What We Pass On – Generational Trauma and the Responsibility of Ethical Leadership
- Brainz Magazine
- 2 days ago
- 10 min read
Written by Kerrie-Lyann Hirst, Trauma-Informed Coach
Kerrie-Lyann Hirst is a trauma-informed coach and social impact leader specialising in generational trauma, nervous system regulation, and cycle-breaking leadership. She combines lived experience with ethical, non-clinical practice to help individuals and organisations create sustainable, trauma-aware change.
Generational trauma is increasingly recognised as a factor shaping leadership behaviour and organisational culture. What are we unknowingly passing on in our families, teams, and systems?
Ethical leadership is often discussed in terms of values, integrity, and decision-making. But rarely do we examine the inherited emotional, relational, and systemic patterns that quietly shape how we lead.
As the Founder of Heal A Generation CIC, working at the intersection of trauma-informed practice and organisational leadership, this question sits at the centre of how I choose to lead. Not because leadership demands perfection, but because it carries responsibility, and responsibility requires awareness.
The weight of that responsibility is significant. How leaders structure organisations, model behaviour, and make decisions has a direct impact on the people they serve, the teams they lead, and the systems they build. Leading ethically requires slowing down and examining how past experiences, including trauma, show up in the present.
This is not about having a bad day and its ripple effect. Leaders work with people navigating mental health challenges, addiction, vulnerability, and complex life circumstances. They lead teams made up of real humans with full, messy lives. At the same time, they are laying foundations that will either support or strain future generations within the organisation.
Leadership is shaped not only by conscious values but by the nervous system, personal history, and lived experience brought into everyday decision-making.
Much of what shows up in leadership is not a conscious choice, but inherited survival patterns learned long before we ever held responsibility.
What generational trauma actually is (beyond the buzzword)
Generational trauma refers to the beliefs, emotional responses, and behavioural patterns that are learned, witnessed, and unconsciously adopted within our environments. These patterns are shaped by cultural, social, political, and circumstantial contexts and are often passed down through families, communities, and institutions.
While many of these patterns originate in early childhood through primary caregivers, they are also reinforced in schools, organisations, and other systems of influence. Over time, what begins as adaptation or survival becomes normalised behaviour carried into adulthood and often into positions of leadership.
So, what, then, is trauma?
In this context, trauma refers not only to what happens to us, but to the lasting impact those experiences have on how we think, feel, and respond to the world. Trauma can stem from single events such as abuse, bullying, neglect, or relational harm, as well as from ongoing experiences commonly captured through Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).
What is less widely understood is that trauma is not just held in memory, it is held in the body. To survive challenging environments, we develop adaptive survival responses shaped by the nervous system. These responses are often described as fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
The nervous system’s role is protection. However, patterns that once supported survival can later show up in everyday life as people-pleasing, avoidance, hypervigilance, or perfectionism. In leadership contexts, these same patterns may manifest as emotional dysregulation, burnout, control, or the misuse of power, often without conscious awareness. Left unexamined, this can lead to harmful leadership patterns.
Exploring how trauma-based patterns show up in leadership
Hyper-responsibility
Hyper-responsibility often presents as an internalised belief that everything depends on the leader. This pattern frequently develops in environments where safety, stability, or emotional regulation were inconsistent, and survival required taking on adult roles early. In leadership, this can show up as difficulty delegating, chronic overworking, and burnout. Leaders may absorb responsibility that properly belongs to teams or systems, feeling personally accountable for everyone’s well-being. Over time, this creates unsustainable leadership models and can foster dependency rather than empowerment.
Emotional suppression
Emotional suppression emerges when emotional expression is minimised, ignored, or actively discouraged. Messages such as “be strong,” “don’t make a fuss,” or “just get on with it” teach individuals to disconnect from emotional experience. In leadership contexts, this may show up as avoidance of emotionally charged conversations, dismissing staff wellbeing as a personal issue, or an inability to hold space for discomfort, grief, or vulnerability. The result is often emotionally disconnected cultures with low psychological safety and unspoken resentment.
Conflict avoidance and conflict dominance
Conflict avoidance and conflict dominance are two expressions of the same survival response. Leaders who learned that conflict was unsafe may avoid it entirely, delaying decisions, maintaining unclear boundaries, and adopting a passive leadership style. Others may respond through dominance, controlling situations to prevent a perceived threat. This can manifest as authoritarian decision-making, shutting down ideas, and rigid “my way or no way” cultures. Both patterns reduce trust, stifle innovation, and create environments shaped by fear or stagnation.
