How Your Childhood Trauma Shapes Your Leadership Style

EXECUTIVE COACHING • April 17, 2026

The Meeting Where Everything Became Clear

Ayla is 41, the VP of Engineering at a fintech company in San Francisco. She is sitting in a quarterly leadership offsite, in a glass-walled conference room overlooking the Bay, and her head of product has just presented a roadmap that is — she knows, immediately, viscerally — wrong. The sequencing is off. A critical integration dependency has been missed. If the company ships on this plan, they will be underwater in Q3.

Ayla knows all of this in the first ninety seconds. And then something happens that she cannot quite explain to herself: she goes quiet. The room is discussing the roadmap enthusiastically. Her CEO is nodding. Her peers are adding to it. Ayla is watching herself not say the thing she needs to say, and she is watching it with a strange, suspended quality — the way you watch yourself drop something in slow motion and cannot move fast enough to catch it.

She does not say anything in that meeting. She sends a carefully worded Slack message to the head of product afterward. The message is so carefully worded that the critical content is almost invisible. Three weeks later, when the dependency problem surfaces in a sprint review and costs the team two weeks of rework, Ayla is sitting at her desk thinking about something that happened when she was nine years old.

She is thinking about a dinner table in Tucson. She is thinking about what it felt like to speak up when the room had already decided — when her father had already decided — and what happened next. She is thinking about how, somewhere between Tucson and San Francisco, she learned to absorb the cost of not speaking rather than risk the cost of speaking.

In my work with clients, this moment — the moment where a driven, ambitious professional recognizes her current leadership behavior in the face of her childhood self — is not unusual. It is, in fact, one of the most common moments in the work. Because childhood trauma doesn’t stay in childhood. It migrates. It follows you into every organizational system you enter, every team you lead, every feedback conversation you attempt, every conflict you navigate or avoid. It shapes not just how you feel at work but how you lead — the specific patterns, defenses, and relational strategies you deploy in your professional life.

This post is about that migration. It’s about the clinical mechanisms through which childhood adversity shapes adult leadership style — and about what becomes possible when you understand those mechanisms clearly enough to start leading from choice rather than from history.

The Core Wound and Its Leadership Imprint

To understand how childhood trauma shapes leadership style, we need to start with what trauma actually does to the developing nervous system — because the leadership patterns aren’t arbitrary. They’re logical. They’re the direct expression of survival strategies that were formed in specific childhood conditions and then carried, intact and operational, into adult professional life.

The clinical framework for understanding the trauma-to-leadership pipeline draws on several decades of attachment theory, developmental neuroscience, and complex trauma research. John Bowlby, MD, British psychiatrist and originator of attachment theory, established that the quality of early caregiving relationships forms what he called “internal working models” — cognitive-emotional templates for how relationships work, what to expect from others, and how to behave when relationships are threatened. These templates, formed in the first years of life, are carried into every subsequent relational context, including organizational ones. The leader who grew up with an unpredictable, critical parent carries an internal working model that says: authority is dangerous, approval is conditional, and the safe position is perfect. That model doesn’t get checked at the office door.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, offers the framing that has perhaps most influenced how clinicians think about trauma’s ongoing presence in adult life: “Trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present.” That word — survive — is important. Your leadership style, when it’s shaped by trauma, is not a performance choice. It’s a survival strategy. Understanding the difference is the beginning of change.

The neurobiological research supports this framing. Martin Teicher, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and his colleague Jacqueline Samson found in a comprehensive 2016 review in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry that childhood abuse and neglect produce measurable, enduring neurobiological changes: reduced hippocampal volume (impairing memory and context processing), altered amygdala reactivity (increasing threat-detection sensitivity), and reduced prefrontal cortex connectivity (impairing emotional regulation). These are not metaphorical changes. They are structural changes in the brain that directly impair the capacities most critical for effective leadership: emotional regulation, accurate threat assessment, integrative thinking, and the ability to tolerate uncertainty without collapsing into a defensive response.

The pathway from these neurobiological changes to specific leadership behaviors runs through what Peter Walker, MFT, therapist and author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, has named the “4F” responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. These are the four primary survival strategies available to a child in an unsafe environment. And they don’t retire when childhood ends. They get recruited into the adult professional context — where they express themselves as leadership style.

