When Ambition Becomes a Trauma Response: Healing High-Functioning Burnout with Ashley McDonald

Written By Farya Barlas

  • When Ambition Becomes a Trauma Response: Healing High-Functioning Burnout with Ashley McDonald


    The most capable woman in the room is almost always the one with the lowest ceiling. And no, it has nothing to do with her capabilities, but rather because somewhere along the way, she learned to call her limits strength. And that single misunderstanding is quietly costing high achievers more money, more leadership, and more reach than any strategy they will ever buy.

    Voiceover: Welcome to From Trauma to CEO: The Psychology of Transformational Success with Fariha Barles. This is a space for cycle-breakers, leaders, and visionaries who are ready to rewrite old patterns and rise into their full potential. Each episode explores the emotional, psychological, and identity-level shifts that turn lived experience into lasting, meaningful success. And now here's your host, Fariha Barles.

    Fariha Barles: Welcome to From Trauma to CEO, the podcast for high achievers who are done working on the surface and ready to change the thing underneath that's been running the whole show. Let's get into it.

    So, here's something that I want you to sit with and, you might have heard something like this before or it might be the first time you're hearing this, but I want you to know this: that the relationship that you go home to is running your business. Not influencing it, not affecting it a little bit around the edges—running it. And I already know what some of you are thinking already because I know that I hear it constantly. "Oh no, Fariha, you know, my personal life and my business or my career are separate. I keep them separate because what happens at home stays at home."

    And let me say this as clearly as I can. That line that you think you've drawn between your personal life and your business was never there. There is no line. There is only you, the same you standing in the middle of every single relationship in your life, including the one that you call your business. And whatever pattern you're running in one, whatever pattern that is present in one of these relationships, I promise you, you're running it in all of them.

    So, this episode is for the high achiever who has already done lots of things right. So, you might have implemented the strategy, you might have optimized your offer, you might have built a team, you've read the self-development books, and you might have even hit numbers that most people will never see, and there's still a ceiling that you keep hitting, and you cannot, for the life of you, work out why. So, you do what you've always done. You go back to the business looking for answers, as I know that many, many people do—maybe looking for a new funnel, a new hire, a new framework—whatever that you think might improve or might change the outcome of the business. And I'm here to tell you, the answer was never only in a business, because it never is.

    Let me show you what I mean. So, I'm going to tell you about a client of mine, and I'm going to demonstrate to you how what she thought was a business issue or a ceiling was actually a ceiling in her own relationship. And because it's also one of the clearest examples that I've I've seen of what I can actually do and why it works when nothing else has.

    So, this client of mine, she was a director at a finance company, corporate, senior, and she was like the kind of woman that she would walk in a room and you can feel that she earned her seat at that table. And God knows that she had earned her seat. She had worked so, so hard for many years, and she finally managed to get to where she wants to be. And I say she earned it because where she came from, there wasn't much, right, within her family? She grew up with very, very little. And when she was very young, like far too young, she made a decision, the same decision that a lot of high achievers make. She decided that, "You know, I'm going to break this cycle and my family will have a different life than the one that I had. It stops with me." And that drive, that drive just built her whole entire career. And for her, success wasn't something that was nice to have. It was safety, it was proof, it was the cycle finally breaking, so it meant a great deal to her.

    So, when she came to see me, she wanted to talk about the business, the strategy, her team, scaling, and what she thought she was buying—or at least that's what she thought she was buying. And here's the first thing I want you to understand about my work. I cannot understand your relationship with your business or your work until I understand your relationship with everything else, because it's all connected. It always is and it always has been.

    So, naturally, because of the way that I work, I started asking about the rest of her life. And every time I came near talking about her partner or asking about her partner, she would just go somewhere else. She would go quiet, she was very non-committal, she would brush it off, and then she would steer us straight back to the business. And when I gently stayed there on what's actually going on, what came out was this: that she was with this person, with somebody who was deeply, deeply unsupportable, manipulative, and based on how she was describing him, he had narcissistic traits, as well. So, the kind of partner, basically, who every time she won, he would find a way to make it small or make it about something else or minimize it, or he would take the shine off. And many on many occasions, he would make her doubt the very thing that she just achieved. And he was very manipulative in a way that none of the things that she was doing ever He would always make it about himself, and that it was because of his, the way that he is, the how much he is supporting her, and that's the reason why she is achieving all the success that she was.

    And her response to all of it? She said that it doesn't really interfere with my business and "I am not going to leave him, so there's no point talking about it." Now, a business coach might have respected that and gone back to the chart, looking at the chart, because on the surface, what does her partner have to do with her quarterly numbers, right? But this is exactly where my work is different, because the second she said it has nothing to do with my business, I knew it had everything to do with her business. The thing people most insist are irrelevant are usually the key to the entire room—at least in my experience.

