Call it what it is.

We often think of trauma as catastrophic events, but trauma isn't always dramatic or immediately obvious. 

Big T Trauma refers to severe, life-threatening incidents like assault, war, or natural disasters. These experiences commonly lead to diagnoses such as PTSD and are widely recognized in clinical psychology, thanks to foundational researchers like Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, and the American Psychiatric Association (APA). 

Big T trauma and PTSD in the workplace are most commonly associated with emergency services, first responders and military, but this doesn't mean that Big T trauma doesn't also sometimes in the corporate world. 

Corporate trauma will more often fit the bill of little t trauma, recently recategorized as Adverse Life Experiences (Shapiro, 2018). Little t trauma / adverse life experiences describe chronic, cumulative experiences that repeatedly undermine an individual's sense of safety, autonomy, or worth. Examples include workplace bullying, harassment, shaming, gaslighting, and systemic silencing. 

Researchers Peter Levine and Gabor Maté suggest that trauma is defined not just by the event itself but by how the body and nervous system respond over time.

Corporate trauma emerges gradually within organizational cultures that normalize harm, even when they don't know they're doing it.

Naming corporate trauma clearly helps validate experiences that are often missed or sometimes minimized. It creates the necessary urgency for leaders and organizations to proactively address these issues, protecting people and culture before harm escalates.

Corporate trauma (little t / adverse life experiences) can be defined as the psychological and emotional harm that individuals or groups experience as a result of toxic, high-pressure, or dehumanizing work environments. It’s not a clinical diagnosis, and the use of the word trauma in this context is sometimes challenging as a) it does not meet the definition in the DSM and b) does not want to minimize the magnitude of Big T trauma events. We persist however, as this word without the capitalization captures the real, pervasive, cumulative and normalized impact of harmful organizational systems, practices or behaviours.

Through our work as change consultants we have seen a lot. We have worked with some workplaces where they described the tenure of a certain leader as "reign of terror", and others where individuals in leadership roles had been arrested as a result of their actions towards others in the workplace.

Not all of the workplaces we have experience have been left with the same level of trauma, but we have also experienced some very difficult corporate contexts ourselves to know that long lasting effects that continue to surface after we have left the workplaces.

This is why we are undertaking this work. We want to raise awareness, and on the individual level give people voices if they have felt silenced. On the organizational level, we hope to be able to create enough visibility around the issue that we can one day start to make change to it.