Confronting What’s on the Inside with Self-compassion
In Healing Leadership Trauma : Finding Emotional Health and Helping Others Flourish, Nicholas Rowe and Sheila Wise Rowe argue that leaders must confront their own past and wounds to actually lead others to places of flourishing and wholeness. [1] This book invites leaders away from predominating field of techniques and external competencies to engage with a less-travelled road: the inner life of emotional and spiritual health. I resonate with their challenge to “find the grace, compassion, and courage to see, hear, and speak good and messy truths about why and how we lead.” [2]
This aligns with some very familiar authors who have also been important to me as a leader, helping me to pay attention to the warning signs that if I don’t deal with what’s on the inside, it will come out in unhealthy ways. In 1972, Henri Nouwen developed these concepts in The Wounded Healer, inviting a leader to be in tune with their own wounds to deepen empathy and connection with others. [3] Mindy Caliguire, founder of Soul Care, shares openly about her experience in 1995, when “her body shut down from overwork, hidden exhaustion and spiritual depletion… She described her soul as on fire, brittle and dry”. [4] This inspired Caliguire to develop Soul Care, an organization that blends spiritual direction, counselling and coaching to help leaders find replenishment and ongoing flourishing. Edwin Friedman’s posthumous work from 2007 helped me to pay attention to my level of emotional maturity, understanding the links between personal and professional life. [5] In 2015, Peter Scazzero offered The Emotionally Healthy Leader, which helped me to not default into prioritizing outputs of ministry life over personal relationships and spiritual health, which he argues leads to fragmentation and depletion. [6] All of these form the ‘what’ that I face in leadership, but Rowe and Wise Rowe mine for any connection of these ‘stressors’ to the past by attending more to the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of leadership. They write,
Those triggers may cause us to reexperience past hurt and trauma psychosocially, emotionally, physically, spiritually, or interpersonally. If leaders do not attend to this reality, they are especially susceptible to reenactment, which is when trauma in our past that has not been resolved follows us into new situations that remind us of the past. [7]
They affirm the theological gift of a Trinitarian bond out of which the deep needs of our souls can be fully met, [8] but do not permit any spiritual by-passing or hyper spiritualization. In fact, they immediately jump into the other factors that can easily sink a leader. I see a resonance with the Apostle Paul’s familiar confession, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Romans 7:15, 19). Fully alive to the Holy Spirit, there is still a conflict within us (Galatians 5:17). Rowe and Wise Rowe guide me to consider how past trauma affects a hunger for attachment, a fixation on satisfying my own needs (giving into temptation), or buying into the Western imagination called self-sufficiency. [9]
I recognize how important this ongoing inner work is, not only for my own wholeness, but for the restoration of relationships as well. And in this way, there is an more informative map that comes from connecting a deep emotional intelligence and soul well-being with the practical integration of both self-compassion and ongoing attention to healing from trauma.
Rowe and Wise Rowe’s call for self-compassion aligns with a realization that comes from reaction to trauma, especially in moments of dysregulation. In their chapter on restored relationships, they spoke specifically to how transference can occur as a projection of unmet needs and feelings from our own past. I appreciate the challenge to catch these teachable moments so that
Transference can become a spark God uses to identify unresolved issues of the past. As we surrender and ask for God’s help in yet another failed attempt to set things right, the Holy Spirit brings revelation and conviction about our relating so that we can follow what he is saying and experience deeper attachment to him. [10]
Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps The Score, “Once you recognize that post-traumatic reactions started off as efforts to save your life, you may gather the courage to face your inner music (or cacophony), but you will need help to do so.’ [11]
As a follower of Jesus, and a Christian leader embarking on the latter half of my leadership, I find this challenge so critical, to embody self-compassion for the things I still need to face as they surface, and ongoing attention to points of healing that emerge in my body and soul.
I simply pray, “make these things true of me.” Thanks to God for full acceptance, patient encouragement, and healing inside and out.
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[1] Nicholas Rowe and Sheila Wise Rowe, Healing Leadership Trauma: Finding Emotional Health and Helping Others Flourish, (1st ed. Westmont: InterVarsity Press), 2024.
[2] Healing, 8.
[3] Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer : Ministry in Contemporary Society, (New York: Image), 2013.
[4] “About Soul Care.” n.d. Accessed November 11, 2025. https://www.soulcare.com/about-us.
[5] Edwin H. Friedman, A Failure of Nerve : Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, (10th Anniversary, Revised Edition, New York: Church Publishing Incorporated), 2017.
[6] Peter Scazzero, The Emotionally Healthy Leader : How Transforming Your Inner Life Will Deeply Transform Your Church, Team, and the World, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan), 2015,
[7] Healing, 14.
[8] Healing, 27.
[9] Healing, Chapters 3,4,&5.
[10] Healing, 128.
[11] Bessel A. Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score : Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, (New York, New York: Viking), 2014, 213.
About the Author
Joel Zantingh
Joel Zantingh is a catalyst for peacemaking and intercultural teams, speaker, theologian and consultant. He is the Canadian Coordinator of the World Evangelical Alliance's Peace and Reconciliation Network, and the Director of Engagement with Lausanne Movement Canada. He has served in local and national roles within the Evangelical Missionary Church of Canada, and led their global mission arm. He has experience teaching in formal and informal settings with Bible college students and leaders from various cultures and generations. Joel and Christie are parents to adult children, as well as grandparents. They reside in Guelph, Ont., situated on the treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, and home to many past, present and future First Nations peoples, including the Anishinnabe and Hodinöhsö:ni'.5 responses to “Confronting What’s on the Inside with Self-compassion”
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Thanks Joel. Great post. How does this connect to your doctoral project?
Hey Ryan, I appreciate the chance to process this.
Because my NPO is dealing with Newer-to-Canada/Diaspora evangelically aligned leaders who still experience marginalization at the leadership culture level, I am asking participants to disrupt and transform dominant culture comfort zones that lead to unintended feelings of exclusion by visible minority leaders.
Rowe and Wise Rowe speak about one of the symptoms of racial and ethnic trauma. “BIPOC leaders constantly try to prove their worth.” (Healing, 97) In bringing leaders together from minority and dominant cultures to talk together, the very conversation about feelings and experiences of racism and ethnicism may have a triggering effect for past traumas that have never been addressed.
Participation in the “Everyone’s Table” peer learning experience will try and address this by including taking a trauma-informed approach as part of the listed shared values, so that there will be freedom to release and find comfort for anything that gets triggered. But I imagine that there will be some grief and weariness, and the pressure to maintain a narrative that “it’s all just fine” when it is not.
Rev. Dr. Zantingh,
I appreciated your words: “I recognize how important this ongoing inner work is, not only for my own wholeness, but for the restoration of relationships as well.” That’s such an important realization. Given your long experience in peace and reconciliation work, I’m curious— as you’ve grown in your own inner wholeness, have you found yourself seeing the peacemaking process in new or more nuanced ways?
Insightful question, Dr. Burns. In the work of peacemaking, and reconciliation, we start with a theology and practice that begins within a person, before moving to interpersonal of social reconciliation or peace.
So while it is understood that the work must flow from within, the integration of trauma-informed repair has been on a growth curve of integration, most notably for work in conflict zones. Applying it to “reconciliation within” more generally is something that is just emerging.
The nuances of this are related more in the lack of awareness of trauma in our society, and so the entry points of the conversation almost need to come with a disclaimer that “what we are addressing in the face of conflict” may cause an internal reaction that requires the work of healing above and beyond this experience/training, etc.
Joel, thank you for your post. I have a general question for you:
Reflecting on the stories and case studies in the book, which example resonated most with you, and why?