Grounding Urgency Culture Webinar Series: Recordings & Resources
In this first session of the "Grounding Urgency Culture" series, Tend Collective founder Alison Cebulla explores how urgency culture — the organizational norm of treating everything as equally critical and time-sensitive — functions as an addiction cycle rooted in childhood stress. Drawing on neuroscience, the ACEs research, and the work of trauma experts including Dr. Gabor Maté and the Nagoski sisters, Alison walks participants through how chronic urgency activates the brain's fight-or-flight response, narrowing our thinking and undermining the collaboration, creativity, and focus that good work requires. She introduces the concept of "toxic stress" as distinct from the positive and tolerable stress that motivates us, and explains how unrelenting workplace urgency compounds the childhood experiences that many of us carry into our professional lives.
The second half of the session turns to how these dynamics show up in workplace culture, examining how unexamined childhood beliefs and behaviors — around conflict, rest, performance, and control — can cause organizations to become "trauma-organized" around their most dysregulated members. Alison introduces the concept of dark tetrad personalities and how they manufacture urgency and chaos, while also offering a compassionate reframe: most difficult workplace behavior reflects unmet needs and underdeveloped skills rather than fixed toxicity, and can be addressed through tools like emotion regulation, communication frameworks, and rupture-and-repair practices. Participants are invited to bring gentle awareness to their own patterns and those of the people they lead, using understanding itself as a stress-reduction tool.
In Part 2 of our Grounding Urgency Culture series, we get practical about breaking the cycle. We explore why our nervous systems treat a stressful email like a predator — and what we can actually do about it. Drawing on Dr. Bruce Perry's Regulate → Relate → Reason framework, we walk through tools for self-regulation, co-regulation with your team, and the structural changes that make urgency culture less likely to take hold in the first place: clear agreements, protected deep work time, defined decision-making authority, and closing the stress loop deliberately. If you work in human services, nonprofits, or government, this one's for you.
Recordings:
Resources:
Slides - click here. Google Drive link to download a PDF.
Session 1:
Book: Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski, PhD and Amelia Nagoski (2019)
Video: How Childhood Trauma Leads to Addiction - Gabor Maté
Article: Everyday Sadism in the Workplace - Recognizing sadistic conduct at work is a critical step in protecting targets. (2026) By Jennifer Fraser, PhD, author of The Bullied Brain.
Book: Poisonous People: How to Resist Them and Improve Your Life by Leanne ten Brinke, PhD (2026)
Book: It’s Not You - Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People by Ramani Durvasula, PhD (2024)
Session 2:
Podcast: Bessel van der Kolk on On Being, “How Trauma Lodges in the Body” (2013)
Instagram video: Big Little Feelings, “When you remember you’re not being chased by a bear”
Book: Parenting from the Inside Out by Dr. Dan Siegel
Video: Dr. Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Model: “Regulate, Relate, Reason”
Video: Fight, Flight, or Freeze: The Psoas Muscle’s Role in Stress
Blog: The Mandalorian as a Child Trauma Parable (2021)
Website: Cathy Malchiodi on Art Therapy
