What if your client of your coaching practice suddenly shares a traumatic experience during a session? And when does supporting their growth intersect with trauma work?
As coaches, we walk a delicate line between empowering our clients and recognizing when they need specialized trauma support. And today we will explore how to navigate these moments with both ethical awareness and genuine care. Now, trauma healing rarely follows a linear path and clients may unexpectedly bring their past experiences into coaching sessions.
Recognizing When Your Client Brings Up Trauma
It happens all the time. Clients want to talk about the past. But as coaches, we must understand both the scope and the limitations of our role in supporting clients who carry trauma.
And while we are not therapists, we can create safe spaces that honor our client’s experiences while maintaining appropriate professional boundaries. Dr. Wessel van der Kolk‘s groundbreaking work in trauma healing, especially his book, The Body Keeps the Score, which I absolutely love, emphasizes that recovery often requires multiple approaches and support systems. And his research shows that healing happens not just in the therapist’s office, but through various modalities that help people reconnect with their bodies, rebuild trust, and rediscover their sense of agency.
This multifaceted approach to healing creates a space for coaches to play a very valuable and clearly defined role. But as coaches, we occupy this unique position in the broader landscape of healing and professional development. And rather than trying to process trauma directly, which we cannot do and do not do, we could work alongside other professionals knowing exactly when and how to maintain appropriate boundaries.
Now, our role is to recognize the signs that indicate a need for additional support and to maintain a pretty strong referral network with mental health professionals and understand how coaching can complement rather than replace trauma-specific therapeutic work. Now, when I was a coach and working with a lot of students and some executives, I had multiple connections in the therapy world where I could refer clients to. There were a handful of times when I was working with a client and I just didn’t know something was happening.
It just felt a little bit off. And those moments, that’s when you know you need to go and connect with your professional network. Ask them, connect with clients and ask them, so what has been your healing journey so far? What other professionals are you working with? And this is just what you need to do if you are a professional life coach.
First, Understand What Coaching Is.
Coaching represents a unique partnership based primarily on future growth and potential. At its core, it’s a collaborative relationship where the coach and the client work together to envision and create a meaningful change. And through powerful questioning and active listening, coaches create this bridge.
And this bridge bridges the gap between a client’s current reality and their desired future. Now, this goal-oriented approach distinguishes coaching from other helping professions. Other helping professions absolutely have goals.
They absolutely can look at what clients really want in their lives. However, with coaching, rather than dwelling on past experiences and trying to puzzle them out and figure out why this is the way it is, coaching conversations center on actionable steps and measurable outcomes. And coaches help clients identify specific objectives.
Ideally, those action steps come from deep insights that clients have in coaching sessions. So when you’re coaching, you’re not necessarily trying to go after so much action as much as you’re trying to go after an insight. You’re trying to go after an insight that not solves a problem, but an insight that helps clients address that problem and all the other problems in their lives.
From these insights, you can start to develop specific action plans, strategic action plans, and create accountability structures that support a sustained progress towards chosen goals. Now, this empowerment-based methodology of coaching rests on the fundamental belief that clients are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. Coaches don’t position themselves as experts with answers, but rather as skilled facilitators who draw out clients’ inner wisdom and capabilities.
And this approach helps clients develop a greater awareness, confidence, and decision-making abilities. And while maintaining professional boundaries, coaching creates a safe space for exploration and growth. Coaches can cultivate environments where clients feel supported in examining their current challenges, they test out new perspectives, and they experiment with different approaches to achieve those goals.
And in that space, that safety allows for a certain kind of vulnerability. And then with appropriate limits, you can foster a genuine development without venturing into therapeutic territory.
Now, What Coaching Is Not.
A coaching practice is distinctly not trauma therapy. And this boundary must be clearly understood and maintained. And while clients may reference traumatic experiences, coaches are not trained to process or heal trauma.
Unlike licensed medical and health professionals, coaches, we just lack the specialized education and clinical tools necessary for trauma work. Now, the coaching relationship is not designed for healing past trauma, even when clients express the desire to do so. And while past experiences may naturally inform present circumstances, coaching maintains this future orientation.
So when clients bring something from the past, you can ask them, okay, so that’s here. How does it inform where you are right now? And how can this be useful for where you wanna go in the future? And when clients need to explore and heal from this past trauma, the coaches must recognize it as beyond the scope of their practice. Now, coaches are simply not equipped for clinical interventions that trauma survivors need.
