Coaching Meets Trauma
An Integration Discipline for Leaders - at Work, in Family, in Community
Hi, I'm Maria Marc
ICF-credentialed coach and trauma integration practitioner helping leaders trade pressured performance for self-trust and integrity.
The Territory I Work In
I work in the territory most leadership coaching avoids - the hidden, the unspoken, the parts of your history that have been shaping how you lead, love, and show up long before you ever had words for them.
My gift isn't diagnosing what's wrong with you. It's helping you bring what's hidden into the light - not as pathology, but as the raw material for real authority.
This is The Surfacing Practice, where coaching meets trauma integration - for leaders navigating their own inner terrain, and for institutions navigating the collective terrain of the people inside them.
Where It Starts: The First Institution
Long before you led a team, sat on a board, or built something of your own, you were part of a family - the first institution most of us ever belong to. It's where you first learned what got you seen, what had to stay hidden, what earned love and what earned silence.
Those early patterns don't disappear when you grow up and step into leadership. They come with you - quietly shaping how you hold power, handle conflict, tolerate visibility, and extend or withhold trust, usually without your conscious awareness.
The Surfacing Practice starts here, because you cannot fully integrate what you refuse to look at, and you cannot lead from a place in yourself you haven't first understood.
How I Work
My approach draws on neuroscience, relational trauma theory, Compassionate Inquiry (CI), and Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST), developed by Janina Fisher - each offering a different lens on how the nervous system holds, and eventually releases, what it's been carrying. Where it serves the work, I also draw on archetypal frameworks to support integration once there's enough nervous-system stability to do that work safely.
Together, these modalities let me work with what's beneath the surface: the over-responsibility, the perfectionism, the inhibited emotion, the chronic self-abandonment. Not to fix you - to help you recognize these patterns as protections that once made real sense, so you can finally set down what you no longer need to carry.
What Becomes Possible
As the nervous system settles and what was hidden becomes visible, something shifts. Old, familiar defenses give way to something more durable: the capacity to live and lead from integrity rather than pressured performance. Clients describe it less as becoming someone new, and more as finally becoming who they already were - underneath the roles, the titles, and the coping strategies that got them this far. The Surfacing Practice is about clarity, dignity, authenticity, and self-trust. This is not curated confidence - it's the hard-earned, real thing that no one can take away, even when life falls apart.
My Track Record
I've facilitated over 6,000 conversations with high-performing leaders, founders, practitioners, and change-makers. I'm an ICF Credentialed Coach, hold an MA in Leading Innovation and Change, and am trained in Relational Trauma Coaching, Compassionate Inquiry, and Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST).
Two Ways We Might Work Together
Compassionate Inquiry (CI)
Trained under Dr. Gabor Maté
Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST)
Trained under Dr. Janina Fisher
+6,000 private sessions
+1,000 hours group work
Relational Trauma Coaching
ICF Credentialed Coach