If you’re recognizing yourself in any of this, it can help to also read about the fight-flight-freeze-fawn response and its relational origins — that piece lays out the neurobiological architecture in more detail than we have space for here.

Four Adaptive Leader Archetypes Born From Trauma

What I’m about to describe are not character flaws. They are survival strategies that worked — strategies that were formed in specific conditions of threat or deprivation and that succeeded at keeping you safe. The problem isn’t that they’re bad strategies. The problem is that they were designed for a childhood environment that no longer exists, and they’re now running as the operating system for a leadership role that requires something different.

The Over-Functioner: Fight Response in the Corner Office

The Over-Functioner is the leader whose childhood fight response has been dressed up in professional clothes and promoted into management. She grew up in an environment where imperfection was punished — where a parent’s criticism was precise and devastating, where mistakes had real consequences, where the safest position was always perfect. She learned to find the flaw before anyone else could find it in her. That strategy kept her safe.

In a leadership role, she’s relentlessly precise. Her standards are genuinely high — frighteningly high. She can identify the weakness in any proposal in under two minutes. Her team’s output is excellent. Her projects ship on time. Her investors trust her judgment implicitly. And her senior leaders keep leaving. Because her team doesn’t bring her problems until they’ve already solved them, because bringing an unsolved problem to her feels like standing in front of the original threat. The fight-habituated leader is frequently feared rather than trusted — a distinction that matters enormously for the kind of psychological safety that drives actual innovation.

She’s often also struggling with the physical signs of burnout — because the vigilance required to maintain perfection at scale is physiologically expensive, and the body eventually presents the bill.

The Controller: Flight Response as Executive Function

The Controller’s childhood flight response looks, from the outside, like extraordinary productivity. She grew up in an environment where staying in motion was staying safe — where busyness was both a genuine escape from threat and a strategy for demonstrating her value. She learned that if she was useful enough, productive enough, accomplished enough, she could outrun whatever was coming. That strategy worked.

In a leadership role, she’s perpetually in motion. She has seventeen priorities at any moment and she’s genuinely executing on all of them. Her work ethic is legendary. She’s also emotionally unavailable. Her team respects her. They don’t feel seen by her. She’s present in the room and absent from the relationship — always thinking about the next thing, always managing toward the next deliverable, always slightly beyond the present moment. The flight-habituated leader produces extraordinary output. She also produces teams that feel managed rather than led, and she produces a version of herself that hasn’t actually stopped running since she was eleven years old.

The Caretaker/Fawner: Fawn Response as Leadership Philosophy

The Caretaker grew up managing other people’s emotional states. She was the child who knew, before she entered the room, what mood her parent was in and what she needed to adjust in herself to keep the peace. She may have been parentified — made responsible for a parent’s emotional stability in ways that were developmentally inappropriate. She learned that her safety depended on others’ comfort, and that the way to stay safe was to be the one who made sure everyone was okay.

In a leadership role, she’s extraordinarily attuned. She knows what her team needs before they ask. She creates psychologically comfortable environments. Her team loves her. They also don’t fully trust her judgment — because they’ve noticed that her positions tend to shift based on who she’s talking to, that difficult feedback arrives so cushioned in affirmation it’s nearly invisible, that the thing that needed to be said directly often wasn’t said at all. The fawn-habituated leader is liked and not quite respected — a combination that is exhausting to maintain and devastating to her actual effectiveness as a leader.

The Avoider/Detacher: Freeze Response as Leadership Style

The Avoider grew up in an environment where the safest response to overwhelming threat was to become very still, very quiet, and very internal. When fight and flight weren’t available — when the threat was too big to fight and too inescapable to flee — the freeze response kept her safe by taking her somewhere else inside herself. She learned to inhabit a kind of functional dissociation: present in body, elsewhere in mind.

In a leadership role, she’s technically excellent and emotionally difficult to read. She’s calm in crises — a genuine asset when everything is on fire. She’s also hard to connect to in ordinary moments. Her team trusts her judgment and doesn’t feel emotionally connected to her. She has difficulty making decisions under pressure — the freeze response produces a specific kind of decision paralysis that looks, from the outside, like deliberateness but feels, from the inside, like being trapped. She avoids difficult conversations not because she doesn’t care but because high-stakes interpersonal moments activate the original freeze — she goes blank at the moment she most needs to be present. You can read more about this pattern in the context of emotional unavailability — the relational dynamics are strikingly similar in leadership and intimate relationships.

