How trauma affects you at work, and what you can do about it - with Kelly Campbell

#201: Kelly Campbell is a Trauma-Informed Leadership Coach for emerging and established leaders.  She explains the different sources of trauma, how it can affect your work, and what you can do to heal your trauma.

What you’ll learn

• [02:01] Why Kelly became trauma specialised coach.
• [04:50] The trauma Kelly faced growing up.
• [06:31] Effective business characteristics that trauma creates.
• [07:37] How to identify burnout.
• [10:19] Unhealthy characteristics that are praised in a business context.
• [11:12] How companies should approach burnout.
• [12:49] What childhood trauma involves.
• [15:35] The compounding nature of trauma.
• [17:31] How to not internalise traumatic events.
• [20:45] How trauma presents itself in the workplace.
• [23:25] The importance of identifying underlying traumas.
• [26:20] The necessity of identifying the source of your traumas.
• [28:32] How to know you’ve successfully addressed your traumas.
• [30:30] How realistic healing your traumas is.
• [31:34] What you can do to heal trauma by yourself.
• [34:18] When to get external support for trauma.
• [35:20] The problems with talk therapy.
• [37:17] The type of practitioners that can help people with trauma.
• [41:26] What happens when you address your trauma.

Resources mentioned in this episode
Please note that some of these are affiliate links and we may get a commission in the event that you make a purchase.  This helps us to cover our expenses and is at no additional cost to you.

• CDC-Kaiser Permanente Study on adverse childhood experiences
• Bessel van der Kolk
• My Healing Menu

For the show notes for this episode, including a full transcript and links to all the resources mentioned, visit:

https://changeworklife.com/how-trauma-affects-you-at-work-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/

Re-assessing your career?  Know you need a change but don't really know where to start?  Check out these two exercises to start the journey of working out what career is right for you!

Transcript

0:00

There's no question that trauma can have a long-lasting impact, including on the way you show up for work. But what about if that trauma isn't some big life changing event, but is a whole succession of smaller events? Maybe it's the boss who continually ignores you, or the work colleague that you always seem to end up in arguments with. How do these cumulative traumas show up, and what can you do about them? That's what we're going to be discussing in this week's episode. A quick warning, we do touch on some topics which you might find difficult or upsetting. So, just be aware and do whatever you need to do. I'm Jeremy Cline, and this is Change Work Life. Hello, and welcome to the Change Work Life podcast, the show that's all about beating the Sunday evening blues and enjoying Mondays again. I'm a career coach, and in each episode, my guests and I bring you tips, strategies and stories to help you enjoy a more satisfying and fulfilling working life. When you think of trauma, you probably imagine major life-altering events. But what about those smaller or subtle events or experiences, like a perceived betrayal or embarrassment? What lasting effects can these have, particularly in the context of the workplace and how you show up for work? To explore this topic, I'm joined this week by Kelly Campbell, a trauma informed leadership coach to emerging and established leaders. Kelly is also the author of Heal to

Lead: 1:40

Revolutionizing Leadership Through Trauma Healing. Kelly, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Jeremy. This is great. I feel like people often come to the helping professions because of something they went through in their own lives, and that was certainly the case with me and what led me to coaching. What led you to become a coach specialising in trauma? As I like to say, a nonlinear path. Best kind. I was a CEO for 14 years, I owned a cause marketing agency, where we did digital marketing and things like that for non-profits and foundations and social impact initiatives. Very rewarding work. But it wasn't until I started to burn out towards the end of that 13-, 14-year stint, where I first started really questioning what got me involved in entrepreneurship in the first place. I saw other people leading organisations much older than I was, and I couldn't understand how I was burning out so quickly, and they weren't. I thought maybe I just couldn't hack it. I wasn't really sure what was going on. But I knew that there must be some reason that I hadn't thought about or encountered before as it related to the motivations behind an entrepreneurial journey. And so, the more that I started to dive into these areas, I've realised that I had actually become an entrepreneur out of a trauma response. And what I mean by that is, I felt the need to prove myself, to prove my worthiness and my value to myself, to my mother in particular, and to the world. And I did that through the vehicle of business ownership, because it was something where I could control the environment, I could sort of recreate the environment, a healthier environment than the one that I had grown up in. And so, that was sort of the inflection point. When I sold the company at 36 years old, I really started to dive