    So, here's the principle, and I want you to pay attention to this part. Every relationship you have is, underneath, the same relationship, because you are in the middle of all of them—your partner, your team, your money, your clients, your business itself. And make no mistake, your business is a relationship, one of the most intimate ones you'll ever have. What do all of these have in common? You, obviously. So, the one constant standing in the center, bringing the same nervous system, the same rules, the same quiet contract about what you're allowed to have and what you're required to tolerate. So, if you really think about it, the pattern doesn't really stay in one box. Actually, there is actually no box. It shows up everywhere because you show up everywhere. And this is why I get genuinely, sometimes, irritated when the business world keeps the personal stuff separate, or they're not really bringing in all the personal aspects of your life because they might think that it's not relevant. It's not just relevant, it's the whole thing! You're not a business owner who also happens to have a personal life. You're one person running one operating system across every domain you touch.

    Okay, so now let's go back to this particular client. What was the pattern that kept her in that relationship? Because she already mentioned to me that she had no intention of leaving that relationship—well, although it wasn't really doing much for her, it wasn't making her happy, but she just didn't really want to leave. The pattern that kept her in that relationship was her extraordinary high tolerance for pain. So, and she learned it very young, in a hard home. Then she practiced it for years with this partner, absorbing the manipulation, the minimizing, sometimes even the gaslighting, and carrying on, tolerating, pushing through.

    And the same high tolerance from pain for that pain worked for her business, brilliantly, for many, many years. Because what does business throw at you, relentlessly? Rejection, dismissal, being underestimated at times, doors shutting in your face. And she could take it all. She could walk in a room, get knocked back and sometimes get talked over, and just keep going because that is what was familiar to her, whereas other people might have crumbled. But because she was already completely accustomed to being treated that way at home, it actually worked for her. It actually worked for her business, it almost became her superpower. So, her single greatest business asset, her resilience, her ability to take a hit and keep moving, was the exact same wound that kept her in a relationship that was hurting her—same adaptation, two faces. One looked like strength, the one in business, and one just looked like staying too long in a place that was not making her happy. And that is something I will say until forever: resilience and self-abandonment look completely identical from the outside. They look identical on a CV. The only difference is what they cost you and where they send the bill.

    Okay, now you might be wondering, so this is what I call her trauma response, so you might be wondering, a trauma response has been working for her, and I would agree with you, it has. And, but here's where her superpower turned on her, even inside the business. So, you know that lifetime of high tolerance for pain? It had actually set her internal bar in a very specific place. And what I mean by that is that she had taught herself that pain is normal, you just push through it, you don't make a fuss, you don't get to struggle unless it's a genuine catastrophe. So, when it came to her team, she could not extend empathy, not really, unless somebody was visibly falling apart. She genuinely couldn't understand why they needed support. So, underneath her stance was, "Okay, I survived far worse than this and kept going, why can't you?" And you know what that does to leadership, to a team, to trust, to retention, to whether your best people will ever go to the wall for you, right? People do not give their full selves to a leader who secretly thinks that their pain doesn't count. So, if you've ever led a team or if you work with a team, you know that the relationship you have with each member is very much telling of their productivity and what they're going to produce. So, of course, if the team felt that there isn't much empathy coming towards them or support, that they wouldn't be doing their very best. And this is what I also really want you to hear: she didn't have a leadership problem, she had a tolerance problem which came up in her leadership.

    So, again, if you look at this carefully, what you'll see is that the very pattern that built her business had quietly became the ceiling on her business. Her leadership, her leadership was impacted, and she's been staring at strategy decks trying to fix a problem that was never strategic. And it had nothing to do with her leadership skills or it had everything to do with her underlying patterns. And no course on leadership or leadership presence was ever going to touch it, because it wasn't in her skill set, it was in her nervous system.

    So, then what happened after when she saw the patterns? Obviously, understanding the pattern and seeing the what the drive is, it is going to help tremendously. However, it's not going to move the needle completely, because she saw this pattern actually in one of the early sessions and she understood it intellectually within an hour. And then she went home and did the exact same thing that she's always done, because awareness alone is not going to be transformational. Awareness is a door, and most people stand in that doorway for the rest of their lives, mistaking the view for the journey.

    So, you have been told a thousand times by a thousand people, notice your pattern. It's the most common advice in personal development, and it is almost completely useless on its own if you think about it, because you cannot think your way out of a pattern that your body installed before you even had words for them. You can't, I always say this—I mean, if you've heard any episode of mine, you probably would have heard—that you cannot affirm your way out of a contract you signed when you were 6 years old, for example, or younger. So, insight is great, but and it it gives us, it opens the door for us, but it's not going to move the needle in a way that we want.