How Trauma-Based Leadership Shows Up at Work

The four archetypes above are clean in description and messier in real life. Most driven, ambitious women with trauma histories don’t lead from a single archetype — they lead from a primary response with secondary adaptations, and the primary response shifts based on context. The fight-habituated leader who fawns with her board. The fawn-habituated leader who freezes when she’s genuinely cornered. The flight-habituated leader who controls when she can’t flee.

What they share is this: their leadership behavior, in moments of stress, is being driven by a threat-detection system that was calibrated in childhood — and that threat-detection system is not particularly good at distinguishing between a critical parent at the dinner table and a challenging board member in a quarterly review. Both activate the same alarm. Both produce the same survival response. The leader doesn’t choose it. It happens before she has time to choose.

Here’s what this looks like in practice. Let me share two stories from my clinical work — both are composite vignettes, details changed to protect privacy.

Vera is 44, the Chief Operating Officer of a regional healthcare system in the Pacific Northwest. She grew up in a household with a mother who was loving in warm periods and withering in difficult ones — the kind of criticism that was so precise, so knowing of exactly where to cut, that Vera learned to anticipate it before it arrived. She became expert at finding her own flaws first, at holding herself to a standard so exacting that her mother had nothing left to criticize. That strategy worked. It also never ended.

Vera now runs operations for four hospitals. Her quality metrics are the best in the region. She is also conducting what her CHRO has quietly started calling “pre-mortems with teeth” — review sessions where Vera identifies everything that could go wrong with a proposal before any implementation begins, sessions that have become so thorough and so critical that her directors are arriving with fully polished proposals rather than bringing problems to her early, when she could actually help. They’d rather spend three extra weeks over-preparing than face what feels, to them, like an ambush. Vera doesn’t understand why her team isn’t bringing her problems sooner. She genuinely wants to help them. She doesn’t see that what she experiences as thorough review is what they experience as threat.

Eliza is 37, a Director of Strategy at a management consulting firm in Chicago. She grew up as the emotional anchor in a family where her father struggled with alcohol and her mother worked long hours to compensate. From the time she was eight, Eliza was the one who kept the emotional temperature of the house — who checked in on her younger brother, who made sure dinner was on when her mother came home exhausted, who absorbed her father’s difficult moods without escalating them. She was told, repeatedly, that she was so mature. She was so good at reading a room.

She is still so good at reading a room. She is also, at 37, constitutionally unable to give a performance review that might genuinely upset someone. Her direct reports receive feedback that is technically accurate and so thoroughly cushioned in affirmation that its critical content is nearly invisible. Two of her team members have been underperforming for more than six months. Eliza has had the difficult version of those conversations in her head dozens of times. She has not had them out loud. She is terrified — and “terrified” is the right word, not an exaggeration — that directness will shatter something irreplaceable. She has never fully examined where that terror comes from. But she knows, if she’s honest, that it comes from a long time ago, and that it has something to do with a father’s volatile moods and a child who learned that managing everyone else’s feelings was the price of peace. You can learn more about the roots of this pattern in what parentification actually looks like in childhood — the list may be more recognizable than you expect.

What both Vera and Eliza share is not a leadership problem, exactly. It’s a survival strategy that has outlived the conditions that required it. What they need isn’t better leadership training. It’s access to the wound underneath the style — and a path toward leading from something other than the management of original threat.

The Cost of Unexamined Trauma in Leadership

Let’s be honest about what it costs — to the leader herself, to her team, and to the organizations that benefit from her without fully seeing her.

The cost to the leader is the most private and the most significant. When your leadership style is driven by unexamined trauma, you are spending an enormous amount of cognitive and emotional energy managing threat that is not, in the present moment, actually there. The fight-habituated leader is scanning constantly for the error that will expose her. The flight-habituated leader is in perpetual motion away from a stillness that she associates with danger. The fawn-habituated leader is monitoring everyone’s emotional temperature while her own needs go unmet. The freeze-habituated leader is spending energy maintaining the wall between herself and her team that keeps her emotionally safe. All of that energy is not available for actual leadership — for vision, for genuine connection, for the regulated presence that allows a team to do its best work.

