Psychological Safety Without Healing? The Overlooked Role of Trauma

This week we focus on a crucial element often kept to one side of psychological safety initiatives -? Trauma. When trauma is ignored, (frequently it is in individuals, corporates and institutions), the creation of psychologically safe environments becomes nearly impossible. It’s like putting a sticking plaster over a gaping wound, trying to forget about it and hoping it will heal by itself. This has serious consequences for all safety and well-being initiatives in our workplaces and communities.

Just the word trauma often appears as a big, nebulous, scary word. One that is quickly rejected and distanced from (for different reasons) that can create discomfort and dismissal in senior leadership groups across industries and political leaders influencing our communities. Yet It’s not beyond anyone’s abilities to become trauma-informed.

Trauma-informed

It’s not just that we set trauma aside; we unconsciously perpetuate division because we fail to recognise, acknowledge, and heal our emotional wounds.

As difficult as it may be to admit, we could just as easily rename Planet Earth, "Planet Trauma," given its widespread presence across human cultures. At all levels including everyday interactions, in the C-suite and throughout political authority, we remain largely unaware of the fundamental roots of trauma and our role in perpetuating it. As long as we fail to recognise the trauma we inflict on one another, it will continue to breed division, even as we speak of wanting to create greater inclusivity.

In the last three articles, we’ve explored the power each of us has to embody acceptance and inclusion by improving our ability to self-regulate sensations, feelings, and emotions. We’ve touched on the psychological parts that often interrupt us—like the controller, achiever, perfectionist, and survivor - and how our nervous system tends to cling to hyperactive survival strategies, reinforcing familiar patterns that don’t, collectively, serve us.

You may recognise that practical tools in these areas are within our control to learn, and some of these skills are crucial for both preventing and rebalancing trauma. If we truly want to create inclusive environments, we must wake up to the reality that trauma - whether consciously or unconsciously - is something we all affect, perpetuate, and endorse. Addressing this is key to genuine inclusion. We’ll dive deeper into how we unknowingly endorse trauma in the final article next week.

Examples

Recently, I read an account in which plane passengers were permitted to lock a toddler in a toilet on her own (mid-flight) because the complaining passengers, couldn’t self-regulate their psychological parts, nervous system and emotional triggers under the pressure of the child’s distress and subsequent noise. The toddler’s accompanying grandmother allowed two female passengers to lock the girl in the toilet, as she continued to cry during the flight.

While some passengers and commentators afterwards criticised these actions as “bullying”, “psychological harm” and “lacking empathy”, one of the women leading these reactions stated she "prefers to take action rather than be a bystander".? And through her intention of, “I just wanted to calm the child down and let everyone rest,”. Telling the child she could leave the cubicle only if she stopped crying.

If you happen to agree with these actions you are at the beginning of your journey to become trauma aware. If so, notice any tendency there might be in your body-mind right now, to dismiss and resist this opportunity.

Trauma is a subjective experience, ignited in many different ways. In this instance, Isolating a toddler is likely to flood her system with intense emotions such as fear, panic, confusion, abandonment, worthlessness, powerlessness, and shame.

• Is this likely to help the child "calm down"?? And further, will the child be able to process and let go of these overwhelming feelings?? No, and no.
• Such overwhelming feelings will likely become embedded in the child’s body and mind, lying dormant, yet ready to be triggered throughout her life. They could resurface whenever a related memory is consciously recalled or, more often, without conscious memory at all - where her adult self experiences a surge of similar sensations, emotions, and confusion, without understanding why.
• Punishing a child for crying, a natural form of communication for toddlers, sends the harmful message that her emotions are unacceptable. Over time, this can lead to difficulties in expressing emotions and suppressing them, resulting in emotional dysregulation. As an adult, she may struggle to express distress in healthy ways, not applying boundaries, carrying an underlying sense of mistrust - perhaps feeling she can’t fully rely on the safety of her work environment, even if her employer promotes psychological safety.

To become trauma-informed, you may find the following experts, and their approaches as useful starting points, without becoming an expert yourself.

• Gabor Maté: "Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you, as a result of what happens to you."
• Bessel van der Kolk: “Trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body."
• Peter Levine: ”Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence."
• Teal Swan: "The most damaging thing about trauma is that it isolates you from yourself and from others."

Teal’s quote highlights a crucial link between trauma and division, which also ties back to the sense of helplessness we explored in article two. Trauma fuels isolation, leaving us feeling stuck and helpless - a state that becomes ingrained in our nervous system, even though it serves neither us nor the collective. We can find ourselves trapped in this cycle, feeling isolated and merely surviving, driven by the hope that we can avoid future trauma. When we are here, there are few genuine experiences of feeling safe.

