Healing Leadership Trauma: Finding Emotional Health and Helping Others Flourish

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.

Sheila Wise Rowe (MEd, Cambridge College) has over thirty years of experience offering counseling and spiritual direction to abuse and trauma survivors and to emerging and established leaders in the United States. Sheila ministered to unhoused and abused women and children in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she taught Christian counseling and trauma-related courses and was also a lay pastor for a decade. Sheila is the author of the award-winning Healing Racial Trauma and Young, Gifted, and Black.

Nicholas Rowe (PhD, Boston College) is a historian and the Hansen Associate Professor of Leadership at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He has over thirty years' experience in senior leadership roles in higher education and nonprofit organizations and is a consultant in cross-ethnic reconciliation and conflict resolution in the United States and South Africa. Nicholas also provides spiritual direction for individuals and reconciling communities. He and his wife, Sheila Wise Rowe, live in Boston and have a daughter, son, daughter-in-law, and grandchild.