The cost to teams is also significant — and it’s one that researchers are beginning to document more carefully. Amy Edmondson, PhD, Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and leading researcher on psychological safety, has established that the single greatest predictor of team performance is psychological safety — the belief that you can take risks, voice concerns, and make mistakes without being punished. The trauma-based leadership styles described above — particularly the fight (perfectionism/criticism) and freeze (emotional unavailability) styles — are directly corrosive to psychological safety. They don’t destroy it dramatically. They erode it incrementally, one meeting at a time, one unspoken concern at a time, one feedback session that went wrong at a time, until the team stops bringing the problems that need to be brought and starts protecting itself from the leader instead of working with her.

The cost to organizations is perhaps the most ironic: the very leadership traits that organizations celebrate — the perfectionism, the relentless productivity, the calm in crisis, the attunement to the room — are, in many cases, the direct products of childhood adversity. And organizations benefit from them without examining their roots or counting their costs. We’ll return to that in the Systemic Lens section. But first, a pull quote that names this more plainly than any clinical framing can.

This reframe — from “what is wrong with me as a leader?” to “what happened to me, and how is it showing up here?” — is the foundational shift that makes the work possible. It removes shame. It introduces curiosity. It opens a door that perfectionism, self-criticism, and the relentless drive to fix oneself keep firmly closed.

The costs don’t stay abstract. They express themselves in turnover rates, in teams that stop innovating, in driven women who arrive at their forties with impressive careers and a private sense that something essential is missing — that they are leading from somewhere behind glass, unable to fully connect to the work or to the people they’re leading. If you recognize that feeling, it may be worth exploring what burnout at the edge of breakdown actually looks like for ambitious women — because the gap between those two states is often smaller than it appears.

There’s also the cost to the leader’s own health. The ACE research is sobering on this point: Vincent Felitti, MD, and Robert Anda, MD, co-investigators of the landmark Kaiser Permanente ACE Study involving 17,337 adults, established that adverse childhood experiences are dose-dependently associated with adult health outcomes across every domain they measured — physical illness, mental illness, substance use, occupational functioning, and mortality. The body doesn’t forget. The driven woman who has built an impressive career on the foundation of an unexamined trauma history is not exempt from that research. She is, in many ways, its subject.

Both/And: Your Trauma Shaped Strengths AND Created Costs

Here is where we have to hold two things at once — and hold them without collapsing either one into the other.

Both “the leadership qualities you developed through your childhood experiences — the precision, the resilience, the attunement, the work ethic, the calm under fire — are real and genuinely valuable” AND “those same qualities, when they’re driven by unexamined trauma rather than by choice, are costing you and your team something significant” can be true at the same time.

This is not a consolation prize. The skills are real. The attunement of the fawn-habituated leader is genuinely extraordinary — she reads rooms with an accuracy that most people spend careers developing. The precision of the fight-habituated leader is genuine — her standards are not arbitrary, they’re the product of an exacting intelligence that can see failure modes before anyone else. The endurance of the flight-habituated leader is real — her capacity to sustain effort through difficulty is remarkable. The composure of the freeze-habituated leader is an actual asset — she doesn’t lose her head when everything around her is on fire.

What’s also true is that these capacities are most powerful when they’re chosen rather than compelled — when they arise from your authentic values and deliberate leadership philosophy rather than from the automatic activation of a survival system that doesn’t know the war is over.

The goal of this work isn’t to dismantle the strengths. It’s to free them from the fear that’s been driving them. It’s to let the precision exist without the terror of imperfection underneath it. To let the attunement exist without the self-erasure that accompanies it. To let the endurance exist without the inability to stop. To let the composure exist without the relational disconnection that maintains it.

And here’s the second Both/And that matters just as much:

Both “your leadership style was shaped by experiences you did not choose and could not control, in an environment that was genuinely unsafe or inadequate” AND “those adaptations are now limiting your effectiveness as a leader and costing your team something they deserve — a leader who can be present, direct, and regulated” can be true simultaneously.