    So, what did we actually do, and that's that's the real work, and it took a minute. So, we went underneath the story to the place in her body where "I must tolerate," you know, that sentence, where that sentence actually lived, because that's not a belief in the head. Because, you know, this is also important, because a a lot of the times when we are dealing with patterns, people sometimes mistake that with a cognitive belief, and that's why they think applying mindset work would help, and it doesn't. We found the original moment that wrote the rule, and we worked with it directly and somatically until her nervous system had a different reference point for what safe is allowed to feel like. Now, a lot of people mistake this kind of patterns with a cognitive belief, and that's why they go off and they try to do mindset work, because they think it's just a belief in their head, whereas it goes a lot deeper than that, right? And then the way that you work with it has to also be very different. So, we slowly, deliberately recalibrated her tolerance, not because we wanted her to tolerate less and become brittle, but actually so that she could finally tell the difference between strength and self-betrayal in real time. And we rebuilt her capacity to feel her own pain—and this might shock some people, because this is the exact same muscle as feeling somebody else's. You cannot extend to your team an empathy that you refuse to give to yourself, or that you feel for your own self. So, as I mentioned earlier, this is not a mindset shift, this is rewiring, and it's rewiring on a much deeper level. And the business result? Her leadership transformed. And, of course, it had nothing to do with her learning any management tactics or anything new, but it had everything to do with the fact that she became a person her team could trust, right, with her humanity? Her retention just changed completely, and her reach also changed. And she stopped building a business size to what she could endure, and she started building it in a way that, you know, was sustainable for everybody. And that is the difference between knowing your pattern and being free from that pattern.

    So, here's what I want you to sit with, and I don't want you to fix anything, I want you to just look at this and sit with it. I want you to find a relationship in your life where you tolerate the most, the one where you train yourself to absorb it, push through, not make a fuss, maybe it's a partner, maybe it's your parent, maybe it's your child, maybe it's a client that you're scared to lose. Now, I want you to look at your business and your work and ask, where is that identical tolerance showing up here? Where am I calling something resilience that is actually just a very old agreement to accept less than I deserve? Because I assure you, your business will only ever grow as large as the smallest version of you that's willing to be in any single room of your life. The market is not your ceiling, your tolerance is.

    So, I opened this episode by telling you that the most capable woman in the room usually has the lowest ceiling. Now you know why, and it's not capability, it's the pattern that she learned to call strength running silently across every relationship she has, including the one with her business. Now, you can spend the next 5 years optimizing the surface—new funnel, new hire, new framework—or you can go to the place where the ceiling is actually built, the pattern underneath it, and change it at the root. And that is the work that's worth doing, that is the work that's going to be sustainable for your success, for your business growth.

    But before you go, I want to leave you with one question—I know I asked a question earlier, but this is the one that I really want you to kind of focus on and answer it, not just hear it. I want you to reflect on it. Look honestly at the relationship in your life where you tolerate the most, as I mentioned earlier. But now, I want you to ask this question of yourself. You know that ceiling, the one you quietly you quietly agreed to live under at home, are you really so sure that it's not the same, exact same ceiling on your business? I want you to reflect on that, sit with that, and I will see you next time.

    Voiceover: Thank you for listening to From Trauma to CEO: The Psychology of Transformational Success with Fariha Barles. Check out the show notes for more information on how to continue this work or explore more of Fariha's teachings. If this episode resonated, please follow, review, and share it with someone who needs this message. And we'll see you in the next episode.

Episode Summary

What if your business isn't limited by your strategy, but by the patterns you tolerate in your personal life? In this episode of From Trauma to CEO, Farya Barlas explores the powerful connection between your relationships and your leadership. Through the story of a high-performing executive, she explains how survival patterns that once fueled success can eventually become the hidden ceiling on your business. Discover why resilience isn't always a strength, how awareness alone rarely creates lasting change, and what it takes to break the patterns that keep you playing smaller than your true potential.

What You'll Learn

  • Why the relationship you have with your partner, family, clients, or team reflects the same subconscious patterns influencing your business.

  • How resilience can become a survival strategy that leads to self-abandonment and quietly limits your leadership and growth.

  • Why awareness is only the first step, and why lasting transformation requires changing the deeper patterns stored in the nervous system.

  • How unresolved tolerance for unhealthy situations can affect your leadership, team culture, decision-making, and long-term business success.

  • Why expanding your business starts with changing the internal rules you've learned about what you deserve, what you tolerate, and what feels safe.

Free Resources

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