Overachievement tied to self-worth
Overachievement tied to self-worth develops when value, love, or safety were experienced as conditional on performance. Leaders shaped by this pattern may over-identify with their role or title, struggle to rest or step back, and measure team value primarily through output. While often praised in high-performance cultures, this pattern contributes to burnout, normalisation of overwork, and leadership models that fail to demonstrate balance or sustainability.
These behaviours are not character flaws, they are adaptive survival strategies. The issue arises when they remain unexamined and are carried into positions of power. The harm comes from not being aware that these behaviours can affect how you lead.
Awareness is the point of intervention. When leaders understand how survival patterns shape their behaviour, they gain the ability to choose differently.
How generational trauma shows up in leadership
Survival patterns formed in early environments often translate directly into leadership behaviours. One common expression of this is the tension between control and trust.
Leaders shaped by environments where trust was unreliable may adopt highly controlling leadership styles. This can show up as rigid hierarchies, micromanagement, or an overreliance on authority as a means of maintaining safety. From the perspective of teams, this often creates a sense of being unseen, undervalued, or excluded from meaningful decision-making.
From the leader’s perspective, control is rarely about dominance alone. It is often driven by an internal belief that responsibility cannot be shared, that no one else fully understands the work, the risk, or the consequences. Over time, this erodes trust on both sides, contributing to disengagement within teams and burnout for leaders themselves.
Overwork as a virtue
Overwork as a virtue often develops from early experiences where rest was viewed as laziness and worth was tied to productivity. For leaders, this belief can translate into an inability to slow down, switch off, or prioritise rest without guilt.
In leadership contexts, this mindset can shape workplace cultures where long hours are normalised, and teams feel pressure to constantly perform, often leading to burnout and a persistent sense that their efforts are never enough. For both leaders and their teams, this pattern frequently impacts relationships, with work consistently taking priority over home life, rest, and connection.
Fear-based decision making
Fear-based decision making often develops in environments where mistakes carry high emotional or practical consequences. When safety felt conditional, decision-making became rooted in avoiding risk rather than exploring possibilities.
In leadership, this can show up as hesitation, over-control, or reactive choices driven by the need to prevent worst-case outcomes. Opportunities may be delayed or avoided altogether, and creativity and out-of-the-box thinking can stall as leaders prioritise certainty over growth. For teams, this creates a climate of anxiety and caution, where people are reluctant to take initiative or speak openly. Over time, fear-based leadership limits creativity, trust, and collective confidence.
Difficulty holding healthy boundaries
Difficulty holding healthy boundaries often stems from early experiences where personal needs were ignored, blurred, or unsafe to express. Leaders shaped by these environments may struggle to separate responsibility from over-availability.
In practice, this can look like blurred working hours, difficulty saying no, or taking on emotional and practical burdens that belong to others. Teams may become overly reliant, while leaders feel stretched, resentful, or depleted. Without clear boundaries, both leaders and organisations risk burnout, confusion, and relationships that lack clarity or sustainability.
All or any of these survival strategies can look like strong leadership until they create harm.
Organisational culture as an inherited system
While leadership behaviours often feel personal, they rarely exist in isolation. Organisations themselves inherit patterns shaped by the histories, values, and survival strategies of those who lead them. Over time, these patterns become embedded in culture, influencing how people work, communicate, and relate to one another.
Organisational culture reflects what is consistently rewarded, suppressed, and normalised. These signals are rarely written into policy, but they are felt daily through decision-making, expectations, and unspoken rules.
In trauma-shaped systems, output is often prioritised over wellbeing. Resilience becomes confused with endurance, and vulnerability is quietly silenced in favour of performance. What begins as individual coping strategies can evolve into organisational norms that reinforce overwork, emotional disconnection, and fear-based leadership.
This is where individual awareness meets systems responsibility. Ethical leadership requires examining personal patterns, but also recognising how those patterns scale, shaping cultures that either interrupt harm or pass it forward.
Ethical leadership: From blame to responsibility
So, how do we ensure we lead ethically and do not pass harm forward?
Ethical leadership is not about being healed, fixed, or having all the answers. It is about awareness, choice, and accountability. It requires recognising that while many of the patterns we carry may not have started with us, we are responsible for whether they continue through us.
This shift from blame to responsibility is central to ethical leadership. It moves leadership away from defensiveness or perfectionism and towards conscious stewardship. Ethical leaders do not deny their influence, they examine it. They understand that leadership always leaves an imprint, whether intentional or not.
Practising ethical leadership begins with reflection and continues through action. It asks leaders to pause and consider:
What behaviours am I modelling, especially under pressure?
