Trauma and Family Business

Unresolved past is destiny; it repeats until we have the courage to work together to face it.

~ Thomas Huebl

A truth of life is that shadows are always present in families. In mine, their shape was the complete absence of my paternal grandparents. My father turned 84 last month. He lost his parents at the age of 22, in such a catastrophic way in the space of just one month to suicide and a fatal aneurysm, that their stories froze somewhere in him in that limbo of grief and time. This tragedy marked me and my two brothers in different ways. In my life, it left a haunting sadness and the enormous capacity to hold in tightly my own painful experiences for far too long. It also gave me an affinity for the stories and wisdom the darkness brings, which ended up shaping my life and work. We grew up in a business family, one of India’s pioneering ones, with a surname that is still recognized today. Its story began in 1910 on a patch of 36 acres of hardy, barren earth in southern Maharashtra, a grant gifted by the Raja of Aundh to my great grandfather Laxmanrao Kashinath Kirloskar. As he started to bring the dream of his factories to life, his wife, my great grandmother Radhabai Kirloskar, was busy looking after their growing family, four sons and a daughter, as well as becoming the matriarch of the new settlement they established, Kirloskarvadi. As children of the third generation, we grew up with this history, though I know now that not all stories made it to the dinner table.

Business families revel in achievements, closely guard family values and traditions and celebrate festivals, weddings and the birth of new generations with grandeur. The rest, an often-troubled landscape of conflict, secrets, regrets, estrangements, divorces, deaths, shame and grief is either lost in silence, thrown to loud whispers and breaking news, or handed over to legal routes to sort out. The rules of belonging mandate that strength and power are respected, vulnerability is discouraged, and silence is the bottomless container of our sorrow. For the generations that ensue, this can be a heavy and lonely legacy to carry with its weight of expectations, complexities and many hurts. It certainly was for us. As a great granddaughter, I carry an ocean of grief and helplessness in my heart for the loss of family members to death, estrangement and unresolved conflict. My journey has taught me that these personal, collective and ancestral wounds are what constitute trauma; in Greek, the word means wound. It is the shadow we all carry. These wounds tend to fester and splinter inside us if not attended to, impacting our health, wellbeing, work and relationships.

Trauma is the shadow that lurks at the edges of deep conflicts in family business.  

Trauma can feel like a big word, even an intimidating one. It is a term that describes the wounds from the catastrophes of war, childhood abuse, accidents, sickness, domestic violence and other significant difficult events as also the wounds we experience from everyday living that impact our safety, dignity and connection. From the decades of deep research in this field, we know that trauma is an overwhelming and gut-wrenching inner experience that disconnects us from our bodies, emotions and sensations. Trauma numbs us, preventing us from being in the here and now. It impacts our sense of aliveness and our capacity for healthy relationships, and it does all this to keep us safe. Neuroscience tells us that a trauma response is the intelligence in our nervous system that helps us to survive and keep us safe from the painful experience even as it isolates, disconnects and shuts down our capacity to relate in a healthy way. In the words of Peter Levine, Trauma is the broken connection to self, others and spirit (our sense of something larger than ourselves). Bessel van der Kolk tells us that Trauma comes back as a reaction not a memory; and Gabor Maté expands this wisdom as Trauma is not what happens to you. It’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.

Trauma symptoms and patterns include disruptive reactive behaviours (controlling, complying, pleasing, numbing) and emotional eruptions. In a frenetic, fast-paced world, trauma suppresses or ignores our needs, normalizes reactive behaviours and leads to chronic illness. We know today that trauma is prevalent in individuals, societies, organizations and cultures. While its severity and experience differ, trauma is beginning to be acknowledged as widespread, in school, at home, at the workplace and in the boardroom. Amy Elizabeth Fox, CEO of Mobius Executive Leadership shared this profound quote in the year-long Trauma-informed Consulting and Coaching Certificate Program I’m part of this year, Our organizational systems are broken because we are in a hurt world. If we move now to create new systems from the same consciousness of that hurt and we don’t do the personal healing work that is required to invoke, reimagine and abide in something else, we are going to reinvent the same thing. In other words, hurt people hurt people and their constellation of systems and stakeholders. In family business, when we look at recent statistics, this may impact rather big stakes.

Family businesses are the cornerstone of entrepreneurship and wealth creation in India, contributing an enormous 79 per cent of the country’s GDP, the highest globally. Their influence and impact hence play a significant role in India’s economic and social heritage.

