Holding Trauma in the Public Eye

Lili Tarkow-Reinisch, Psychotherapist

It’s easy to assume that wealth cushions people from life’s hardest edges. In my clinical experience, however, the opposite can often be true. Privilege doesn’t buffer against trauma – it just changes how it’s packaged and perceived and, often, how long it goes untreated.

In high-profile families, trauma can go unnamed. There can be a lot of helpers but not a lot of help, so it gets buried beneath a level of success that everyone’s working hard to maintain. Trauma gets hidden in immaculate appearances and the belief that pain should be private, undisclosed. People can appear polished on the outside whilst being fractured within. It’s very hard to thrive under constant scrutiny. And when the world expects you to be flawless, showing vulnerability can pose a threat. Inevitably, the trauma stays hidden and exacts a significant toll.  Mechanically, trauma isn’t loud – it operates quietly, systematically, and where you least expect it: cycling under the radar between generations.

The Illusion of Immunity

People often assume that wealth grants immunity from pain, dysfunction, and the deeper fractures of life. But, in high-profile families, it is as present as it is everywhere else, just hidden beneath the visual of privilege and its machinations – either unnamed or frequently misdiagnosed and therefore left untreated. The covering up of trauma can also happen voluntarily because, when resources are abundant, pain becomes easier to mask.  In these cases, we observe access to distractions, power to control the narrative, and short-term solutions that smooth the surface. On the outside, everything appears managed, but inside, there is fear, confusion, and deep emotional injury.

Privilege can create the illusion of safety, but it can also create conditions where suffering is harder to identify, where perfection becomes the armour, and vulnerability is quietly exiled. Over time, that silence becomes costly because what’s unacknowledged just settles in deeper. People become inured to it. The human brain, often criticised for its reactivity, can also, unfortunately, learn to accommodate trauma and accustom itself to it as a means of self-preservation. This is why, whilst psychologists originally identified the two survival responses – Fight or Flight – they eventually added two more: Freeze and Fawn. The Freeze and Fawn responses are particularly interesting in light of trauma. In the former, people can experience both emotional and physical paralysis and are unable to either avoid future harm or break destructive patterns. In Fawn, particularly, people learn to sublimate themselves or perform in such a way as to suggest that nothing’s wrong. This allows them to carry on, acquiesce, attempt to mitigate further harm and operate whilst living with the trauma in what is essentially a hostage situation that’s become normalised.

The Invisible Signs of Trauma

The essence of trauma’s silent nature means that it ends up being a quiet force that settles into a person’s nervous system and reshapes how they show up in the world. Especially in high-profile individuals, trauma can hide behind the veil of success. This may present in overachievers who can’t get off the corporate treadmill – the ones that pursue perfection with fanatical intensity, always in control, and always composed but privately exhausted. This manifests as a hyped-up pendulum that swings between love avoidance and love attachment, chronic anxiety, addiction, eating disorders, and what I’ve come to call a “walking depression”: a subdued flatness that doesn’t collapse a person, but incrementally drains their capacity to experience basic happiness.

These are clients that live emotional groundhog days. They repeat the same relationship dynamics, the same self-sabotaging patterns, feeling powerless to stop. And sometimes not wanting to stop. It’s not because they don’t know better. It’s because trauma isn’t innately cognitive, rather it controls cognition and perception. In essence, their experience of themselves is deeply confusing, hidden beneath layers of coping mechanisms – some of which yield great results like multiple homes and record-breaking yachts, and others which threaten to destroy them and those they love the most.

In the world of executive trauma recovery, this kind of psychological presentation is often missed. These individuals may, on paper, be thriving but, until their trauma is addressed, no amount of success can rescue them. This is why trauma work often begins as a recovery mission involving a deep dive of traumatic material from the darker depths of a person’s experience, brought to the surface and into a cognitive light where it can be tangibly examined and identified.

Childhood Trauma: The Unseen Root

In my clinical experience, childhood trauma in high-profile families is one of the most overlooked foundations of adult suffering. It may not look so dramatic from the outside but that’s usually because some of the story is missing. Often, it’s subtle rather than overt – formed undetectably through day-to-day conditions such as emotional absence, conditional love, and the pressure to perform for approval.

Children become actors in a play they didn’t audition for: perfect, polished, pleasing. Over time, their performance is inseparable from their identity. Add generational wealth, legacy pressure, and a lack of emotional fluency, and you have a recipe for intergenerational trauma that hides in plain sight. Children raised in this atmosphere often carry a quiet fear of being “the thing that can break it all” So they mask, they strive, and though they succeed, they nonetheless end up suffering in silence.

In private trauma therapy, we gently begin to unpick the early bonds that were formed, not simply to thrive, but for the sake of survival itself. Healing often starts with unpicking what happened way back when. This is a major part of my ethos: “Don’t water the fruit, water the root”. We must get to the root of the trauma. Better yet, of course, is to nourish children emotionally in order to spare them from hauling the painful burdens of their forebears down the road of their own burgeoning narratives.

The Costs of Visibility

For public figures, those in high-pressure roles, and those from high-profile families – trauma isn’t just personally experienced; it’s observed, speculated on, sometimes even commodified. When your identity is conflated with power, vulnerability can be dangerous.

This fear is not an imaginary fear – a single disclosure involving either mental or physical health can affect reputation, relationships, legacy. Individuals will delay treatment for years. Not because they don’t feel the cracks, but because acknowledging them feels like collapse. Even something as straightforward as, for example, a knee replacement surgery can – and previously has – resulted in shareholders getting jittery.  And so, beneath the curated exterior, there is often quiet anguish. Private breakdowns behind public success. Panic attacks masked as precision. As Bessel Van Der Kolk aptly observed, “the body keeps score”, even when the image stays polished. Eventually, people start to feel the cracks forming and the clock ticking – they begin to have a sense that their capacity to evade the impact of trauma is running thin.

People don’t just fear exposure, they fear erasure. And at some point, it becomes clear that the cycle has to stop. They can’t beat the trauma without help.  Sometimes this comes from an epiphany, but other times something existential happens, and the individual is reminded of their mortality and the fragility of those they love. Importantly though, healing doesn’t need to mean stepping out of the spotlight entirely. It means creating a space that’s safe enough to finally step out of character.  At Harbor, we provide the UK’s most discreet trauma therapy, which means that help is possible … even for those who feel the world is always watching.

Why The Right Model Matters

The most effective trauma treatment isn’t just about clinical accuracy. It’s about the conditions that allow someone to feel safe enough to begin. So, for those navigating intense public pressure, generational expectation, or private pain behind privilege – conventional treatment models can fall short. They can feel impersonal, exposing, or too standardised to meet the complexity of what’s being carried.

That’s why the Harbor model is different. Quiet, private, culturally informed. We begin by understanding what’s happened – not just what’s ‘wrong’ – and we hold that understanding through every layer of care. The ‘clinical’ is ever-present, but so is the ‘relational’ – carefully chosen practitioners, individually matched, who can meet the client where they are with no assumptions or agenda.

Treatment is led by a multidisciplinary team and precisely tailored not just to an individual’s clinical profile, but to their lived experience, their cultural background, their family dynamic. This is how trust is built. And this is why there really is no one-size-fits-all in trauma work. It has to feel safe. It has to feel attuned. And it has to begin from a place of profound respect.  When those things are in place, real healing becomes possible.

A Different Kind of Strength

For many of the people we work with, strength has meant composure. Control. Carrying on. But healing asks for something else entirely.  It asks for the courage to be seen. The willingness to question what’s always been. And, perhaps most of all, the strength to soften without falling apart. There is nothing weak about seeking support.