Personal Power vs Privilege: A Trauma-Informed Look at Radical Responsibility

In my last blog, I wrote about radical responsibility, not the kind that shames or blames, but the kind that lovingly hands you back the reins and says:
You still get to choose how you show up now.

Since then, a few things have come up. Big things.
Conversations about trauma. About inequality. About whether agency is even accessible to everyone. I’ve seen the critiques — and to be honest, I agree with some of them.
Because the personal development world has a habit of slapping a shiny mindset sticker on deep systemic pain, it preaches things like:

When those words are dropped into spaces without context or care, they can absolutely cause harm.

But I want to offer this:

Swinging the other way — where we reject all personal agency and see healing as only accessible to the privileged — can be just as damaging.

I’m not here to pretend we are.
Some of us carry trauma in our bones. Some of us are navigating invisible illness, disability, racism, poverty, grief, and systemic injustice. I see that. I live some of that.

To ignore context is ignorant.
But to ignore capacity is disempowering.

There’s a sacred middle here.
And that middle is where I do my work.

Taking radical responsibility doesn't mean you caused your pain.
It means you get to respond to it in a way that's aligned with who you are becoming.

Not because you should.
Because you can.

That doesn’t erase the real grief, the nervous system dysregulation, or the complexity of healing. It simply reminds us:
You are not what happened to you. You are what you choose next.

To be trauma-informed doesn’t mean we tiptoe around power.
It means we hold it with gentleness.
We help people find the edge they can lean into, without pushing them off the cliff.

Some days, your power might look like setting a boundary.
Other days, it’s asking for help.

Some days, it’s simply brushing your teeth and breathing.

That’s still agency.
That’s still leadership.
That’s still your life.

After losing my son, I had no idea how to go on.
But I knew I had to — for my surviving children, and for my husband.
Not because I was ready. Not because I knew how.
But because something in me whispered, just keep breathing.

I didn’t choose that pain.
But I did choose how to honour it. How to live again, slowly. Gently. Fiercely.

Agency was the rope I held onto when nothing else made sense.
And no — I didn’t do it alone.
But I did have to say yes to my own becoming.