into more, I guess I would call them realms of spirituality and higher consciousness. And trauma was a big part of that. Because as I was exploring those realms, these feelings and memories and realities of my childhood really came to the forefront. And then I realised, wow, I am actually, by a long shot, not the only business owner or founder-entrepreneur who's dealing with these. Because as we know, every single one of us has experienced some type of trauma when we were younger, whether that was the big T that most people are familiar with, or the small t, as you mentioned at the top of the show. So, that is essentially what led me to coaching other leaders in particular around this idea of correlation between childhood trauma and effective leadership. So, you mentioned there that starting the company was effectively like your own reaction to a trauma. What was that trauma? Well, I grew up in a household with a mother who had two comorbidity conditions, borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. I didn't know those names or terms at the time. I just knew something felt really off. I knew that I couldn't do enough to earn her love. I knew that, in a weird way, she felt very competitive toward me. And she, also in a strange way, saw me as the other woman in my father's life, hence the competition. And so, there was quite a lot of physical abuse. And along with that always typically comes emotional and mental abuse as well. I had a younger brother who was 13 months younger than I, and he didn't receive those things. So, it was this clear indication to me that, this is what we do when we're younger, we turn it all inward, and we realise, and we think, well, I must be the broken one, there's something wrong with me, which is why this person is, this primary caregiver is able to love this child, but not love me. And so, it must be me. And so, that created some very deep wounding around this idea of self-value and worthiness and actually lovability. So, that's what I was working through in this route of business ownership. So, what was the gap or the void or the thing that starting the business was a reaction to? Is it still like a personal validation thing or something like that? Personal validation, competence. If you think about the way that I tried to earn love during that time, I would get straight A's as a student, I would really throw myself into the thing that I was passionate about, which was art. I was very good at athletics, and so I was the captain of every sports team I was ever on. None of it could be enough. So, I was highly competent, highly functioning, probably over functioning as a kid, and I think all of those traits were natural components or criteria of what we think of as effective business owners. Ones with a lot of grit and tenacity and motivation and drive. And especially here in America, those things are praised, but no one knew that, under the surface, this was really that response to that trauma and trying to recreate a different environment for myself. And I'm conscious that I'm asking you to recall difficult memories, but you mentioned burnout there as well, which is something that's come up a few times on the podcast, and I'm interested to know, how did burnout show up for you, and how did you identify that that's what it was? That's a great question. I don't actually know that anyone has asked me that before. I would say there was a physical component to it. Certainly not taking care of myself, putting my own needs and self-care and health and well-being on the back burner. And so, over the course of the 14 years that I owned the company, I had put on about 40 pounds. And I was a pretty young person, very active, having been in sports and things like that. So, that was different for my body. I would also say that from an emotional and psychological standpoint, I was just running on fumes. And specifically the emotional side, I was quite dysregulated. I would maybe not so much in the workplace, because I wanted to, again, keep that environment of peace and calm, trying to recreate that environment, which was very chaotic, or recreate in a new way the environment from childhood, but at home, it was a different story. Right? So, there might have been something small that I had a larger reaction to. So, there was really no real way to have what was happening in terms of conflict match up with what my reaction was. So, the fuse was quite short. And I think, looking back, there probably was an element of depression as well. I didn't go to a doctor for that. There was no diagnosis. I don't take pharmaceuticals, so I wouldn't have taken something. But in retrospect, I do think that there was an element of that. When I think of burnout, I don't think about one thing. I think from the holistic view, thinking about the spirit, the body, the mind, overall. I was functional from the outside looking in, what other people would perceive as functional, but I didn't feel functional, which is why I ultimately sold the company at 36. Thank you for sharing all that. I really appreciate it. And I think it's helpful for other people to hear from the experiences that someone has been through, just so they can maybe recognise something that's going on in their own lives and recognise that it's not just them, this is actually something that's pretty common. Yeah. Very