When the Body Remembers: Trauma, Trust & the Leadership Practices that Heal Workplaces

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Introduction

I’ve just finished reading The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, and I haven’t been able to look at workplace behaviour the same way since. So much of what we label as “performance issues” the colleague who shuts down in meetings, the leader who snaps under pressure, the team member who avoids conflict might actually be the body remembering what the mind has learned to hide.
It made me think about how easily workplaces confuse behaviour with intent, and how rarely we pause to ask: what might this reaction be protecting? If our bodies keep score, then our organisations are part of that ledger too, sometimes as healers, sometimes as triggers.

The Science

Van der Kolk’s work shows that trauma isn’t only the result of catastrophic events. It can also come from chronic emotional stress exclusion, humiliation, lack of control, or prolonged uncertainty. These experiences leave imprints in the nervous system.

When the body perceives threat, even subtly, it activates the fight, flight, or freeze response. Heart rate rises, breathing shortens, and the brain’s amygdala floods with signals of danger. In these moments, the prefrontal cortex responsible for empathy, creativity, and rational decision-making temporarily goes offline. The body moves into survival mode.

Neuroscientist Stephen Porges refers to this as the polyvagal response, the body’s attempt to maintain safety through either connection or protection. When cues of safety are absent, the vagus nerve triggers defensive states that shift energy away from social engagement toward survival. Over time, repeated activation can “rewire” the brain’s pathways for vigilance, making trust physically harder to sustain.

In workplaces, this can look like disengagement, defensiveness, or perfectionism. The person isn’t being “difficult”; their nervous system simply doesn’t feel safe enough to think, connect, or trust.
Neuroscience and organisational psychology converge here: environments that foster predictability, respect, and belonging calm the body’s threat system and reopen access to learning, reasoning, and collaboration. Safety, quite literally, switches the brain back on. Studies in post-traumatic growth show that recovery of safety reactivates the brain’s default mode and executive networks, enabling greater empathy, insight, and innovation. Psychological safety is, therefore, not just emotional, it is neurocognitive infrastructure for learning.

Key Findings

1. Micro-traumas accumulate.
   It’s not always the big events that break trust. Repeated exposure to dismissal, ambiguity, or subtle bias can create the same physiological imprint as overt harm. Over time, these small shocks accumulate in the body as chronic stress.
2. High vigilance erodes capacity.
   People who constantly scan for threat; the critical boss, the next restructure, the unspoken tone in an email burn through cognitive resources. Innovation, humour, and generosity don’t survive long in hyper-vigilance.
3. Safety is relational and embodied.
   Psychological safety isn’t a slogan; it’s a felt experience. The body must believe it’s safe before the mind can engage. Leaders who speak calmly, maintain consistency, and model openness send powerful physiological cues of safety to their teams.
4. Repair matters.
   Mistakes and missteps are inevitable. What matters is repair. Acknowledgment, apology, and empathy are not “soft skills” they are the nervous system’s reset button. Without repair, trust calcifies into caution.
5. Not everything is a performance issue.
   When someone withdraws, overreacts, or resists feedback, we often go straight to performance management. But sometimes, what looks like resistance is protection. Understanding the body’s role helps leaders respond with curiosity rather than judgement.
6. Organisational memory mirrors human memory.
   Just as bodies remember threat, organisations hold imprints of past crises - restructures, failed change programmes, or cultures of fear. Organisational structures themselves can reinforce trauma or support healing. Without deliberate “repair” at a systemic level (rituals of closure, acknowledgment, transparent practices, or cultural reset), these patterns persist as collective hyper-vigilance.

 
What This Means

This approach aligns with the growing field of trauma-informed leadership, which recognises that past and chronic stress can shape how people engage, decide, and relate at work. Trauma-informed leaders respond not by diagnosing trauma but by designing systems of safety, trust, and empowerment into every layer of workplace life. Their work is grounded in five dimensions of safety: physical, psychological, social, moral, and cultural, which together create the conditions where people can think clearly, relate openly, and recover from stress.

If the body keeps the score, then leadership must become a practice of co-regulation helping others find calm by being calm ourselves. This doesn’t mean turning managers into therapists; it means recognising that how we lead affects how others’ nervous systems respond. When leaders ground themselves - slowing their breath, maintaining tone, and acknowledging emotion, they stabilise not only their own nervous systems but also those of their teams. Calm presence is, neurologically, contagious.

In practice, this might look like:

• Grounding before reacting. Taking a breath before responding to tension or challenge. Before your next feedback conversation, how might you anchor both your breath and your language?
• Creating predictability. Clear agendas, follow-through on promises, and visible fairness all quiet the body’s threat response.
• Listening for signals, not just words. Withdrawal, agitation, or fatigue may be signs of overwhelm, not disengagement.
• Repairing after rupture. A short check-in after conflict (“I sensed that meeting was tough how are you doing?”) can reset safety.
• Embedding rest and recovery. Micro-breaks, transitions between meetings, and permission to pause are not indulgences; they are maintenance for cognitive clarity.

When we treat every tension as a performance gap, we risk pathologizing protection. When we see behaviour as information data about safety, stress, and story we lead from a place of humanity and intelligence.

A Quote to Reflect On
“Trauma is not what happens to you. It’s what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.”  - Bessel van der Kolk

A Question to Reflect On
What hidden patterns in your team might be not “bad behaviour” but the body remembering and what would change if you led with curiosity instead of correction?

​Further Reading

• van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.
• Edmondson, A. (2018). The Fearless Organization.
• Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence.
• Siegel, D. (2012). The Developing Mind.
• Harvard Business Review (2022). Trauma-Informed Leadership Is Essential to Building Trust at Work.
• Regent University. (2024). Trauma-Informed Leadership: Integrating Research-Based Models of Safety, Trust, and Empowerment.
• Porges, S. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation.

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