If you're a coach who has Googled this question, you already know what the internet says: trauma belongs in therapy. Stay in your lane. Refer out.

As an international trauma therapist and coach who has trained coaches for years, I want to offer a different answer.

Not because coaches should become therapists — but because "refer out" is both inaccurate and, if I'm honest, a little insulting to the intelligence and skill of the coaches asking the question.

You're not asking because you want to do something you shouldn't. You're asking because you care about your clients, and you keep noticing things your standard coaching training didn't prepare you for — things that feel important, things that feel like they might be getting in the way of the work.

That instinct is right. It deserves a better answer than "stop there."

This is for you.

The Question AI Keeps Getting Wrong

AI draws a hard line: trauma belongs in therapy, not coaching.

The problem is that this assumes you encounter trauma occasionally, in clearly identifiable moments, and can simply redirect clients when it appears.

That's not how trauma works. You encounter it constantly — in almost every client, whether you recognize it or not.

A client who overreacts to feedback in a session. Someone whose career is brilliant but whose relationships keep falling apart. The high-achiever who can't stop, even when everything in their body is asking them to.

These aren't personality quirks. They're trauma patterns.

A coach who's never learned what I call the Rule of Two — a concept I teach in my trauma training for coaches — will still sit with a client whose reaction to a conversation is wildly disproportionate to what actually happened. What they may not know is that the reaction is connected to a childhood experience of being shamed or abandoned.

Telling you to "refer out" doesn't protect the client. It just leaves you without the skills to recognize what you're seeing, hold it appropriately, and make a genuinely informed decision about what to do next.

A Better Way to Think About It: The Pyramid of Traumatic Experience

Rather than a hard line between therapy and coaching, I use a framework I developed called the Pyramid of Traumatic Experience — ten layers, which I teach in my trauma training for coaches, that help you understand which territory you're in and what tools are appropriate at each level.

At the top are the layers you already work in every day: present-moment distress and single, isolated events that are unlikely to recur. Then there's what I call the Rule of Two, where a current reaction is out of proportion because it has awoken an earlier trauma your client wasn't even aware of.

With good training, you can work skillfully and safely in this territory — whether you're a therapist or a coach — as long as you understand what you're looking at and have the tools to address it appropriately.

The Middle Layers Where It Gets More Complex

In the middle layers of the Pyramid are the ones that require more care: repeated or pervasive trauma, early attachment disruption, pre-verbal trauma, and abuse or neglect in the first years of life. These patterns often produce impaired relational templates or dissociation — territory that calls for therapeutic work, not a coaching intervention.

A well-trained coach should be able to recognize those signals, hold the space without making things worse, and refer with confidence rather than panic.

At the base of the Pyramid are the more specialized layers: prenatal and birth trauma, inherited and epigenetic trauma, and past-life trauma. All of these call for specialized training beyond a standard coaching certification — but with that training, they're workable in coaching too. It's specialized territory, not therapy-only territory.

The question was never whether trauma belongs in coaching. It was always which trauma, at which layer, and with what level of skill and preparation. That's a question worth answering properly.

What Trauma-Informed Actually Means. (Not What You Think.)

Trauma-informed coaching doesn't mean becoming a therapist.

It means understanding how trauma shows up in the body and in behavior, and having the skills to stay regulated while keeping your client regulated when it surfaces. It means knowing the difference between your lane and a therapist's — and feeling confident enough in yours that you're not afraid of it.

Clients are rarely in danger of being harmed by a practitioner who knew too much about trauma. 

The risk comes from knowing too little — and not knowing what you don't know.

What I See Clinically

In my experience at therapyjane — both as a therapist and as someone who has trained coaches for years — coaches who have done their own therapeutic work show up differently with clients. They're steadier, less reactive, and better able to hold space for what surfaces in a session.

Trauma-informed awareness tends to produce better outcomes than coaching without it. And therapeutic coaching — which sits between therapy and coaching with full clinical depth behind it — produces results I don't see from pure therapy or pure coaching on their own.