There’s no blame in the first part of that sentence. The adaptations made sense. They were the best available strategies for the conditions they were formed in. They kept you safe. They may have been the very thing that made your ambition possible — the drive to build something outside of what you came from. What I see consistently in my work with clients is that the leadership style shaped by childhood trauma is not a moral failure. It’s a developmental outcome. And developmental outcomes can change.

Consider what Iris came to understand in her work. Iris is 46, the founding CEO of a venture-backed climate tech company. She grew up in a household where emotional needs were treated as inconveniences — not cruelly, but systematically. Her parents were both academics who valued intellectual rigor above all else and treated emotional expressiveness with a kind of benign confusion. Iris learned to lead from pure cognition. She built a company on it. She was, by every external metric, extraordinary — a strategic mind, a fundraising talent, a genuine visionary. And her leadership team was quietly planning to address the board about her inability to hold space for the relational needs of the organization. Not because she was unkind. Because she genuinely didn’t know how to be present with someone’s difficulty without analyzing it. She’d never been taught. She’d been shaped, instead, by an environment that rewarded analysis and treated feeling as noise.

Iris’s work was not to stop being a strategic thinker. It was to learn that her team’s need for genuine human connection was not noise — and that meeting it was not a distraction from her job. It was her job. Learning to recognize what genuine connection actually feels like — in professional relationships as much as personal ones — was part of that work. And it started with understanding where the disconnection had come from in the first place.

The Systemic Lens: Why Corporate Culture Rewards Trauma Responses

It would be incomplete to talk about trauma-based leadership styles without naming the system that benefits from them — because the individual psychological work matters, and so does the cultural context in which it happens.

Organizations benefit from trauma-based leadership in specific ways that are rarely named directly. The fight-habituated leader’s perfectionism produces high-quality output. The flight-habituated leader’s workaholism produces extraordinary productivity. The fawn-habituated leader’s people-pleasing produces harmonious team environments. The freeze-habituated leader’s dissociation produces calm in crisis. These are genuine organizational benefits — and they are, in many cases, extracted from the leader’s developmental adversity at the leader’s expense.

The “resilience narrative” — the cultural story that celebrates leaders who have “overcome adversity” to achieve success — is, in part, a mechanism for extracting the products of adversity without addressing the adversity itself. We celebrate the driven woman who built her company from nothing, who survived a difficult upbringing to lead with relentless standards, without asking what it costs her to maintain those standards, or what it cost her team to work inside them, or whether the organizational system that celebrates her might also be one that profits from her wounds.

Herman’s framing is important here because it names the political dimension of recovery: in a system that benefits from your trauma-based productivity, your healing is, in part, an act of self-determination. To choose regulated leadership over reactive leadership — to insist on doing the internal work that makes genuine presence possible — is to refuse to let the organizational system extract what it extracts without cost. It is to become the author of your own leadership, rather than the product of your history.

The gender dimension of this is also significant and worth naming explicitly. The specific trauma-to-leadership pipelines most common in driven women — fawn and freeze — are also the pipelines most consistent with gender socialization. Girls are more consistently rewarded for compliance, accommodation, and emotional attunement, and more consistently penalized for assertion and boundary-setting, than boys. This means that for women, the fawn response isn’t only a neurobiological survival strategy — it’s one that has been systematically reinforced by every social system the driven woman has moved through, from her family of origin to her school to her early professional environments. The driven woman who leads from a fawn response is expressing a trauma adaptation that has been socially legitimized at every step. She’s been called “collaborative.” She’s been called “emotionally intelligent.” She’s been promoted, in many cases, specifically for the quality that is quietly erasing her.

This is not a small thing. It’s worth sitting with. The organizational culture that rewards her fawn response is not a neutral backdrop. It’s a system that has a stake in her staying where she is. That’s worth factoring into the healing conversation — because healing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and the woman who does this work in isolation, without naming the system she’s doing it inside of, is working with one hand tied behind her back.

You can read more about this in the context of gaslighting dynamics — the mechanisms by which systems maintain the conditions that benefit them at the individual’s expense are related, and naming them matters. For a broader look at how relational trauma shapes adult functioning, the complete guide to betrayal trauma covers the foundational clinical concepts in depth.

How to Heal: From Reactive to Regulated Leadership

Healing from trauma-based leadership is not a leadership development intervention. It is, at its core, a trauma healing process that has leadership implications. That distinction matters — because the tools that actually shift these patterns are not the tools you find in a leadership training curriculum. They’re the tools of trauma-informed clinical work, adapted for the leader who is doing the healing while still running the organization.

