I grew up in a small country town in Victoria and have lived most of my life in Queensland. Country towns teach you early that everyone has a part to play, and that people do better when someone notices them.
I started out as a Child Safety Officer while I was still training as a psychologist. Early in that role, our team experienced a tragic event. What has stayed with me most is what happened afterwards. The review that followed became a search for who was responsible. My manager went on stress leave. A colleague lost confidence in making decisions. People who cared deeply about children stopped thinking clearly and started protecting themselves.
It took me years to see what was happening. A system full of people who cared about children was treating its own adults the way trauma treats a child: with threat, with hypervigilance, and with a search for someone to blame.
Since then I’ve worked across child protection, youth justice, residential care and mental health, first as a practitioner and now as a psychologist, clinical supervisor and consultant. I’ve supported more than 300 children and families directly, run over 150 workshops and trained more than 2,000 practitioners.
In every one of those places I saw the same pattern. The leaders weren’t the problem. They were some of the most committed people I’ve met. The problem was how the work was organised around them: who decided, who was reachable, and where the pressure went when nobody had room to hold it.
During a workshop on compassion fatigue, a strong, capable leader broke down and said, “This is me.” She had so much resilience that it had become the problem, because it was the only tool her role had ever asked her to use.
Somewhere in those years I stopped asking how to make leaders more resilient. I started asking what it would take to build conditions where no leader has to carry it all alone. Trauma Transforming Leadership is my answer.
