Spiral of Healing

Transforming Pain into Power: The Intersection of Leadership and Healing

Envision our healing journeys as spirals, where each conquered challenge propels us to the next, and just when we believe we’ve reached the end, we embark on a new segment of the spiral. It’s an infinite cycle, brimming with endless possibilities…and a ton of inner work.

Today, it’s my turn to take a walk this healing path once more. After battling a severe illness that reached its pinnacle between January 2022 and April 2023, I’ve been on a slow but steady physical recovery. Now, with regained stability, I’m ready to face the emotional healing that’s been waiting for me and find a coach or therapist.

I’m sharing the insights that led me to this decision in the hope that you see where you might be living with unnecessary suffering. Maybe this can inspire you to kick off your own healing exploration.

Recognizing the Need for Healing: Signs and Signals

The idea of reopening my own healing work quietly crept up on me. It’s fascinating how we tend to adapt and even normalize periods of intense trauma. For me, the constant anxiety around a potential relapse has been a challenge I’ve started to heal around. But it’s time to go beyond healing around it—it’s time to heal it all the way through.

How did I realize that I need to reset and restart my healing journey?

1. My triggers are diminishing my life’s fullness—I get a lot of anxiety when I approach surfing or intense physical exercise, likely due to how my body couldn’t tolerate exercise when I was sick.
2. My perception of time is skewed—I tightly manage my day to maximize energy before I experience an afternoon crash, which was common during my illness. I can’t relax or slow down. Now that my energy levels are stable, I find my inner planner is rushing me in its attempt to be productive.
3. My sense of safety and tranquillity is compromised—When was the last time you felt safe in your body? This prompt helped me realize that I get fleeting moments of safety, but otherwise I live with shakiness and constriction in my body. It feels like there’s a constant alarm bell going off that no one else hears.

Understanding Trauma: Big T and Little T

Some people cringe when they hear the “T” word. I see this often from a denial that whatever you’ve been through was a big deal. It comes from a place of minimizing past damage, a desire to find okayness in the present.

And I get it, trauma is a word that can be misattributed. But more often than not people who have been through trauma try to minimize its impact without properly healing through it. They may heal around it and continue to move on with their life. But if they don’t heal the center of it, heal it all the way through, then they are bound to be confined by trauma showing up again.

This is where the idea of a trigger come in. People inappropriately refer to “being triggered” when they feel any kind of intense negative reaction to a situation. I find that real triggers occur when you sense that your reaction is outsized in relation to the situation you are reacting towards.

Sometimes, triggers are the only breadcrumbs we initially see on this path. That’s because trauma has this way of folding up into itself and hiding from the conscious mind. It’s often difficult to see your own trauma — the self-blindness and self-numbing is there to protect you from feeling the intense emotions that part (link) harbors.

A Big T Trauma is typically a single incident traumatizing event, like a car crash. Though even in these cases where your intellectual side may know that trauma is present, your emotional landscape may go foggy around it, numbing you out so that it seems you are doing fine. Until you hit a trigger where a near miss on the road driving sends your body into a full nervous system response, where your hands are sweaty, your body is shaking, and fear locks your body down.

Little t Trauma is a bit more insidious to find. This could be a series of events or longer period of time where you got rocked. I would say that chronic illness can feel more like this, since the timespan of the illness is so spread out, your body and mind start to normalize your reaction to it.

Leadership Begins with Healing

I ran a company for 10 years. I’m really good at suffering. Most leaders tolerate a lot of suffering (arguably, we seek it out, too).

But suffering reduces our capacity to handle life’s toughest challenges, including the ups and downs of running a startup.

Unhealed trauma diminishes our ability to be present and see the world how it actually is.

The more we heal, the more capacity we gain to be amazing leaders, parents, friends, and community members. The more capacity we have, the more we can sit in the present moment and experience what’s actually happening and act on it, instead of creating stories that distort the truth to make us feel safer.

Facing challenges head-on—be they fundraising, company pivots, or conflicts—is crucial in entrepreneurship.

I’m here to reassure you that we don’t have to accept all our suffering. We have countless healing modalities available to us (including IFS, energy work, conscious movement, and extreme presence, just to name a few!). 

Healing ourselves as leaders doesn’t just benefit us—it transforms our companies.

I strive to share as much of my healing journey as possible, right in the heart of the messy present. I used to share more of my healed past, but I find those stories lack the candor of what the healing journey actually feels like when you’re smack dab in the middle of it. My current vantage point isn’t a gorgeous horizon with a clear path of light. Instead the messy present is filled with caves I hide to for safety, mountains that block the sunlight, and a few meadows where I find pockets of relaxation.

Navigating the Topography of the Healing Journey

I strive to share as much of my healing journey as possible, right in the heart of the messy present. I used to share more of my healed past, but I find those stories lack the candor of what the healing journey actually feels like when you’re smack dab in the middle of it. My current vantage point isn’t a gorgeous horizon with a clear path of light. Instead the messy present is filled with caves I hide to for safety, mountains that block the sunlight, and a few meadows where I find pockets of relaxation.

This is the topography of the healing journey, and I invite you to explore your own landscape shoulder-to-shoulder with me.