“You got certified in trauma-informed coaching? Are you looking to work with trauma victims?”

I’ve gotten that question more than once lately, and I get why people ask it. The word trauma carries a specific picture for most people. An accident. A diagnosis. Something dramatic enough that everyone in the room would agree, yes, that counts. But that’s not how trauma actually works, and it’s not why I went and got certified.

Here’s the example I use most. Picture two people in the same car, in the same fender bender, at the same time. One of them walks away and is fine getting behind the wheel the next morning. The other one isn’t. Nobody got hurt. The damage to the car was identical for both of them. But one of them now feels their chest tighten every time they drive, and the other never thinks about it again.

Same event. Two completely different outcomes. Trauma isn’t defined by what happened. It’s defined by how a specific nervous system processed what happened. Two people can live through the exact same moment and only one of them carries it.

That’s true of car accidents. It’s also true of everything smaller and quieter that never makes it onto anyone’s official list of “real” trauma. A parent who was unpredictable. A teacher who singled you out. A relationship that taught you to brace before anyone even raised their voice. None of it has to be dramatic to be real, and none of it asks your permission before it shows back up.

The workplace is one of the best places for that old material to resurface, because nobody’s looking for it there. A boss who yells, or who goes quiet and dismissive when they’re disappointed, can land directly on top of a pattern that started with a parent or an uncle decades earlier. The person across from them in the 1:1 isn’t reacting to today. They’re reacting to today plus everything today just reminded their body of.

It runs the other way too. A leader who has never sat with their own history just passes it forward. I’ve sat with plenty of people managing teams under someone who never did that work, and the way that leader showed up landed on every person beneath them, sometimes for years before anyone had the language to name what was happening.

This is exactly why I got certified. Not to treat trauma. To recognize it when it walks into a session disguised as a leadership problem.

I’m not a therapist, and I’m careful never to act like one. I won’t diagnose anyone. I won’t tell a client what their experience means. What I will do is hold the space so a client can bring anything into it. The messy parts. The parts they’ve never said out loud. The parts they’re embarrassed are still affecting them at all. And know they’re not too much for me to sit with. If something needs more than coaching can hold, that’s their call to make, not mine to declare for them.

I came into this work as a leadership coach first. People hire me to build a specific skill, prepare for a specific room, lead a specific team. But leadership was never going to stay contained to the office. The way someone shows up at work and the way they show up at home run through the same nervous system. You cannot coach one half of a person and ask the other half to wait outside.

That’s the real reason the certifications keep arriving. Trauma Informed Coach Certification, the newest one. ACC before that. Certified Executive Leadership Dynamics Specialist before that. None of them are separate projects. Each one feeds the same thesis: leadership and trauma response were never two separate systems. They’re the same system, showing up in different rooms.

I wrote about what the trauma-informed training itself has been teaching me a few months back, if you want the other half of this. [What Trauma-Informed Coaching Is Teaching Me] is the inside-the-room version. This one is the why.

If you’ve ever caught yourself reacting to a boss, a coworker, or a room in a way that felt bigger than the moment actually called for, that’s worth a second look. It’s rarely about being too sensitive. It’s usually an old pattern finding a new door.

If you’re not sure where to start: take my Why Do I Feel Stuck? quiz. It gives you language for the patterns that might be shaping your current decisions.

Read next: The Difference Between Ambition and Survival — a companion piece that unpacks why the version of you that got you here isn’t always the version who should decide what comes next.

If this is landing for you, sign up for my letters. I write about identity at work, the patterns that got you here, and how to decide what comes next from awareness instead of survival.