common. And, again, I do think some part of it comes from childhood and repetition of patterns, unhealthy patterns. But I also think that the odds are stacked against us a little bit, because the things that are unhealthy are actually praised. Right? So, overworking, showing up and pushing through your emotions at all costs, your health, your emotional well-being, your psychological well-being. No one's really tracking that in the workplace. So long as you're getting your work done, and you're doing it well, it doesn't matter what the cost is to you. And I think that's where we veered off course, but that is probably a whole another podcast. I think it probably is. And I'm just going to indulge myself for a minute to get on a soapbox. I was listening to a podcast actually the morning we're recording this, where there was someone who was saying that burnout should really be seen as a health and safety issue. So, it's not about the individual and helping them to develop their resilience or that kind of thing. If, I don't know, there's a hole in the floor or a trip hazard, and someone falls in the hole or someone trips over it, then the health and safety response is filling in the hole or removing the trip hazard. It's not training someone to get out of the hole or to avoid the trip hazard. The same approach should be taken to burnout. It's not just an individual thing. It's an environmental thing, a cultural, environmental thing. So, that's the way that companies should be approaching it. And yeah, I hope that message gets through. Yeah. I've seen in working with leaders and previously leadership teams, as a coach, I've seen a lot of, oh, well, this particular employee or this manager is struggling, we're going to give them three extra days off. And it's like, wow! That band aid is, we need to really talk about what's going on in the culture before we're trying to apply these band aids that, again, put the onus on that individual. Yeah. If the fish are dying, then there's something wrong with the lake, not with the fish. Anyway, we had better, actually, get into the topic that I had you on to talk about. We talked about trauma a couple of times, and you used the expression big T, trauma. What does trauma mean? What are we talking about here? So, I'll give you a couple of different ways to think about this or understand it. I always find that that's helpful, because different ways of thinking about it may land for different people. So, we can think about trauma, the definition that I like best is simply unintegrated information and energy. Unintegrated information and energy. You're going to have to unpack that for me. The reason why I like that definition is because it takes a lot of the emotion and stigma out of trauma. Most people, when they think of trauma, they're thinking of these larger life events, right? So, if we go back to the Kaiser Permanente and CDC study in the late 1990s, we think about the ACEs, Adverse Childhood Experiences. And so, most of our ideas about big T trauma come from that. These 10 or so items that we might classify as big T trauma. So for example, growing up in a war-torn nation, living in a house where one of your caregivers has a mental illness, being a child of parents who are divorced, maybe a child of a parent who is incarcerated, maybe having a natural disaster in the area where you've grown up. Right? So, these large events or more, quote-unquote, I'm using air quotes, more impactful events. The reality is that most people don't understand small t trauma as just as impactful as those things. So, again, at the top of the show, you mentioned embarrassment, betrayal. I would add humiliation, these types of things where they really cut our core self when we're younger, when we're just starting to form our senses of self, these are typically more, we receive them on a more frequent basis. And so, it's almost like these, you can think about those larger, more impactful events, but on the same scale as death by 1,000 paper cuts. So, they're smaller, they're maybe more frequent, probably more frequent, and over time, with the stacking and compounding nature of them, it's still difficult for most people's nervous systems to really cope with that over and over and over again. So, it's a more continuous, if you think about one as a big punch, and the other one is like a repetitive over and over and over again consistency. Both are, in my opinion, equally impactful, but we don't talk about the small t stuff. Aren't these things that you've described as small t just facts of life? I mean, anyone who's been through puberty has probably been embarrassed and maybe humiliated. I mean, it's just part of growing up. Yes. And that it's the compounding nature of those things. So, this isn't a one-off, oh, you tripped in the cafeteria, and all of your food went on the floor. Right? And that was the only thing that you've ever felt embarrassed or humiliated over. If that were the case, I don't think that that would be as impactful. Maybe you would have some friends who would rush over and help you or a teacher. So, there would be evidence that it wasn't you. It was a mistake. And that is a normal part of life. But I'm talking about with these small t traumas and why they're considered traumas is that compounding effect, when that is happening to you over