Daniel J. Siegel, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and founding co-director of the Mindsight Institute, offers the framing that grounds this section: “Where attention goes, neural firing flows, and neural connection grows.” The nervous system is not fixed. The brain that was shaped by early relational adversity can be reshaped by new relational experiences — including the relational experience of a good therapeutic relationship, and the experience of learning to notice, name, and regulate the survival responses that have been running in the background of your leadership for years.

Here’s what that process looks like in practice:

Start with pattern recognition, not self-correction. The first goal is not to change your leadership behavior. It’s to see it clearly — to develop the capacity to notice, in real time, when your threat-detection system has activated and is driving your response. “I’m about to shut down this proposal because something about it activates my internal alarm” is a different internal experience than “this proposal is wrong and I need to correct it immediately.” The first creates a moment of choice. The second doesn’t.

Name the developmental origin without using it as an excuse. Understanding that your perfectionism has roots in a critical parent is not a reason to keep deploying perfectionism. It’s a reason to have compassion for the child who developed it — and to begin separating the current leader from the original threat. Pete Walker, MFT, calls this “flashback management” — the process of recognizing when a present-moment trigger has activated a past-tense survival response, and grounding yourself in the present long enough to respond differently.

Build nervous system capacity for the experiences your style has been avoiding. The fight-habituated leader needs to build tolerance for imperfection — not in others first, but in herself. The fawn-habituated leader needs to build tolerance for relational discomfort — for the experience of saying the direct thing and surviving the other person’s reaction. The flight-habituated leader needs to build capacity for stillness — for presence without the protection of productivity. The freeze-habituated leader needs to build capacity for relational warmth — for contact with her team’s experience without the wall that keeps her safe.

Do this work with professional support. The patterns described in this post are not amenable to insight alone. They are neurobiological patterns — embedded in the nervous system, activated below the level of conscious choice, maintained by the same survival imperatives that formed them. Changing them requires the kind of sustained, relational, body-based work that good trauma therapy provides. Individual therapy and trauma-informed executive coaching are different modalities — and both have a role in this work, depending on where you’re starting from and what you need.

Expect the work to be non-linear and worth it. The leader who does this work doesn’t arrive at some state of perfect regulation where trauma never activates. She arrives at a place where she can see it faster, name it more accurately, and return to regulated choice more quickly than she could before. The window of tolerance — the neurobiological term for the range of arousal within which we can function effectively — widens. The survival responses still exist. They’re just no longer the default.

If you’re not sure where to start, the trauma patterns quiz can help you identify the specific wound that’s most likely shaping your current experience — in your leadership and beyond it. And if you’re ready to begin doing this work in a more structured way, Fixing the Foundations is Annie’s signature course for relational trauma recovery, built specifically for driven, ambitious women who are ready to repair the psychological architecture underneath their impressive lives.

The path from reactive to regulated leadership is real. It’s well-mapped by decades of trauma research, attachment theory, and clinical practice. And it begins — as most meaningful things do — with the willingness to ask the question that Pete Walker named so precisely: not “what is wrong with me?” but “what happened to me — and how is it showing up here?”

You don’t have to keep leading from the dinner table in Tucson. You don’t have to keep running the organization from the survival strategies of the child who needed them. There is a version of your leadership that is chosen, grounded, and genuinely yours — and it’s worth doing the work to find it. If you’re ready to take the first step, you’re welcome to connect with Annie’s practice to explore whether working together is the right fit. Or learn more about working with Annie one-on-one — individually in therapy or through executive coaching — to begin the process in earnest.

Related Reading

1. Felitti, V.J., Anda, R.F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D.F., Spitz, A.M., Edwards, V., Koss, M.P., & Marks, J.S. (1998). “Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258. PMID: 9635069.
2. van der Kolk, B.A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking Press.
3. Siegel, D.J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
4. Herman, J.L. (1992). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books.
5. Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Publishing.
6. Teicher, M.H., & Samson, J.A. (2016). “Annual research review: Enduring neurobiological effects of childhood abuse and neglect.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 57(3), 241–266. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.12507. PMID: 26831814.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer