Some people who experience trauma in childhood go on to have a fear of authority figures in adulthood, as the association of this traumatic experience lingers and can be triggered when encountering someone in a leadership role. Nicole Zupich saw this manifest in her own life at her job as a data scientist: She found it hard to say no to colleagues and developed a habit of people pleasing.
In therapy, she learned to recognize these habits were based on a fear that developed in childhood and never fully went away. Separating this “part” of herself from her capital-S “Self,” allowed her to meet it with compassion and even thank it for protecting her against the threat it had identified in an authority figure.