What environments am I actively creating or allowing to persist?
What patterns am I reinforcing, and which ones am I consciously choosing to interrupt?
Ethical leadership is not a final destination, but an ongoing practice. One rooted in responsibility for the cultures we shape, the people we lead, and the legacies we leave behind.
What it means to break the cycle in leadership
So what does it actually mean to break the cycle in leadership? At its core, cycle-breaking is the conscious decision to choose something different. It begins with awareness, noticing the patterns we carry, the behaviours we default to, and the responses that feel automatic. From there, it becomes a willingness to challenge, change, or gently erode what no longer serves the people, cultures, or systems we are responsible for.
Breaking the cycle is not about rejecting the past or blaming what came before. It is about recognising how inherited patterns show up in the present, and choosing not to pass them forward without checking them first.
In leadership, this often shows up as a shift towards conscious leadership that is responsive rather than reactive, reflective rather than defensive. It involves developing emotional literacy, the ability to recognise, name, and hold emotional experience in ourselves and others without dismissing it or becoming overwhelmed by it.
It also requires nervous-system-aware decision making. Leaders who understand how stress, fear, and survival responses influence behaviour are better equipped to pause, regulate, and choose actions aligned with their values rather than their triggers. This does not remove pressure or complexity, but it changes how leadership meets it.
Importantly, cycle-breaking is not a one-off moment of insight. It is ongoing work. It requires humility, the willingness to acknowledge when old patterns resurface, and containment, the ability to hold responsibility without collapsing into guilt, control, or avoidance.
When leadership is approached in this way, it becomes less about authority and more about stewardship. Stewardship of people, of organisational culture, and of the future generations shaped by the systems we build today. Breaking the cycle in leadership is not about perfection. It is about presence, responsibility, and the conscious choice to lead in a way that does not pass harm forward.
Why this matters now
Why does this conversation matter now? We are living through a period of significant cultural and organisational change. The way people work, lead, and relate to systems has shifted, accelerated by global disruption but driven by something deeper. There is a growing unwillingness to tolerate environments that prioritise output over wellbeing, silence over honesty, or endurance over care.
Across sectors, we are seeing rising levels of burnout, increasing pressure on mental health services, and widespread disengagement rooted in a lack of trust. Many people are no longer willing to sacrifice their health, relationships, or sense of self to systems that do not acknowledge their humanity.
At the same time, the next generation is making something increasingly clear. They are less willing to accept “this is how it’s always been done” as a justification for harm. They question hierarchy, challenge unspoken rules, and refuse to suffer in silence. In doing so, they are exposing the limitations of leadership models built on endurance, emotional suppression, and unquestioned authority.
This generational shift is not a rejection of leadership, but a call for it to evolve. Younger leaders and workforces are asking different questions about success, sustainability, and responsibility, and they are expecting answers that go beyond performative values or wellbeing initiatives.
In this context, ethical leadership is no longer optional or aspirational. It has become a requirement. Trauma-informed leadership does not mean turning workplaces into therapeutic or clinical spaces. Being trauma-informed is not about treatment or diagnosis, but about recognising how lived experience and survival responses influence behaviour, and leading with awareness of their impact on people and culture. It means leading with awareness, accountability, and responsibility for the impact leadership has on people, culture, and the generations that follow.
Closing: What we choose to pass forward
Leadership passes on more than policies and KPIs. The way we lead leaves an emotional footprint for those in our orbit, shaping how people experience safety, trust, and belonging within the systems we are responsible for.
When we lead with awareness, we gain choice. We begin to notice the patterns we carry and understand how they influence the cultures we create, often in subtle but lasting ways. Leadership then becomes less about control and more about responsibility for the impact we have on others and on what continues beyond us.
We may not have chosen the experiences that shaped us, but we do influence what we pass forward. In leadership, that influence extends beyond individuals to teams, organisations, and future generations.
Now we know we can choose what we pass forward. What are you consciously choosing to pass on, and what patterns are you willing to interrupt?
Read more from Kerrie-Lyann Hirst
Kerrie-Lyann Hirst, Trauma-Informed Coach
Kerrie-Lyann Hirst is a trauma-informed coach, speaker, and founder of Heal A Generation CIC, supporting individuals and families healing from generational trauma and chronic stress. Shaped by lived experience and 15+ years in leadership and project delivery, her work bridges personal healing with systemic change. Kerrie specialises in nervous system education, burnout recovery, and trauma-informed leadership, working ethically within non-clinical boundaries. She writes on cycle-breaking, self-worth, and why healing ourselves is essential to healing the next generation.