and over and over again. And that's not necessarily just a fact of life for most people. For example, in childhood, if you have an uncle who really needles you and puts you down every single time you see this person, over time, your nervous system may not be able to cope with that, and so you may develop some kind of, I don't even know what the word is, but you would develop some resistance or something that would be known to you in your body every time you encounter a person just like that when you get older. As one example. So, it really comes down to that nervous system's inability to cope. That's what makes a trauma. I'm interested in the word unintegrated, which I feel leads on from what you were just saying. So, can you develop what that means in this context? Yeah. So, using those examples... Or maybe we'll use different examples. If we have something traumatic happened to us, it's not really the event, it's what happens inside of our body as a result of an event, if we are able to repair or would I say integrate that in the moment, something happens and another person comes over and says, 'You know that that wasn't your fault", there's a way in which we understand, okay, this thing happened either to us, or we've made a mistake, or what have you. And in the moment, if it's repaired, the nervous system has the ability to say,'Okay, I'm feeling this thing, and, oh, right, okay, now I can cope with it', sort of in the moment. It's the time period between when something happens and our ability to cope with it. If those things, whether it's big T or small t trauma, if those things are unable to be integrated in that moment, they compound inside of us. And then, we look for confirmation bias of the stories that get created around them. This is what we're talking about with unintegration. Another example of this might be, we can go to a big T trauma, maybe there's an element of sexual abuse in childhood. Now, if that is shamed, or the person who's on the receiving end of that doesn't feel like they have anyone to talk to, they push it down, they repress it, maybe it comes up in some other way in adulthood. If it's not integrated, what happens is, all of that shame, all of that self-loathing, all of the stories that are created about that event and that experience, that can come out sideways. Their wounding can be projected, their pain can be projected on other people. So, that would be an example of unintegrated trauma. Now, when I say unintegrated, we can't change the fact that trauma happened. It is a fact of life, and every single one of us has experienced this in some way, shape or form. The difference between an effective and healthy leader, I might even say a high conscious leader, is that they're actively doing the work to integrate that trauma. Not to say that didn't happen, but to say, yes, that happened, that was not my fault, and I've done the work to really integrate that into the whole part of my being, as opposed to pushing it aside, pretending it didn't happen, all of that kind of thing. Does that answer help? Does it get us closer to an understanding of integration? I'm definitely going to want to come back to that question of integration and what that can look like. But before we get there, can you talk about some of the ways that trauma might show up in everyday work? So, say there is big T or little t trauma in the past, how does that present itself, if you like? I mean, because there are so many ways in which we can experience trauma, there are equally as many ways as we experience it in the workplace. For example then. Yeah. Now some of that could be from childhood, again, I'll use the example that I had before, where someone may have a reaction that doesn't seem equal to the experience that they're having. So, let's say someone gives feedback. And the feedback is, you're doing a great job in these areas, here are some areas where some improvement needs to be made. Now that seems quite benign. But if someone has an extremely defensive response to that, that could indicate that there was something in childhood where they were meant to feel wrong, they were meant to feel maybe powerless. And because that trauma was not integrated, now the reaction to this what we might call benign feedback is so much larger, seems out of proportion, disproportionate to what were the feedback that they're given. So, that's an example. But again, you can see, even just from that one example, how many different ways that could show up. And then, I also want to hold that some of this may not be from childhood. There is certainly trauma that gets played out in the workplace in adulthood. We have discrimination. We have misogyny. We have all sorts of things that happen traumatically in the workplace, that may have nothing to do with childhood, or may be that confirmation bias that I talked about before. An unsupportive boss is something that comes to mind. Sure. Absolutely. Because sometimes the unsupportive boss feels just like a mom, or dad, or a caregiver who was also unsupportive in childhood. And so, that friction internally is going to make it very difficult to work in that environment, particularly if that person is not working on the things that they've experienced when they were younger. Is it important to identify that there is some kind of underlying trauma going on