I was holding the door open at the top of the basement steps. I did this every day to excitedly welcome my Dad home from work.
The house was quiet in that calm, ordinary suburban way. I was 3 years old. My Mother was in the kitchen starting dinner. I already felt responsible, capable and helpful because I was an older sister.
My hand on the basement door, looking for my Dad to appear. Suddenly without warning or a moment to react, my 8-month-old baby sister came flying across the floor in one of those walker things and went right under my arm through the open door and fell down 13 concrete steps. I watched as she bounced between the wall and the railing like a bowling ball.
It was like watching a movie in slow-motion. My father dropped his briefcase and ran to the bottom of the stairs as my mom rushed past me from the top of the steps screaming and yelling to get to the baby.
I remember the sounds of the screams and the cries.
I FROZE. Standing their holding the door open, watching the chaos and terror unfold beneath me on the stairs.
Mom ran up the stairs blowing past me again while holding the baby. She and my sister were both screaming and crying. My dad followed right behind them.
Let me back up for a minute. My early life was idyllic as could be (more to come on the later years). I had a present, loving, safe two-parent household. We were comfortable middle-class and I was protected and loved with lots of family and friends close by.
But…in this one instant, I was alone, frozen, terrified watching a scene unfold that would eventually drive a large portion of my life.
I immediately believed everything was my fault.
Did I kill my sister????
What must have felt like a lifetime holding that door open. In reality, it was only a few minutes before they realized the baby was going to be just fine.
They hugged me, they consoled me, they told me it wasn’t my fault.
I didn’t believe them.
The whole incident would become a defining moment for my life and work that took over 40 years for me to unpack.
That momentary scenario created an unconscious story that anchored my brain and belief system.
The belief became….”any time I open a door (literally and figuratively), bad things happen to me and others.”
It became THE root cause of a lifetime of what I call my own “Peak and Plummet” cycle. I could get into big rooms. I could accomplish things personally and professionally, up to a point, then I’d do something and it would all come crashing down.
I first came to realize there may be something inside of ME that was causing this cycle. I saw it wasn’t just bad luck, instead it was what author Gay Hendricks calls an upper limit problem in his fantastic book The Big Leap.
Having an upper limit problem means we have an internal thermostat that heats up when we don’t feel safe or have guilt or shame. Exceeding a comfortable level of the thermostat means we unconsciously sabotage ourselves to return to what feels familiar and safe, especially if we haven’t learned how to regulate our nervous systems.
Through many years of a deep inner work and trauma healing journey, I learned the “basement steps incident” was an embedded wound that became exiled inside the 3-year-old part of me that I now call “Curly”.
I named that inner child part of me Curly because of the defining characteristic at that age, my big thick curly hair.
Seeing the wound Curly was carrying allowed the adult (Self) version of me to better understand when and why the Freeze response showed up in various areas of my life and work.
When I would get to certain levels (my personal upper limit), the unconscious Curly part would take center stage with my belief system that says… “Freeze. Don’t open that door. You will get hurt. You will hurt others. Stay put, that’s the safe thing to do.”
My personal and professional life operated by believing that:
- Opening doors is dangerous.
- Progress is dangerous.
- Movement is dangerous.
I learned how to meet and heal my parts through the work of Dr. Dick Schwartz and his IFS (Internal Family Systems) approach to healing inner wounds.
I worked to move protective layers (ie. my Freeze response) out of the way enough so I could unburden the wound and reprogram my belief systems.
The Five Trauma Responses That Shape Leadership
Even with techniques like IFS, we must understand where true self-healing starts.
We’ve all been taught in 8th grade science class about fight and flight.
But there are actually 5 primary trauma responses and they are not abstract psychological terms. They are operating systems.
- Fight – control and dominance
- Flight – avoid and disappear
- Freeze – anchored and stunned
- Fawn – people pleasing and caregiving
- Faint – dissociate and body shuts down
Here’s how it plays out for me with different embedded wounds:
Fight when backed into a corner by not being seen or heard.
Flight by drowning myself in busy work to outrun fear.
Freeze by delaying launching something that felt too visible.
Fawn by softening my voice to avoid conflict.
Faint when my body got overwhelmed and dissociated.
These are not character flaws. They are intelligent survival adaptations.
But they don’t have to be our forever states of being.
When I look at my own story, I see how each one played a role at various ages, stages and scenarios in my life. I learned how to make the unconscious conscious and become aware of when I resorted to one of the five responses.
Unburdening each part of me that was anchored by a particular trauma response gave me the ability to heal the parts and move forward with more autonomy, permission and freedom to elevate in my life and work.
And here is the most important truth I have learned…
Self-Leadership is not about eliminating these parts. It is about learning how to work with them.
How Living Oak Leadership Was Born
The irony is that my business, Living Oak Leadership, was not created from my ambition.
It was created from my survival.
Living Oak Leadership uses the metaphor of how a strong powerful oak tree looks on the outside but when cutting a cross section of its trunk, you see everything that ever impacted the growth of the tree.
For over three decades, I worked in Executive Search, Leadership Advisory and Human Capital Strategy. I coached thousands of leaders. I helped CEOs articulate their vision. I guided boards through succession. I assessed executive presence and performance.
On paper, I was operating in the top tier of my industry.
But internally, I was still holding doors shut!
Now I knew why I was.
It became clear I needed to build a framework that would help my leadership clients and others learn how to unburden and heal their own imprinted wounds. Inner wounds don’t always have to happen from Big T-type traumas or terrible childhoods.
Any wound can get embedded by what we generationally inherit, events that happen directly to us and how we perceive the world or family around us.
But we have the ability and the permission as an embodied Self to heal and reprogram how we operate.
Without this work, we can’t fully embody true Self-Leadership which is the foundation of becoming a Conscious Leader that can truly impact the way we desire.
We Have Not Been Taught How
For generations, children have been raised without much knowledge of how (or being properly allowed) to express and release their emotions in the moment. So, we found ways to protect and survive in order to thrive.
Just like an oak tree does.
The business was born at the intersection of wound-healing, consciousness and self-leadership by blending various frameworks, approaches and spiritual somatic work.
Ready to learn more about Living Oak Leadership and how to become the leader you are meant to be…..then stay tuned for the next installment in this series.
It’s the story of another one of my “parts” and how we learned how to start using my voice.
Want support and an amazing community of other self-leaders, come join us in the Living Oak Leadership SKOOL community.
