What if childhood trauma didn't make you fall apart but instead made you highly capable, responsible, resilient, ambitious, and successful?
Trauma doesn't always look like dysfunction. For some high-achieving women, it looks like becoming the strong one, the responsible one, the woman everyone depends on, or the entrepreneur who always figures it out.
In this episode of The Art & Skill of Coaching, Jess DeMarchis shares her personal experience with childhood trauma, C-PTSD, healing, and high achievement, and explores the unexpected strengths and hidden costs that can come from becoming exceptionally good at surviving.
You'll learn how childhood trauma can contribute to patterns like perfectionism, hyper-independence, people-pleasing, over-functioning, overworking, hypervigilance, and an unusually high tolerance for stress. These adaptations may help you build a successful career, business, and life, but eventually the same strategies that helped you survive can make it difficult to rest, receive support, trust yourself, feel safe, or actually enjoy what you've created.
Jess also explains the concept of the trauma drive: when achievement and ambition become partially fueled by survival, and why reaching the next milestone often doesn't create the peace, security, or sense of enoughness you expected it to.
The goal isn't to become less resilient, capable, or ambitious. It's to keep the strengths that helped you succeed while letting go of the fear, pressure, hypervigilance, and survival patterns attached to them.
If you've built an impressive life but still struggle to relax, stop proving yourself, feel safe in your success, or believe you've finally done enough, this episode will help you understand why.
Free Resource: Download Jess's 50 Trauma-Informed Coaching Questions to start identifying the deeper patterns, beliefs, and behaviors influencing the way you work.
https://jessicademarchis.myflodesk.com/50questions
Want support creating your next level of success without sacrificing your personal life? Jess's 1:1 coaching books are open. Book a consultation through this link: www.chatwithjess.com
Stay in Touch:
www.jessicademarchis.com
IG @jess_demarchis_coaching
