Complex grief can deeply affect how leaders think, decide, and function at work. This article explores how complex, traumatic, ambiguous, and disenfranchised grief, especially after covert parental abuse, can impact work capacity, trust, and burnout, and offers practical steps to help leaders regain clarity, resilience, and work performance through five ways, including the SCRIBE framework.

When critical stress or trauma hits, a leader’s capacity to think, decide, and lead effectively often collapses. This "foggy" feeling, emotional reactivity, or even shutdown is not who the leader is; it is their brain in survival mode. In this article, I introduce the SCRIBE Model, a conceptual framework designed to help leaders regain work capacity through neurobiology and organizational frames. This model may help move from survival to capacity restoration and thriving in