In the latest episode of The Femcast podcast, myself and Dr. Jen Fraser sit down with Liza Collins – a 36-year NHS management veteran who spent decades building healthy, psychologically safe teams and championing anti-bullying practice. The irony, as Liza tells it, is brutal, all that expertise didn’t protect her. In 2019, she returned home to Wales to open a brand-new £350 million hospital and within weeks found herself the target of a coordinated bullying campaign that would eventually collapse her health entirely.
“This can’t be trauma. This is work.”
Liza describes being surrounded almost immediately by what she calls “a pack of dogs” — a subordinate who resented her appointment, a peer who quietly took credit for her ideas, and a superior orchestrating it all from a distance. Information was withheld before key decisions, then used against her afterward. Her ideas were reassigned to other people. Meetings became ambushes, with colleagues visibly seeking permission from the ringleader before firing questions at her.
Within six months, her body gave out. She stopped eating. She couldn’t get off the sofa. It wasn’t until a friend — a military trauma expert — told her plainly that what she was experiencing was trauma that anything began to make sense. Her first reaction was disbelief: trauma is war, or assault — not a hospital administration job. But as she dove into the work of Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Maté, Stephen Porges and Peter Levine, the physical collapse she’d experienced started to have an explanation. That process of piecing it together eventually became her book, The Physiology of Bullying.
Gaslighting Is Only Obvious in Hindsight
One of the most striking parts of the conversation is Liza’s attempt to describe gaslighting as it was happening — not after the fact. She talks about approving routine expenses, like bed curtains, only to have the decision thrown back at her later as if it had been reckless. She talks about proposing a mentoring idea for the team, only to watch it get quietly handed to HR as someone else’s initiative. None of these moments were dramatic on their own. That was the point.
“It felt slippery,” she says. “I couldn’t put my finger on it because it kept moving.” Her nervous system knew something was wrong long before her conscious mind could name it — and she dismissed those signals for months, assuming she simply wasn’t good enough at her job.
Dr. Jen Fraser, author of The Gaslit Brain and The Bullied Brain`, points out that this delay isn’t a personal failing — it’s neurological. In the moment, the brain is busy running fight-or-flight machinery to deal with a perceived predator; the prefrontal cortex, responsible for the kind of analysis needed to spot manipulation, goes offline. Understanding only arrives once the threat has passed.
Workplace Bullying as a Public Health Crisis
A recurring theme of the episode is the case for treating workplace bullying the way we treat secondhand smoke: a preventable harm we’ve simply chosen not to regulate. Jen cites long-running research linking chronic job strain and effort-reward imbalance to significantly elevated rates of heart disease. Liza adds her own findings from interviewing 50 people who’d experienced severe workplace bullying — 40 of them described feeling suicidal, and most of the rest showed clear warning signs.
Both point to wearable technology — heart rate variability, sleep tracking — as an underused source of hard evidence. Jen even describes pitching cardiologists in Toronto on building an app that could connect heart-rate data to psychological abuse patterns. The pitch, so far, hasn’t landed. But the argument is compelling: if we can measure the damage, we can no longer pretend it doesn’t exist.
HR as “Black Ops”
We discuss HR’s role in these situations, Lisa is blunt about her own experience — information was manipulated, her grievance process was compromised by someone tasked with fairly gathering evidence, and the language used throughout felt designed to protect the organisation rather than the person raising concerns. She suggests HR would be more honestly named “human risk management.”
Jen references a phrase from a previous podcast guest, a former counterterrorism officer who was also bullied and gaslit at work: HR is the black ops of the organisation. Both agree this isn’t necessarily a reflection of individual HR professionals’ values — many, they note, want to do right by people — but of a structural incentive to minimise organisational liability above all else.
From “Trauma-Informed” to “Trauma-Preventative”
One of the more practical reframes in the episode is Lisa’s distinction between being trauma-informed and trauma-preventative. Being trauma-informed, she argues, is passive — you can understand trauma perfectly well and still stand by while it happens. Being trauma-preventative means actively building the conditions where bullying can’t take root in the first place.
Rejecting Shame, Reclaiming Language
Perhaps the most resonant thread running through the whole conversation is language itself. Lisa reflects that she had no vocabulary for what she was experiencing while it was happening — no way to name the shame, the coercive control, the moral injury she felt. It’s only in retrospect, armed with the language from trauma research and brain science, that she can describe it calmly rather than relive it.
Liza’s central message for anyone who’s experienced something similar: put down the shame. The collapse wasn’t a personal weakness. It was biology, doing exactly what it’s built to do in the presence of a real threat.
Watch the full conversation here:
Lisa Collins’s book, The Physiology of Bullying, and Dr. Jen Fraser’s The Gaslit Brain and The Bullied Brain are available now.
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