here? And if so, how would you identify that that is what it is? I mean, that's a great question. I guess my counter question would be, is it important to who? Is it important to a leader? Is it important to the person, the employee? I think it depends on what's happening. If there's a lot of conflict, let's say between an employee and a manager, and this one particular employee is the only one who's having this experience, it might be that there's some trauma where the manager is pushing against that. So, again, is it important to the manager to figure out what's going on here? Is it important to the employee, so they can figure figure out, well, if I don't have the luxury of going to find a new job, and I have to work with this person, maybe I need to really look into what is it about this person who's activating me? Is it the way that they're speaking to me? What from my childhood might have looked very similar to this? And I do trauma informed leadership coaching. So, for me, I'm working with the managers and the executives and C-suite, so that they are more trauma informed, so that they can start to recognise some of these things. And that does not mean that these leaders are becoming therapists or coaches even or counsellors. They're not unpacking any of these things. They're not diagnosing these people. But just to have an awareness of, for example, when the murder of George Floyd happened, there was not a lot of understanding of racism in the workplace, covert or overt. There was not a lot of understanding of how our black and brown employees really felt inside of these patriarchal and racist systems. And so, working with leaders who were very willing to say, 'I want to understand. I want to understand the experience of these employees who are very dear to me', now it took a very conscious leader to raise their hand and say, 'I'm willing to do that. I want to do that', many people did almost the opposite. They maybe brought in a singular workshop about racism in the workplace and said,'Okay, we've checked the box.' Again, separate podcast. But yeah, I mean, there are lots of ways that we can think about this. Again, whether it's from the leader desiring that, or the employee wanting to say,'How do I exist inside of this organisation?' Let's focus on the employee, the individual, so what's going on for them, rather than their own leader. So, say they are starting to recognise there is something off, and they think, okay, maybe this is a response to some kind of trauma. How important is it to identify what that trauma is? Because I can easily see someone going absolutely crazy analysing their past from last week all the way back down to childhood, and trying to comb through and figuring out what might have been the traumatic events. Yeah. I think the details of the past trauma are slightly less important. I think it's more, hey, where did this potentially show up in my past? Or did this potentially show up in my past? And is that why I'm having a disproportionate reaction here? And that takes an incredible amount of self-awareness. There are a lot of employees who struggle with their managers, their bosses. And I think it's a lot easier for people to, again, project pain and blame others. And so, you're asking, is it important? I think it's important to look at that 360-degree view to say, where is my part in this? Where am I contributing to this? What from my past might be involved in this dynamic? But unpacking and going back and trying to really figure out, and maybe even trying to retrofit, doesn't feel beneficial to me. Even with the coaching that I do, we might have a deep dive session in the beginning to go through, how did you grow up, what was the relationship with you and your caregivers and the relationship between them, just to kind of give us a foundation of where could some of these things point to, right? It's almost like trying to map it a little bit. But it's like map light, just to make some correlations. We're not sitting in the past and trying to go into all of that. That would be the work of a therapist, and that's a very different lane. So, you talked about integration. And so, it sounds like there is a piece of work to do which is integrating the trauma into oneself. What does success look like? I mean, how do you know that you've achieved this? Yeah. That's a great question. As we know, trauma is not one-and-done. Things that evoke emotion or evoke semblances of experiences that we've had when we were younger, they spiral upwards, meaning they come back around in different forms with different people, but the brand of it is essentially the same. So, I might call that activation, some people call it triggering. I don't love that word, so I use activation. And so, having these things come back around over and over and over again, how you would know that the work is working, that the integration is happening, is that each time these things come back around in their different forms, the activation is less and less. Your ability to cope, to recover, to make sense of, to reframe is much easier as these things come back around over and over again. That's what I would look at as success. And at some point, I mean, we're not looking for perfection, so it's not like, oh, at some point, this will be completely gone. These things are stored in our body. We