Recognizing Trauma as a Root Cause of Burnout 

Every day I see post after post about burnout. Women sharing their pain, experts sharing their 5-step plan for avoiding it, how mindset work is the key, how business must shift to avoid it. All great stuff, but what I don’t see a lot of is the root cause analysis. The primary root cause of burnout we must consider is trauma and trauma response.

Current studies show over 70 percent of US adults report experiencing at least one traumatic event. Almost 20 percent report experiencing 4 or more of the ACE markers associated with trauma. Then the world brings even more adverse childhood, community, cultural and climate events. Furthermore, studies show that women are more likely to suffer from burnout. There is a reason. Women are more likely to experience complex childhood trauma, PTSD and trauma that leads to the fawn trauma response.

Fawning is characterized by chronic people-pleasing, workaholism, perfectionism, boundary flexibility and self-denying behaviors. Of course, these behaviors are highly rewarded in our society, making it difficult to recognize when things are achievement-focused versus trauma response-driven. Add to this the challenges of intergenerational trauma related to societal and cultural norms around gender, and it is no wonder women are burning out at high rates.

Most organizations are not cognizant of the impact of trauma

Last week, I asked 500 leading-edge and brilliant HR professionals if they had trauma-sensitive plans in place. The response? Not a single hand raised. While this saddens me it doesn’t surprise me. Even those that leading-edge human resource professionals look to guide the way are not aware. For example, a prominent organizational psychology expert posted about how all emotions do not need to have an immediate reaction, as if one has that much control over their autonomic nervous system and involuntary trauma response.

As I shared with him (to no avail), easy mind-over-matter rhetoric like this is dangerous. It creates a belief that employees can simply mindset their way out of a trauma response, and it just furthers the ‘check your humanity at the door’ approach to business. When these major voices in organizational health and psychological safety in the workplace are not processing their work from a trauma-aware lens, it is hard to expect our corporate cultures to.

But we must expect it because we are hurting at least 223 million people daily by pretending it does not exist. If the people aspect is not enough of a reason, keep in mind that trauma response is impacting our organizations to the tune of $193 billion in lost work days and productivity every year.

Why aren’t we talking about it?

Well… because it is uncomfortable as hell to know the pain of others, even in our closest circles, let alone our work teams. However, breaking the silence does not have to break everything and everyone in the process. To affect change, we don’t need to immediately and haphazardly dump all the darkness out on a table to make a difference. We can start by simply becoming AWARE of where so much of the pain is radiating from and make some simple changes that will benefit 100 percent of our team.

1. Consider the root cause of chronic absenteeism (flight), constant complaining (fight), lack of active participation in meetings (freeze) and doing whatever it takes to get the job done at the expense of personal well-being (fawn). Have a trauma-sensitive discussion before assuming the first three are just plain bad behavior and before taking advantage of the last one. Then consider what it would look like to have a safe, meaningful discussion with the person and establish a collaborative corrective plan.
2. Create safer environments by understanding how physical presence and positioning, tone of voice and body language can feel threatening and how lack of transparency in decision-making and issues erode a sense of security and safety. The framework below provides simple, customizable and implementable opportunities for creating a more psychologically safe environment.   
3. Challenge norms around mental health and trauma by asking appropriate questions, seeking educational opportunities to learn more and evaluating current policies and procedures and past issues that may have been trauma-related.
4. Care… just simply care about your employees as whole, diverse, complex human beings, not human doings, and connect with them accordingly.

How can we acknowledge trauma?

We do not have to, nor can we, solve these complex root issues quickly or easily. Let’s start by taking the blinders and the training wheels off. Recognize that trauma is a root cause of the burnout epidemic, admit we don’t know what we don’t know. We must create awareness around what trauma is and how it shows up. These steps will do wonders for developing a path forward.

Is the path easy… no! It is not well-lit, and it is pretty unpaved and bumpy. But our highest potentials and innovations lie in the dark. Just ask the cavemen and Thomas Edison. When we allow that darkness of the unknown, and our human condition, into the light, anything is possible in our organizations!

About Anita Roach

In her 30 years of consulting for and working in professional services firms, Anita has found that hiding our humanness is the biggest detriment to success – individually and as an organization. With that knowledge and her own experiences, she has come to believe deeply that there is a way to use the things hiding out in the dark to help create better cultures, better companies, better brands, better teams, better leaders and a better you!