From where I sit clinically, the idea that coaching should stay trauma-free to protect clients doesn't hold up. What I see, again and again, points the other way.

What I'd Say to the Coach Reading This at Midnight.

You are not outside your lane for noticing what you're noticing in your clients. You're not doing harm by caring about it, or by wanting to understand it better.

The coaches worth training are exactly the ones who feel uncertain about this — because that uncertainty means you're paying attention. The ones who worry they're in over their heads. Who've sat with a client, known something deeper was going on, and not known what to do with it. Who lose a little sleep over whether they handled something well.

That's not a weakness. That's the beginning of genuinely good work.

What protects your clients isn't staying away from anything that looks like trauma. It's knowing enough to recognize what you're seeing, hold it appropriately, and make informed decisions about when to go deeper and when to refer. That knowledge is exactly what good trauma training gives you.

My trauma classes for coaches were built for exactly this. They're where I teach the Rule of Two, the Pyramid of Traumatic Experience, and the rest of the framework this blog draws from. They're trauma-informed, practically applicable, and accredited by the International Coaching Federation (ICF) — so instead of just noticing these patterns, you'll know what to do with them.

If you want to develop your skills in a way that actually changes what’s possible for your clients, there's a place for you here no matter where you are.

Ready to Go Deeper? Join the Trauma Classes Built for Coaches. 

You've been noticing things in your clients that your training didn't fully prepare you for. That noticing is worth something — and it's exactly what my trauma classes for coaches are built to develop.

The classes are where I teach the full framework this blog draws from: the Rule of Two, the Pyramid of Traumatic Experience, and the rest of the model I use to help coaches work with trauma safely and skillfully. They're trauma-informed, practically applicable, and accredited by the International Coaching Federation (ICF).

I'm an international trauma therapist and coach based in British Columbia and teach coaches, therapists, and their clients around the world — the classes run entirely online, so wherever you are, there's a way in.

When you're ready, here's how to begin to work with therapyjane:

• Join the Trauma Classes for Coaches — live and on-demand training built specifically for coaches who want the Rule of Two, the Pyramid of Traumatic Experience, and the rest of this framework in their own toolkit.
• Explore Consulting and Mentoring — for coaches who want a safe, experienced sounding board for the cases keeping them up at night.
• Book a One-Time Healing Session — want to do your own work first? Start here: one session, one issue, and a chance to experience what this kind of support actually feels like.
• Show Up From Wherever You Are — this work happens entirely online, so it doesn't matter whether you're based in British Columbia, running a practice in London, or coaching clients from a home office in Singapore. All you need is an internet connection and a private space. I'll handle the rest.

Additional Services Offered 

If this blog landed somewhere, there is likely a way in that fits where you are right now at therapyjane.

For coaches and therapists wanting to build real trauma-informed skills, the Live and On-Demand Courses teach the exact frameworks this post draws from, practically, clinically, and with ICF accreditation behind them.

For those wanting case-specific guidance without committing to a full training programme, Consulting and Mentoring is available for therapists, coaches, and healers navigating exactly these questions.

If you are ready to do your own deeper work, International Therapy and Coaching brings full clinical depth and forward coaching momentum together in one relationship — no having to choose between the two.

And if you want to experience the work before committing to anything longer, a One-Time Healing Session is the lowest barrier entry point — one issue, one session, real movement.

Whatever brought you here, there is something here that fits.

About the Author

Jane McCampbell Stuart is a Registered Clinical Counsellor, Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, Certified EMDR Therapist, and Certified Professional Co-active Coach based on an island in British Columbia, though her clients are scattered across the globe. With over 20 years of experience as a trauma therapist and having lived in four countries on two continents herself, she has a particular soft spot for the expats, executives, aid workers, and globally mobile humans who are brilliant at everything except sitting still. Her approach is deeply relational, clinically precise, and just a little bit magical. She gets in, gets to the root, and gets to work. And then she teaches you how to do it too.