know that from the work of Bessel van der Kolk, and many others. Trauma is stored in our body. So, we're not looking to get rid of it, which is why we use the word integration, not removal. So, yeah, you see, as we're talking, looking at this and talking about it in slightly different ways maybe helps to bring about a definition that lands for each individual person. Okay. So, this isn't about, I'm almost certainly going to use a little wrong language here, but this isn't about cure as such. This is about something which has happened, it's in there, and it's almost like managing reactions to the situations that bring it to the fore. I think that's the best I can do off the top of my head. Yeah. Your word cure isn't incorrect here. I would use a synonym of healed, past tense. We're not looking for that. To me, I have said this in the book, it's an impossibility. I don't think of things as being able to be healed. These aren't wounds on our skin that can be healed, and you'll have the ability to not even know that something had taken place. It is about actively healing, present tense, and it gets easier and easier and easier each time these things come around for us. What can someone do by themselves? Well, I think that one gateway is, well, I guess when you say 'by yourself', do you mean without any support whatsoever? Yeah. I'd like to come on to what external support could look like. But before we get there, what are some of the things that someone who's listening to you, and maybe they can easily identify that, I don't know, they were bullied at school for being the school swash or something, and they're recognising how that's showing up, and so they're tying the two together. So, what are some of the things that maybe they can do on their own which will help them to integrate this, as you say, and to not get, to use the word you don't like, triggered by situations? So, there are a number of things that you can do on your own. Journaling is probably one of the first things that comes to mind. Meditation, to really just create more space. And some people meditate in different ways. Sometimes it's just open-ended. Sometimes it's guided meditation. These are things that you don't need external practitioners for. If it's a guided meditation, obviously you're listening to a track. But journaling, meditation, I think, somatic movement. So, just moving the body, because we talked about it being trapped and stored inside of the body. So, movement, whatever that looks like for someone. That could be developing a yoga practice, that could be walking in the woods. That could be all sorts of different things. It doesn't require, in some cases, any money or other practitioners. Those are things that you can do on your own. And I do think that part of the healing journey does require support from other people, because you'll only be able to get so far by yourself. And here's where the integration process comes in. You're doing some work on your own. You're doing some work with a practitioner. You might even be doing some work in a group setting, a community setting. There's a lot of power in healing in community. And then, you go back to doing the work on your own to integrate what you've just done with the practitioner or in community. And it just goes like that, on and on. You don't have to be doing this full time. You wouldn't be able to get much else done. But at your own pace. And that's part of how integration works. And recognising that it is phenomenally subjective, when might someone think about getting external support? Yeah. Very subjective. I mean, I think once you have the little bit of self-awareness, where you've gotten to say, 'Hmm, this is interesting', you start to get curious, I wonder what my role in this 'blank' is. This conflict, this repetitive pattern, this difficulty at work. I wonder what might be going on inside of me or what my contribution to this is. That little opening of curiosity, I think is a good place to say, 'Okay, now maybe let me go speak to someone.' And I do think that talk therapy is a great gateway. I don't think it is a trauma integration modality, but it is certainly a part of mental health maintenance. And I think it's a great entrance into that work. You're going to have to help me out there. You said talk therapy isn't something, and I think a lot of people are going to get, 'Huh?' Yeah. So, there's a bifurcation that I talk about in the book, which may be an unpopular opinion. But again, we all have our opinions. Based on my experience, talk therapy is wonderful if you've never spoken to a mental health professional. I think about talk therapy as everything from today backwards. You're calling through the past, you're talking about your childhood, you're talking about different things that might be happening on that whole spectrum between today and pretty much the day you were born. And you're revisiting and recollecting all of those experiences and those moments and those emotions, and really sorting through and parsing all of that out. And that's very helpful. And there's a way in which only focusing on the past and talking about it can actually be re-traumatising. So, again, if trauma is stored in the body, and all we're doing is thinking about it cerebrally, and there's no somatic component, no movement component to actually release that