Repair in trauma-informed leadership is the most powerful tool you’re probably not using. Leaders spend years learning how to prevent mistakes, avoid conflict, and maintain perfect composure—yet no one teaches you what to do when you inevitably rupture with your team.
The Rupture
Monday morning, 9:15 AM. The weekly stand-up meeting.
Maria is mid-sentence, explaining timeline delays on the website redesign. “So we’re looking at an additional two weeks because the vendor—”
“Two weeks?” Anna’s voice cuts through like a blade. “Maria, we don’t have two weeks. This was supposed to be done last Friday.”
“I understand, but there were complications with—”
“I don’t want to hear about complications.” Anna’s jaw is tight, her words clipped. “I want to hear about solutions. Can you just—get to the point?”
The room goes silent. Maria’s face flushes. Her mouth opens, then closes. She looks down at her laptop.
The rest of the team offers careful, minimal responses. Eyes stay fixed on screens. The meeting ends five minutes early. Everyone disperses quickly, quietly.
Anna spends the rest of the day in her office, stomach churning. She’d violated the very psychological safety she’d worked so hard to build. Her inner critic is relentless: You’re a terrible leader. You destroyed their trust.
What Anna didn’t know yet was that this moment—this rupture—held the potential to deepen psychological safety more than six months of “doing it right” ever could. But only if she understood repair in trauma-informed leadership.
Why Repair in Trauma-Informed Leadership Matters Especially for Women Leaders
Women leaders face a particular challenge when rupture shakes their team dynamics. You’re navigating impossible double binds: be assertive but not aggressive, be confident but not arrogant, show emotion but not too much. When you make a mistake, the judgment is swift—both from others and from yourself.
Many women leaders have internalized the belief that they must be perfect to be worthy of their position. Any display of anger or dysregulation feels like confirmation of the bias that women are “too emotional” to lead. So when you rupture, the shame is crushing.
This is why repair in trauma-informed leadership is essential. Without it, shame keeps you trapped. You either pretend the rupture didn’t happen (eroding trust through avoidance), or you over-apologize and diminish yourself (eroding your authority).
Repair in trauma-informed leadership offers a third path: acknowledge the rupture, take responsibility without collapsing into shame, and actually strengthen psychological safety through the vulnerability of making things right.
What Repair in Trauma-Informed Leadership Actually Means
Repair in trauma-informed leadership is not a quick apology to make yourself feel better. It’s not over-explaining, defending your behavior, or seeking reassurance from your team.
Repair in trauma-informed leadership is a relational process that acknowledges rupture, takes responsibility, and actively rebuilds the sense of safety that was damaged. It’s both a conversation and a somatic practice—one that requires you to regulate your own nervous system first.
Here’s the truth: rupture is inevitable in leadership. You will have moments when your nervous system overwhelms your intentions. You will say something harsh when stressed, be impatient when someone needs more time, bring your activation into spaces where people needed your calm.
The rupture isn’t the problem. The lack of repair is.
Research on resolving alliance ruptures shows that relationships where rupture is followed by successful repair are actually stronger than relationships where rupture rarely happens. A meta-analysis of 11 studies with 1,314 participants found a moderate positive relationship between rupture resolution and positive outcomes (Eubanks, Muran, & Safran, 2018). The repair process itself builds trust in a way that “getting it right” never can.
The Somatic Reality: What’s Happening in Your Nervous System
Before you can engage in repair in trauma-informed leadership, you need to understand what’s happening somatically during and after a rupture.
When Anna snapped at Maria, her nervous system was in fight mode—triggered by stress, looming deadlines, a narrowed window of tolerance. Her body responded before her thinking brain could intervene: jaw clenched, shoulders raised, breath shallow, voice sharp.
After the meeting, Anna’s nervous system shifted into shutdown combined with anxiety. Her stomach churned. Her thoughts raced with shame. She wanted to hide.
This is the somatic reality of rupture: your body holds the impact of what happened, and until you work with your nervous system, you cannot engage in effective repair in trauma-informed leadership.
If Anna tries to repair while still activated, she’ll likely over-apologize and collapse into shame, become defensive, rush through the conversation, or seek reassurance rather than attending to the other person’s experience.
None of these create genuine repair in trauma-informed leadership.
Somatic Self-Regulation: The Essential First Step
Most leadership advice about apologies skips the somatic work. They go straight to “here’s what to say” without addressing “here’s how to arrive in your body so you can actually mean it.”
Repair in trauma-informed leadership begins with your own nervous system regulation. Not perfect calm—but enough groundedness that you can be present to the other person’s experience without collapsing or defending.
Practice 1: Orient to Present Safety
Your nervous system is still reacting to the rupture as if it’s happening now. Help your body understand that the immediate threat has passed.
Find a quiet space. Look slowly around the room, actually moving your head and eyes to take in your surroundings. Notice colors, shapes, textures. This “orienting” helps your nervous system return to the present moment.
Say to yourself: “Right now, in this moment, I am safe. The rupture happened, but right now, I am here, and I am safe.”
Practice 2: The Hand-on-Heart Reset
Place one or both hands over your heart center. Feel the warmth of your hand against your chest. Take three slow breaths.
As you breathe, say: “I made a mistake, and I am still worthy. I caused harm, and I can repair it.”
