I’m an author, speaker, leader, and coach working at the intersection of community wellbeing and individual thriving. Over the last fifteen years, I’ve found great meaning and deep satisfaction in working with people who fight for healing and justice, who uphold the dignity of all people, who approach their work in a spirit of caring, generosity, and optimism, and who see beauty and resilience where others might see brokenness and despair.
My passion for helping others rebuild their lives, find seeds of meaning in their pain, and grow from trauma and adversity comes from personal experience. My expertise comes from studying what helps people flourish when life gets hard and sharing it with others.
About
In 2008, I caused the death of my girlfriend Laura while driving drunk after a birthday party she threw for me. Determined to make meaning out of tragedy and committed to serving others as a way to honor her memory, I’ve since had the privilege of working with top organizations and inspiring people to make communities safer and healthier and been a part of national efforts to make public health, criminal justice, and other systems work better.
Many of the most passionate and profoundly effective change-makers I worked with arrived at their callings through personal experiences with loss, trauma, or life-changing adversity.
Seeing the potential of adversity and hardship to catalyze altruism and positive change, I founded Trauma Informed and returned to school to study positive psychology, focusing my research on posttraumatic growth and resilience. I now work in a number of settings applying what I learned to the fields I care about most.
Current Organizations
Springlake Solutions for Health and Justice: At Springlake Solutions, we partner with mission-driven organizations in health and justice to catalyze transformation—of systems, programs, and the people they serve. We offer subject matter expertise, training, and technical assistance to help organizations build programs that catalyze personal development and human flourishing, and we support organizational development using research-backed strategies for communication, collaboration, workforce wellbeing, and leadership.
University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center: I am a member of the instructional team at the Penn Positive Psychology Center where I work with a team of scholar-practitioners to support students in the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program’s course on designing interventions for organizations. Our students learn through a series of guest lectures from luminary researchers in psychology and business and participate in an intensive service-learning project to develop a new application of social science for a nonprofit organizational setting.
Trauma Informed: At Trauma Informed, our small team provides training and program support for the implementation of Growth-Oriented Trauma Responsiveness, a trauma-informed approach for addiction, criminal justice, and adjacent organizations to harness the potential for distress and adversity to catalyze positive changes and personal growth, offers workshops and organizational support for professionals working in high-stress roles serving others in these fields, and advocates for policies that allow people to rebuild and flourish after systems-involvement or trauma.
Mark and Maria
In my research on how and why people grow after painful experiences, one of the biggest lessons was the importance of connections. When we face adversity, we rely on our relationships and learn to value the care we receive. And we also learn to see and respond to the pain of others.
Not long after Laura’s death, I met my now wife, Maria, who had recently lost her father to cancer. We bonded over our mutual grief, but things were initially, um, complicated. She hung in there while I got myself together, and we got married in 2012. We now live in Lutherville, Maryland with three joyful children and a goofy pup named Otis.
You can read about how we met and grew together through our grief and my incarceration in my book, Crashing.
Media
“I wished it was me who died. Instead, the woman I loved was gone, and I was probably going to prison for causing the crash that killed her. How could I even think about rebuilding when I was 25, and the life I’d planned was already over?”
Crashing: I Love You. Forgive Me.
In this powerful, unforgettable memoir, Mark L. O’Brien examines the profound consequences of the moment that forever changed his life and cut short the life of the woman he loved. The morning after a birthday party she threw for him, Mark woke up in the hospital to learn that his girlfriend was dead, and he might be going to prison for causing the car crash that killed her.
With piercing insight and stark prose, Mark L. O’Brien leads us on a deeply personal, intimate, and emotional journey—grappling with loss, regret, and his fragmented memories of the night of the crash, questioning a new relationship fraught with immense shame and colored by his continued attachment to his lost love, and wondering whether questions about his guilt and the forgiveness of his girlfriend’s family would keep him out of prison. Along the way, he delivers an unflinching exploration of grief, mercy, and the fractured path from loss to meaning. The result is a staggering and inspiring tour de force.
As seen in The Washington Post and on Jada Pinkett Smith’s Emmy award-winning Red Table Talk, Mark L. O’Brien’s story will inspire readers with its powerful message of hope and its heart-wrenching illustration of the human spirit’s capacity to discover seeds of meaning in even the most painful experiences.
Together with Laura’s father, Mark appeared on Jada Pinkett Smith’s Emmy-Award winning show, Red Table Talk, to discuss loss, love, and the healing power of forgiveness.
I help people build resilience to prepare for adversity and navigate painful transitions and experiences to grow, learn, understand their strengths, and connect better with others.
I deliver programs for young people to develop resilience and respond to adversity in ways that support learning and personal growth.
I offer coaching and group programs for adults to overcome adversity, find meaning in painful experiences, and grow from difficult transitions.