Experts agree that trauma isn’t limited to moments of intense impact; it often accumulates over time, subtly shaping our responses and interactions. This ongoing buildup can leave us entrenched in patterns that reinforce feelings of disconnection and helplessness.

It's easy to assume trauma is about a severe one-off incident but it's not. It can just as easily be experienced via, 'too little for too long'. Too little attention, love, kindness etc. These experiences are very common in our cultures. They are handed down, through each new generation of parents in a family line. Trauma is ancestral. For example, if my father had an upbringing that lacked kind and loving attention from his father he may struggle to demonstrate that with me.

All three of us therefore (My grandfather, father and I) feel vulnerable when feelings and emotions enter into family and workplace discussions. Unconsciously, we do our best to avoid them. We can't find it within ourselves to grow within this essential aspect of life. We might become leaders in an organisation that doesn't see the relevancy of trauma in the psychological safety space. We may not understand that a large part of psychological safety is emotional. And like so many of us we don't even recognise our own trauma and challenges in emotional regulation.

If we have experienced too little for too long, and admit to ourselves that our upbringings were cold or loveless we may try and correct this with our family when we become parents or we just as easily brush off these emotional experiences off and convince ourselves, "I am past that". But in my experience, almost always this is not the case.

Division on the plane flight and beyond

On the plane, the potentially trauma-inducing actions were defended by some passengers and echoed in broader community reactions. Some people stuffed tissues in their ears and moved further to the back of the plane to avoid distress. While others justified the intervention to lock away the child, by claiming the grandmother’s consent made the isolation acceptable.

These divisions mirror a wider societal tendency to split into opposing camps whenever trauma, emotional triggers, psychological defences, and nervous system contractions surface. As a collective, without the ability to self-regulate, we miss the opportunity to be truly inclusive, accepting, and compassionate. This leads to individuals and groups becoming fractured, clinging to differences, and justifying their sense of righteousness. True safety will remain elusive as long as we stay unaware of the countless ways we trigger one another’s traumas and emotional wounds.

Vulnerability: A key component of psychological safety is the willingness to be vulnerable, to admit mistakes, to ask questions, and to share concerns. These take a well-regulated nervous system and a basic acknowledgement that we all have emotional wounds.

When our nervous system is stretched or imbalanced, vulnerability can feel dangerous - as past experiences can teach us that being open leads to harm and as a result, this is the motivation to avoid engaging deeply with others. This avoidance creates a barrier to true psychological safety.

Trust Issues: It’s our emotional wounds that often have a difficult time trusting others. In a workplace or community context, this means we can struggle to believe that our leaders or colleagues have our best interests at heart. Without trust, psychological safety is impossible.

Fear of Conflict: In environments where emotional wounds and trauma are unacknowledged, individuals may fear conflict or confrontation, even when it is necessary for healthy collaboration. They may avoid speaking up or sharing their thoughts, not because they feel safe, but because they fear negative outcomes, reminiscent of a previous event.

This perpetuates a cycle of disengagement, hindering the growth of psychological safety. This can be as simple as fearing conflict because their parents ruled their upbringing - by being controlling or perfectionistic - meaning it felt risky to go against their parent's controlling narrative. Numerous incidences of this type of childhood emotional wounds remain with them, as an operational blueprint in their adulthood.

Safety Avoidance - In our organisations, governments and communities

While individual trauma plays a critical role in undermining psychological safety, there is another layer to consider: the systemic and institutional trauma that organisations and communities may perpetuate. Governments and corporations, in particular, often engage in practices that directly or indirectly instigate trauma, either through their policies, business operations, or avoidance of accountability. By failing to acknowledge or address the harm they cause, they contribute to a culture where psychological safety remains out of reach.

For governments and politicians to truly support trauma and psychological safety there will need to be significant changes. Including

• Politicians must begin by recognising and acknowledging their own unhealed trauma and emotional wounds. True leadership requires self-awareness and a willingness to address the personal challenges that often drive their decisions. eg. A trauma based on worthlessness will drive a person in power to prove themselves, over and over again, despite their actions traumatising others.
• Governments would need to cease clandestine operations that perpetuate harm, secrecy, and division.? Replacing these with transparency and accountability.
• Corporations must step away from benefitting from government (clandestine) operations that assist their industry or company profits. E.g. Who is waiting in the wings to benefit from the opening-up of the Palestinian gas fields?

In part 5 next week, we will shed more light on our leaders and their current ability to authentically drive psychological safety and trauma healing. But we must also remember that as long as we remain unaware of our own similar emotional wounds, we will unconsciously endorse and sustain division, trauma, fear and personal gain, above inclusivity.

Until next week,

Glenn