The pressure, pace, and loneliness of leadership roles exacerbates early childhood hurts and leaves executives trapped behind the walls of childhood survival strategies and enacting numbing behaviors.

Our false split between the personal and the “professional” insists they hold their pain alone and has them numbing themselves and isolating.

Leaders in my sessions report they don't know where to bring their fears, their shakiness, their overwhelm, their grief. When we make an inventory of emotional and relational needs they assess they have only a few people, if at all, that they could ask for help.

Equally these same leaders enter the work place with generations of untreated trauma in their life stories and are often drawn to excel achieve and over exert because they were required to take heroic roles in their childhoods and sought refuge in chaotic family systems by becoming the source of order, caretaking, mediation and hope.

This is a recipe for dysfunction, reactivity and risk. As in this tragic context this has sometimes heart breaking consequences.

We can and we must reverse these trends and create leadership programs that offer refuge for true healing.

These once in a lifetime contexts allow the much needed pause, an exhale and a down regulation of an over stressed nervous system. They allow rest and renewal. They hack the silence of the unspoken pain and overwhelm. They allow a turning inwards that affords embodied and emotional integration. This new sense of being able to inhabit one’s life and one’s true purpose in turn returns one’s dignity and faith.

Let your heart break as you read of the poignant loss of this great light below and pledge yourself to the journey of leadership restoration. If enough of us hold the conviction that loving business is possible and that inviting connection and true belonging in the work place is imminent it will become so.

Let’s hold one another before we lose one another.