This isn’t about excusing your behavior—it’s about resourcing yourself so you have the capacity to show up for repair in trauma-informed leadership.
Practice 3: Release Trapped Activation
The fight energy from the rupture may still be trapped in your body. Stand up. Place your hands on a wall and push firmly against it for 30-60 seconds, engaging your legs, core, and arms.
This allows your body to discharge the fight energy so you can be present for repair.
Alternatively, stand and swing your arms gently across your body, rotating your torso for a minute or two. This bilateral movement helps integrate the nervous system and release tension.
The Anatomy of Repair: What to Actually Say and Do
Now you’re ready for the relational work of repair in trauma-informed leadership. Effective repair has four essential elements:
1. Acknowledgment of the Rupture
Name what happened, specifically and without minimizing.
“I want to talk about what happened in Monday’s meeting. I interrupted you when you were explaining the project timeline, and I spoke to you in a way that was sharp and dismissive.”
Notice: no “if I hurt you” or “if that came across wrong.” Repair in trauma-informed leadership requires clarity about the impact of your actions.
2. Taking Full Responsibility Without Defense
“I take full responsibility for how I showed up in that moment. There’s no excuse for speaking to you that way.”
Context can come later, but not at the beginning of repair in trauma-informed leadership. First, the person needs to know you see the impact clearly and take full ownership.
3. Acknowledgment of Impact
“I imagine that when I interrupted and spoke sharply, it felt disrespectful. It may have felt scary or unsafe, especially given the power dynamic between us. It may have made you question whether it’s actually safe to share updates with me.”
This element of repair in trauma-informed leadership is crucial: you’re naming the potential harm to psychological safety, not just hurt feelings.
4. Commitment to Different Future Action
“I’m working on recognizing when my stress level is affecting my capacity to be present. When I notice I’m not able to be fully present in a meeting, I’m committed to either taking a moment to ground myself first or rescheduling if necessary. You deserved my full, respectful attention on Monday, and I’m committed to showing up that way from now on.”
The Somatic Container: Creating Safety During Repair Conversations
The words of repair in trauma-informed leadership matter—but how you hold your body during the conversation matters just as much. Your team feels your nervous system state before they hear your words.
Ground yourself before you begin. Take 30 seconds to ground. Feel your feet on the floor. Take three slow breaths.
Maintain an open body posture. Uncross your arms. Keep your shoulders relaxed. Face the person directly.
Slow down. Your nervous system will want to rush. Resist. Speak slowly. Pause between thoughts. The pace of your speech directly impacts their sense of safety.
Make gentle eye contact. Soft, intermittent eye contact that says “I’m here with you.”
Notice and name your activation if it arises. If you feel defensiveness, instead of giving in to your high emotions, say: “Give me just a moment.” And take your time to breathe slowly and decide how to proceed. This transparency is profoundly trust-building.
What Repair in Trauma-Informed Leadership Creates
When Anna finally has the repair conversation with Maria—after doing her somatic work, after showing up with full presence and responsibility—something remarkable happens.
Maria’s shoulders drop. She takes a fuller breath. The guardedness in her eyes softens.
“Thank you,” Maria says. “I actually had been feeling scared to bring up updates with you since Monday.”
This is what repair in trauma-informed leadership creates: not just resolution of one incident, but a deeper understanding that rupture doesn’t mean the end of safety. It means the beginning of deeper trust.
Maria now knows that Anna has the capacity to recognize when she’s caused harm, take responsibility without defensiveness, regulate her own nervous system, and follow through on commitments.
This creates a different kind of psychological safety than “never rupturing” could provide. It creates the safety of knowing that when things go wrong—and they will—there’s a path back to connection.
The Ripple Effect: Transforming Team Culture
When you practice repair in trauma-informed leadership consistently, your team begins to practice repair with each other. They learn that mistakes don’t have to end in ruptured relationships. They see that taking responsibility is possible without shame-spiraling.
The culture shifts from “don’t make mistakes” to “when we make mistakes, we make them right.”
This is the ultimate gift of repair in trauma-informed leadership: you’re not just fixing individual incidents. You’re teaching your team a relational skill that will serve them for the rest of their lives.
Your Invitation to Practice
If you’ve been carrying the weight of a rupture—if there’s a moment with your team that still sits heavy in your chest—this is your invitation.
You don’t need to wait until you’re perfectly healed. You need to do your somatic work first, ground yourself in the present moment, and then show up with honest responsibility.
The rupture is not the end of psychological safety. It’s the doorway to a deeper trust—if you have the courage to walk through it with repair in trauma-informed leadership.
Your team is not looking for a perfect leader. They’re looking for a leader who can be human, take responsibility, and show them that safety isn’t about never making mistakes—it’s about having the tools and courage to make things right when we do.
That’s the real work of repair in trauma-informed leadership. And it begins with your willingness to face what you’ve been avoiding.
Ready to Build Your Repair Capacity?
If you recognize yourself in Anna’s story—if you’ve been carrying the weight of ruptures you haven’t yet repaired—there is a path forward.
I work 1:1 with women leaders who are ready to develop the somatic and relational capacity for trauma-informed leadership. Together, we’ll build your ability to regulate your nervous system, navigate difficult conversations with presence, and create the kind of psychological safety that includes room for your humanity.
Book a 1:1 coaching session and let’s create your foundation for repair and embodied leadership.
