Also by this author: Young, Gifted, and Black: A Journey of Lament and Celebration
Published by IVP on November 19, 2024
Genres: Non-Fiction, Christian Life, Leadership, Racial Reconciliation
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Countless books are designed to help leaders to become better leaders. But most resources neglect the underlying emotional struggles of both emerging and established leaders, who are often isolated and suffering in silence. Leadership professor Nicholas Rowe and counselor Sheila Wise Rowe offer their expertise in helping leaders process painful and traumatic experiences. Trauma contributes to how we lead others in either empowering or dysfunctional ways. Understanding how these experiences formed us is the beginning of the path to healing.
Woven throughout each chapter are five themes―invitation, attachment, remembrance, healing, and reconnection. Healing Leadership Trauma lays out the emotional challenges of leadership and offers encouragement, prayer, and therapeutic tools to help leaders face their pain and begin to heal.
Leaders frequently carry heavy burdens for others, in addition to dealing with their own personal challenges. In this book, Nicholas Rowe and Sheila Wise Rowe share compassionate care for leaders, validating their struggles and encouraging them towards emotional and spiritual growth. They both share vulnerable stories from their own lives, as well as example case studies in different chapters, and they explore how people’s personal histories influence their leadership styles and tendencies. The authors draw on Scripture and psychology to explore challenging topics, and each chapter ends with reflection questions and a prayer. Some chapters also suggest a creative practice that can encourage healing.
At the beginning, Nicholas and Sheila summarize findings from attachment theory, and they explore how people’s attachment bonds will shape their approaches to leadership and indicate the likely pitfalls they will fall into. The following chapters reflect on God’s relational nature and the results of our spiritual detachment from him and detachment from others, showing how the gospel can bring healing and restoration. After this, the Rowes share wisdom for dealing with temptation, addictions, and the desire for self-sufficiency, and they write about the impact that a history of abuse and neglect will have on leaders. Later, the authors explore themes about how to forgive others, restore relationships when appropriate, embrace rest, and find a new or restored sense of purpose.
The Rowes also write about gender trauma and racial trauma in one’s upbringing and leadership experiences. They primarily write about women’s gender struggles, as one would expect, but they also write about men’s experiences of gender-related trauma. I was pleasantly surprised. It’s incredibly rare for people to even recognize it as a possibility for men to experience gender bias and undeserved contempt, and it’s even more unusual for someone to write about it. I deeply appreciate the authors’ fair and honest portrayal of the different and overlapping struggles that women and men may face due to harmful messages from their upbringing and difficult experiences.
Healing Leadership Trauma will be very helpful for leaders who are struggling with wounds from the past that influence their beliefs and behavior. This book can speak to anyone’s emotional and spiritual struggles, even if they had very stable and secure childhoods, but this will be the most meaningful to people who suffered instability, abuse, or neglect in their youth, since a significant portion of the book focuses on early life trauma.
Personally, I think that the title is somewhat misleading. This is less about healing leadership trauma, and more about healing wounds from your past that influence your leadership style and approaches to relationships. Even though this book is leadership-specific through the examples, case studies, and applications given, the book’s overall focus is on standard therapeutic topics like resolving your family of origin issues. I expected this book to focus on traumatic elements of leadership itself, particularly within churches and Christian organizations.
For example, someone in a leadership position at a church may experience secondhand trauma and compassion fatigue because of what congregants are going through, is in a publicly visible role that carries weighty expectations, and is responsible for making tough decisions and dealing with the fallout of people who are unhappy and disagree with them. Leaders may also experience manipulation, bullying, and abuse from others on their leadership team, as well as from other church members. Even when nothing escalates to the point of abuse, leaders are responsible for helping other people navigate thorny conflicts, in addition to dealing with their own conflicts. There are so many elements of leadership that lead to trauma and burnout, but this book only touches on some of them, and the challenges of leadership itself are never the focus.
Healing Leadership Trauma: Finding Emotional Health and Helping Others Flourish is a thoughtful, compassionate book that explores how people’s past wounds connect with their present struggles. The authors point people to God for ultimate healing and restoration, and share wise advice for how people can process traumatic experiences and grow in emotional and spiritual maturity. This book offers a lot of value, and it has the potential to be life-changing for many readers. However, people should go into this with accurate expectations. This book primarily addresses leadership struggles as the outworking of one’s traumatic experiences, rather than addressing leadership struggles as a major source of trauma in someone’s life. How much this book resonates with someone will depend on their experiences and what kind of help they’re looking for.