Holding Both: Professionalism and Pain
Professionalism and Pain: Reflections from research and practice about women who lead while healing
There is a particular courage required of women who hold both, who lead while still healing, who carry others’ pain while tending to their own. In the domestic and sexual abuse sector, this duality is common, even expected. Many of the most skilled, empathic practitioners are themselves survivors. They bring lived experience that deepens understanding, but also carries a weight that professional culture rarely acknowledges.
My doctoral research explores this complexity. Women who are both survivor and worker, practitioner and patient, professional and personal, often live in tension between the self that must appear composed and the self still mending.
Within liberal feminist thinking, this balancing act can be seen as a form of resilience. Women learn to appear capable and composed even when under pressure, adapting to workplaces that value logic and self-control while quietly discouraging open emotion or vulnerability.
Feminist poststructuralism, however, allows a deeper reading, one that sees these women not as contradictions to be resolved but as subjects constantly in motion, negotiating competing discourses of strength and fragility.
In the narratives I’ve gathered, professionalism becomes both armour and offering. Many women describe feeling compelled to overperform, to prove their credibility within organisations that quietly question whether “lived experience” undermines objectivity. The burden of proof falls on them twice: to demonstrate that they are healed enough to lead, yet close enough to pain to understand. This paradox can produce a kind of emotional labour that exceeds any job description. It is the unspoken work of holding both.
The body often keeps score of this effort. Chronic fatigue, anxiety, heart palpitations, autoimmune conditions, the residue of years spent in heightened states of care. These symptoms echo what trauma theorists like Judith Herman describe as the long tail of post-traumatic stress, but they also reflect organisational cultures that valorise overwork and silent suffering. When systems fail to be trauma-informed for their own staff, the body becomes the last protest.
And yet, within these contradictions, there is a quiet form of leadership, one that integrates empathy with critical reflexivity. Survivor-practitioners often model a way of leading that is profoundly feminist: relational, embodied, and ethically attuned. They demonstrate that professionalism and pain are not opposites but intertwined conditions of care. To hold both is not to be weak, but to be honest — to lead with a consciousness shaped by surviving.
In my own work, I have learned that authenticity is not the enemy of professionalism but its evolution. The women who lead while healing are reimagining what it means to be credible, accountable, and compassionate within feminist organisations. They remind us that wholeness is not a prerequisite for leadership. It is, instead, a horizon, something we move toward collectively, hand in hand, through the slow, radical practice of care.
Notes and Reading
Herman, J. (1992) Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books.
Gill, R. & Orgad, S. (2018) ‘The amazing bounce-backable woman: Resilience and the psychological turn in neoliberalism.’ Sociological Research Online, 23(2), 477–495.
Gatenby, B. & Humphries, M. (2000) ‘Feminist participatory action research: Methodological and ethical issues.’ Women’s Studies International Forum, 23(1), 89–105.