From WorkHurt to Healing: Reclaiming Humanity and Psychological Safety at Work

Written By Yuri Brown-Cruzat

Over the years, I’ve witnessed the same quiet crisis play out in countless organizations—smart, capable people showing up every day but carrying invisible injuries. They weren’t broken, lazy, or disengaged; they were hurting.

We have metrics for turnover, engagement, and safety incidents—but we rarely measure the human cost of work hurt. The kind that doesn’t leave physical scars but erodes confidence, trust, and belonging.

That’s why I launched WorkHurt™—to create language, tools, and frameworks that help people and organizations heal from the inside out. This isn’t another HR initiative or culture program; it’s a movement rooted in the belief that healing is strategic, and psychological safety is the soil from which all high performance grows.

The Gap I Saw

In my work across industries and leadership levels, I saw a missing bridge between organizational accountability and personal agency. We focus on policy and compliance—the external systems—but too often neglect the internal systems of self-awareness, emotional regulation, and compassion that allow people to thrive within those structures.

The WorkHurt to Healing Experience at Howard University was born out of this realization: that healing workplaces requires both—systems that protect people and individuals who are equipped to navigate those systems with resilience and grace.

The BREATHE™ Framework

During my session, I introduced the BREATHE™ Practice, a seven-step framework that helps individuals regulate their inner world when the external one feels unsafe.
It’s a personal reset—an intentional pause to:

  • Be still long enough to recognize what’s really happening

  • Resist making it bigger than it is

  • Evaluate emotions—understanding them as signals that live in the body and offer insight, correction, and clarity

  • Agree to stabilize before acting

  • Take ownership of your response

  • Heal through reflection and restoration

  • Exhale, releasing what no longer serves

BREATHE™ isn’t just a self-care tool; it’s a practice of self-leadership.
When practiced collectively, it becomes a shared discipline that strengthens how teams pause, communicate, and recover together.

The Role of Psychological Safety

At the conference, we also shared the Four Stages of Psychological Safety—inclusion, learner, contributor, and challenger safety—as the framework that defines how trust evolves within teams.
When people feel safe to belong, learn, contribute, and challenge, they don’t just perform better; they innovate, adapt, and stay.
WorkHurt™ integrates these stages into practical behavioral inquiries leaders can use every day to diagnose and strengthen team health—not as a checklist, but as a shared language for honesty.

Healing in Community

The day was filled with transformational sessions that brought this vision to life:

  • Madia Logan reminded us that authentic branding begins with self-definition—the courage to tell our story before others write it for us.

  • Jocelyn Johnson guided us back to the body through mindfulness and breath, showing how stress recovery starts with awareness.

  • Veronica Essex and Tonya Overton helped us honor grief and loss through spoken word and art, revealing that creativity itself can be a healing language.

Together, these experiences underscored that healing is not a solitary act—it’s relational, reflective, and deeply human.

Where We Go From Here

The conversation doesn’t end with an event; it begins there.
Through our ongoing WorkHurt Experience Survey, we’re collecting insights that will shape the next evolution of this work—how leaders can cultivate psychologically safe environments while employees learn to regulate their own healing journey.

Because the truth is: the workplace can wound us, but it can also heal us—if we’re willing to breathe, listen, and lead differently.

WorkHurt™ is more than a brand. It’s a call to return to ourselves—one breath, one story, one workplace at a time. 🌿

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Yuri Brown-Cruzat