And the complex nature of trauma requires specific therapeutic techniques, careful attention to triggers, and the ability to handle potential crises, all of which is just, it just falls outside the coaching competencies. Now, the one thing that coaching offers, and trauma itself is so complex, that coaching can offer a container to help clients understand how they can go out and work with other professionals to specifically heal the trauma in their lives.
Understanding the science behind trauma
Dr. Vessel van der Kolk’s research demonstrates that trauma fundamentally alters both brain function and body awareness. His work, particularly in The Body Keeps the Score, reveals how trauma creates distinct patterns in the nervous system. And these patterns cannot be addressed through cognitive approaches alone.
This neurobiological understanding helps explain why traditional talk therapy, while valuable, may need to be complemented and augmented with other approaches. And the ineffectiveness of standard approaches to trauma stems from the highly individualized nature. Every person’s trauma response is shaped by their unique circumstances.
Cultural context, support systems, personal resilience tools, all of these things create this very complex situation, which is simply, you know, there’s just no one size fits all to how we heal trauma. And what might be healing for one person could be re-traumatizing for another. And this just underscores the need for carefully tailored support strategies.
And these individual healing journeys often incorporate multiple modalities because trauma affects people on a physical, emotional, and social levels. And some may even find relief through somatic experience, while others need cognitive restructuring or emotional processing work. And understanding this variety helps coaches recognize their role within a broader healing ecosystem.
And the role of different modalities in trauma recovery isn’t just about offering options. It’s about creating comprehensive support systems from EMDR to somatic experiencing, from traditional therapy to movement practices. Each modality addresses different aspects of trauma’s impact.
And coaches need to understand this landscape to make appropriate referrals and support their client’s choices.
How life coaching can support trauma-informed growth.
Thing one is creating a safe space for truth-telling. The coaching relationship offers a unique container where clients can speak their truth without judgment, maintaining clear boundaries that distinguish the sharing from trauma processing. We’re not trying to process and heal the trauma, but we’re building trust in a non-political setting, which allows clients to explore their strengths and capabilities in a future-oriented context. And sharing has been shown to have high therapeutic value.
The value of being witnessed and freshening your experience and someone meeting that expression, not with judgment or telling you, okay, this is what this means, this is what this is about, but more meeting that expression with curiosity and care and questions that orient towards this, what do you want to do? So this is here now. How do you want to use it? How do you want to move forward with this in your life? This helps clients feel seen without crossing into therapeutic territory.
Thing two, narrative exploration. Coaches support clients in exploring different perspectives on their current circumstances and future possibilities. This helps them identify empowering viewpoints without rewriting or processing past trauma. And through these future-focused narratives, clients learn to author their own stories of possibility while respecting the impact of past experiences.
A lot of time, clients will use what’s happened in their past and they will want to grow from that. They’ll want to help other people who’ve experienced the same thing. This is a really common thing that happens with coaches, people who experience trauma, they grow through it, they find life coaching, they enroll in a life coach training program, and then they want to help people who’ve had similar experiences to themselves.
This is a rewriting of their history, asking themselves, how can I bring value to people who’ve experienced the same thing I have? When clients learn to author their own stories of possibility while respecting the impact of past experiences, this maintains that coaching forward-looking orientation and it acknowledges the client’s complete life experience.
Third thing, empowered treatment navigation. Supporting informed therapy choices means helping clients develop clarity about their needs and options while maintaining appropriate boundaries. Essentially, coaches can help clients look at all of their options, even approach how they even want to approach their healing around trauma, look at even that perspective itself. And when coaches help build confidence in setting boundaries and developing self-advocacy skills, this enables clients to navigate healthcare systems more effectively and to feel more empowered as they’re looking at all of their different options. This includes helping clients prepare for and follow through on their treatment plans, all while maintaining those clear boundaries of not providing medical or therapeutic advice.
Now, to summarize on all of this, as coaches, we hold a unique position in the healing modalities of not going directly into helping clients heal trauma. However, we can help clients with their overall perspective on what they want to do with their future, what they want to do with the choices that they’re making. And coaching offers this beautiful container, this safe place for clients to explore different narratives, explore different perspectives, explore different stories about themselves in the present moment and how they want to move forward in the future.