out of the body, then it can only get you so far. So, that's why I don't consider it a trauma integration modality. I think of talk therapy as only mental health maintenance. Which is also why you see many people who have a therapist for years and years and years, I know many people, 10, 20 years they're with the same therapist. Trauma integration is different work, and it doesn't really require that longevity, because you're unearthing something out of the body, and then releasing that. Not to say that you wouldn't do that over and over again, but it's quite different. So, I do think that there's a bifurcation there. Okay. So, if you're not looking for talking therapy, what do you Google in terms of the practitioner that you want? I mean, I'm sure you could do, I don't know, trauma integration something or other. But I mean, is this coaching? What is it? I mean, again, there's a million different ways to do this, but it would be probably a somatic practitioner. So, somatic therapist, it could be a trauma informed coach, because a trauma informed coach will also understand that trauma needs to be released from the body. But honestly, all of those trauma integration modalities, there's thousands of them. And this is a very popular question, it's a common question as to like, where do I start? And in the book, I did talk about an educational resource that I put together, because I had gotten this question so many times. Like, oh, this sounds great, but where do I start? Yes, I understand, I can start with a therapist to do some cognitive behavioural therapy or talk therapy, but where do I go from there? Everyone has a different path. So, you really have to find the modalities that are calling to you. That could be looking like energy work. That could look like, again, yoga. There's so many, it's like, you know, we could sit here all day and name them out. But that's why I developed that resource, so that people could look and say,'Okay, well, which of these starts to call to me? Which feels resonant and something that feels accessible for me to move to next?' I think what this is telling me, I'm someone who, I just want to know what the answer is. I just want to know who's the person who's going to fix me here. But it sounds like what you're saying is that it's very much an exploration. It's going to have to be a little bit of trial and error and see what works for you. Yeah. And I want to say two things. What you just said, who's the person who's going to fix me, I think, is a very also common question. Because in our society today, we've all been trained to find the magic bullet and to outsource that work. There's got to be some healer or some this or some that. And that's just not the way that this works. So, first of all, my belief as a coach is that there is nothing to fix because there is no one who is broken. It's about returning to the wholeness of who we are, because what's happened is, with trauma, it's essentially removed pieces of us in a way or suppressed pieces of us. Or maybe even if you think about it, I like a lot of visuals with these things, so it's almost like layers of accumulated silt, on top of the true nature of who we are. And so, our job is actually not to fix anything, it's just to remove the masks and the silt and the layers of other people's stories and the negative experiences that those stories are based on. I know this is, you know, you want, I hear that you want this magic bullet answer. It just doesn't work like that. And there's nothing to fix. That was the first thing that I wanted to say. And I think most people, I can't speak to everyone, but most people would say, if we're trying to find the external person to save us or fix us or repair us, most people who are on this journey come to realise that they are the only ones who can do that ultimately for themselves. But it's through working with others, doing some integration work, working in community, doing some integration work. So, it's very much an oscillating process. You think about a dahlia, the way that a dahlia grows, if you've ever seen it in slow motion, it's quite fascinating. Every time it wants to bloom larger, it contracts, and then it grows a little larger, and then it contracts, and then it grows a little larger, and it contracts. And that's really such a great metaphor for the healing process or the trauma integration process. So, maybe you can give a very brief case study, just to provide a bit of colour to this. So, someone who, at work, something is going on, they've identified a possible trauma in their past, they've got some kind of support, and then the indicators for them that that support is helping them and then giving them the tools that then they can do by themselves. So, can you maybe talk briefly through those stages and just as an example? Yeah. No, that's a great example. So, maybe in a situation like that, what comes up for the person is that they figure out that they've essentially got people-pleasing tendency. And so, they're doing as much as they possibly can for this manager, and it's not being recognised or not being appreciated, and so the employee is getting quite resentful. Because they're doing such a good job, the manager is giving them more work, the employee is getting more resentful, and the relationship becomes now a bit like oil and water. In