From the many articles and reports that are regularly generated on this topic, we know that multi-generational family businesses have shown tremendous resilience, are shaped by steadfast family values and culture, tend to focus on the long-term and are beginning to cultivate strategies to improve governance, strengthen leadership, and navigate change. However, given their complexity and huge number (75 per cent of businesses in India are family owned) this also means that many continue with archaic practices (both social and structural) while others have transformed to becoming more progressive, with cutting edge technology, structures, governance and professional leadership. Explaining the contradictions of family business in India, this recent article said Indian family businesses will need to put their families in order, so that they can reap the benefits of an improving business environment and continue to contribute to the Indian economy. In 2023, a report published by the SPJIMR’s Centre for Family Business & Entrepreneurship lists a number of family and business challenges, key among them family disagreements, reputation, trust and family conflicts, saying that the conflict resolution mechanisms to deal with family disputes was at 13% globally and 19% in India.

It is no secret that conflict in Indian family businesses have often been public and ugly, with rare exceptions. The intricacy of relationships and stakeholders in family businesses set them apart from other organizations. Core among these are the layers of family members, those who are already involved and the next generation that’s being groomed and polished to enter. When serious conflict erupts between key stakeholders as it often does in the evolution of family businesses, it is obvious that it needs to be resolved for the sake of the financial health of the business as well as to sustain its overall credibility and trust with customers. Towards this end, tactical solutions such as family constitutions, deeds of family settlements, family councils and family offices have been largely positive moves. These structures focus on governance, growth, financial health, decision-making, succession and the preservation and distribution of wealth and assets i.e., everything to do with business performance and the future of the family business, making sure it thrives and survives. However, from a relational perspective, it appears that these strategies have been only partly successful. From a systemic lens, this is not surprising.

While conflicts may be managed through strategies that are perfectly logical, effective and well-meaning, this approach remains transactional, with relational (and inter-generational) challenges and needs likely to be bypassed, left to individuals to sort out or not. When mistrust, resentment, bitterness and anger are still present, when deep-rooted trauma remains unhealed, coping strategies embedded in our nervous systems continue to keep us safe, fragmented, distant, isolated and numb. Our need for connection, co-regulation and love are not met because the trauma shape remains, long after the conflict between siblings, parents, grandparents, even extended family is said to have been resolved on paper. Lori Gottlieb’s insightful article in The Atlantic said The death of a parent and the financial and logistical decisions that follow can bring deep-seated childhood feelings and sibling dynamics to the surface, and that issues don’t go away, rather become amplified by grief. These are the tender ‘family dynamics’ that need our attention in resolving family business conflicts. As Gabor Maté puts it, this is because Whether we realize it or not, it is our woundedness, or how we cope with it, that dictates much of our behavior, shapes our social habits, and informs our ways of thinking about the world. In a post Covid world, where mental health has entered the conversation in homes, schools and offices, family businesses that are mired in dispute would benefit from reimagining how they resolve conflict.  

A radical approach is trauma-informed/resourced conflict resolution in family business. A trauma-informed approach is a healing protocol, paying attention to the health and wellbeing of the family business and its members, which is critical for its long-term success. As challenging as this sounds, it is a commitment to healing and growth of the whole system, honouring not just the generations that came before but those that will come after. Trauma-informed and trauma-sensitive protocols will help to sense the system and its individuals, listening, feeling, attuning to and witnessing individual and collective wounds. It will hold space for generative, authentic conversations that cultivate an ability to become present to self and the other. It will surface the needs and values that really matter so that we may acknowledge what resonates individually and collectively.

Resolving conflict in a meaningful way in family business may sound complicated and messy.

Early on in the cringe-worthy hit show Succession, the eldest son Connor Roy says, "This family's broken. And that has consequences. A missed phone call today, a couple dozen kids lose their jobs in China. Butterfly wings, but bigger, huge wings. Like a pterodactyl, or the Smithsonian. So… let's fix our wings." Not surprisingly, he was ignored. It underscores how much family business is a complex web of often deeply wounded relationships inside of which conflict shows up in myriad layers, both covert and overt. In resolving family business conflict, it is important to first realize that conflict can be both necessary and generative; and then acknowledge that it exists. This step will support working with the deeper layer of personal, collective and ancestral healing work that is critical to restore the flow of aliveness, support connection and co-regulation, and repair relationships in family business.

Trauma-resourced conflict resolution is an approach that restores balance, order and belonging in a family system through focusing on a framework of 6 Cs, beginning with Courage.

I view Courage as a call to lean in, facing and voicing individual and collective fears. It is what helps us to welcome difficult conversations, engage with the shadow and emerge, forever transformed. The center of courage in all things is our heart. It empowers us to take a chance on ourselves and each other and befriends grace and love to help us move through the fear. Its emergence is always an invitation to life. Trauma-informed coaching, consulting and therapy are effective ways to engage with this approach. Dan Siegel said it beautifully in the program, We need to find/heal the blockages to integration that are blocking the love from arising. When healing begins in the container that gives us life, as an individual and collective journey, perhaps our deepest need for connection will be met through that golden link between us, the one that pulses with shared blood.

“I can’t see a way through,” said the boy

Can you see your next step?”

“yes”

“Just take that,” said the horse.

~ Charlie Mackesy