The Hidden Survivors: Teens Living in Homes of Violence

If you've been following along the series this month, you've already read my story and how, as a result of growing up in a home with domestic violence, I was a child trying to read the room like a threat assessment report long before I ever learned what that word meant in corporate America.

Years later, sitting in boardrooms across Fortune 500 spaces, I realized something: the adults in those rooms once looked and, in some cases, acted like the teens I work with today. They learned how to perform calm. How to overachieve. How to people-please. How to survive.

But what happens when you’ve been surviving since childhood?

For teens exposed to domestic violence, what’s called Childhood Domestic Violence (CDV), silence becomes the operating system. It rewires how safety feels. They learn to adapt, to avoid conflict, to anticipate tone shifts, to read faces. They not only show up in classrooms but eventually, in workplaces, carrying invisible data from years of instability. Ya know... The Body Keeps Score.

And yet, these are the future innovators, employees, and leaders companies say they want to invest in.

Why This Should Matter to Companies

If the next generation enters your workforce carrying unaddressed trauma, burnout won’t be your biggest threat; disconnection will. ACTUALLY, corporations are already seeing this, whether they're coming straight out of high school or college. Those who are in the Corporate spaces already see that disconnected teams don’t collaborate well. Unseen employees can’t innovate freely. And unsupported teens grow into adults who think belonging is earned through performance, not humanity.

That’s why prevention isn’t just a social issue; it’s a leadership strategy.

All Isn't Lost... What Companies Can Do

1. Invest early. Partner with organizations like mine, D.O.V.E.S. Network® to bring prevention and healthy relationship education to schools and communities. It’s not charity, it’s pipeline development for emotionally intelligent talent.

2. Model what safety feels like. Create trauma-informed workplaces that normalize empathy, boundaries, and emotional literacy. Teen interns and early-career hires notice whether your culture feels like chaos or calm.

3. Sponsor learning, not just labor. Support after-school programs and youth empowerment events. Your resources can help break the cycle of silence for the next generation before they ever need an HR complaint form.

Teens don’t need pity; they need opportunity, mentors, and safe spaces to grow. They need adults who remember what it felt like not to have a voice and who choose to help rewrite that story.

If your company says it’s committed to the future of work, start by caring about the future of workers. Even if your company is planning to use AI, you still need humans to program, run, and implement it, so you can't avoid this.

The next generation is watching. Let’s make sure what they see from us helps them heal.

With Survivors,

Tiffany