the employee recognising how the way that they grew up or some experiences in childhood correlate to why they are such a people pleaser in this dynamic, what might happen through the process of trauma integration, all different modalities over the course of time, what might happen is they might realise, my role in this is that I actually have terrible boundaries, and I'm not taking care of myself. I'm making sure that the manager has everything that they need, and I'm getting praised for that, but actually, I'm the one that's at cost here. And so, what happens in the trauma integration process is to, first, understand that that is happening. Second, to really start to talk, maybe with a coach or some other practitioner, about how those boundaries can be fortified. And maybe that looks like role-playing, communication as to what boundaries are going to be set. Maybe that means pushing back on additional work. Maybe the manager doesn't respond favourably to that. How am I going to deal with that? So, it's a little bit of boundary setting, it's a little bit of really recognising where they've outsourced their validation to this manager, and kind of bringing that back into themselves, so that they're working more traditional hours, hours that are expected of them, not overworking and, yeah, just advocating for themselves more. So, that's just one scenario. You can, again, imagine how many different ways that that could play out. Sure. But I love that example. That gives me a really practical way that this can show up and play out. So, that's really helpful. You mentioned that you had put together a toolkit almost, like a list of where you could go. Where can people get hold of that? Yeah. So, I thought, while I was writing this book, I had overwritten it by about 12,000 words. The editor was quite happy with that. And she suggested that I take that out of the book and actually create that as an online resource. So, that became very similar to a restaurant menu. It's called myhealingmenu.com. And essentially, it breaks down all of these trauma integration modalities as appetizers, things that you might gently step your toe into on your own, things like podcasts or particular books or binaural beats to listen to, things like that. Journaling. Then, shared plates would be the second category. And that's the things that you do with a practitioner. Entrees, which are much more of the somatic experiences, the things that are actually going to be moving your body in quite impactful ways. And then, the desserts are actually psychedelics and things in that realm, where I categorise them as desserts, because those are going to be the richest of experiences and the things that you will probably have the least. So, I was really intentional in thinking about that, and I wanted it to be accessible and just an easy way in for anyone to understand how these things were categorised. So, yeah, there are hundreds and hundreds of modalities on that website. It's an educational resource. Nothing to purchase there. Just if you're curious, and you want to follow a little trailhead, that's a great place to start. And if someone wants to find you, where would you like them to go? Oh, my website is just klcampbell.com. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. This is one of those interviews where I think we probably could have gone on for about double the time, but it's been a great introduction to this topic. So, maybe we'll do another one, dive into a little bit deeper. But in the meantime, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, Jeremy. This was wonderful, and I really, really appreciate the dialogue. Okay. Well, notwithstanding the topic of that interview with Kelly Campbell, I hope that you enjoyed it and found it interesting. I had never really thought about the way that cumulative events could ultimately amount to something which you find traumatic and which affects the way that you show up. But it does make a lot of sense. If you have a work colleague, for example, who always treats you in a negative way, then it's not surprising that you find yourself reacting to that and changing your behaviours, not necessarily in a positive way. I also really liked the idea that something you can do here is to integrate the experience within you, rather than, quotes, 'cure yourself of it'. It's like a coming to terms with it and acceptance of it, and crucially, not allowing it to dictate the way that you present yourself and show up. Show notes for this episode are at changeworklife.com/201, that's changeworklife.com/201. And I haven't asked this for a while, but it would be great if you would leave a review for the podcast. Apple podcasts is still really the place to leave a review, so if you use an Apple device to listen to your podcasts, and you can leave a review there, then that would be amazing. But if not, wherever you get your podcasts, if you can rate me on Spotify, or if there's any rating function in the app that you use, any review would be really, really helpful. And if it's not a five-star review, tell me why not. Drop me a line. Go to changeworklife.com/contact, and tell me what can I do better. There's another great episode coming in two weeks' time, so make sure that you've subscribed to the show if you haven't already, and I can't wait to see you then. Cheers. Bye.