If you have unresolved childhood trauma but didn’t think it affected your career (like I did), think again. Trauma symptoms will show up in every area of your life, and it will keep presenting you with opportunities to learn and grow from them, work-life including.
We’ve all been there – arriving at your new job on the first day of work with the highest of hopes and cheeriest of attitudes believing, “this is it, this is where I’ll send down my roots,” only to quickly realize this wasn’t the opportunity you had hoped and signed your name on the dotted line for. Soon enough, you’re all too familiar with “the Monday blues” - the dread that dawns on you as soon as you realize it’s Sunday, reminding you of all that’s wrong with your current job situation. Haven’t we all escaped from a job like this or two?
While it’s completely normal, even expected, for budding professionals to pave their path towards satisfaction and success by trial and error, it’s a hot, red, complex trauma flag when “starting, then restarting” is the only notable pattern in your career trajectory. It’s exhausting and debilitating to your self-esteem. It can also be downright scary to watch yourself retreat back to square one time and time again while everyone else in your surrounding environment is peacefully and confidently moving right along to the next chapter in their professional life.
If you grew up with long term child abuse and neglect, it could be your unresolved trauma holding you back from moving forward in your career.
Look for these 5 cptsd symptoms that are keeping your career from taking off.
1. Comfortable with ambiguity
As childhood trauma survivors, we grew up having to hide or mask our true feelings and thoughts, even physically hiding from our abusers. We quickly learned that speaking up and seeking validation often resulted in punishment, disapproval, shame, criticism, and a lot of harm. For others, it was hiding the truth from peers or classmates – the truth that there was an alcoholic parent or sexual abuser in the house or the truth that you haven’t had a hot meal in days. It’s easy to see how the need and desire for clarity and transparency became entangled with fear and rejection over time. Many adults with cptsd haven’t departed from this enmeshment, and it’s pretty easy to spot, especially in the workplace. From missing deadlines by just a day or two or just “going with the flow” because you’re a “chill person” to expecting or letting lousy behavior slide are just a few examples of what ambiguity in the workplace looks like. And that’s too bad because where money is involved, exactness is excellence.
No one wants to go in on a business deal where all the details aren’t clearly laid out on the table or take a job from a company that lacks transparency in their policies. Have you ever wanted to ask HR if “10 days’ vacation” meant 10 business days or 10 days in total before accepting a new job but didn’t want to risk coming off as “knit-picky,” so you kept your mouth shut? Or agreed to lead a team for a project without first clarifying the exact scope? Only to find yourself at the office at 10 pm on the weekend surrounded by your team who now resent you? Were there times you could have saved yourself from a lot of upheaval or wasted time and money if details were reviewed thoroughly and explained beforehand? In the case of advancing careers, the higher you go, the less margin for error, requiring precision and accuracy in your decisions and judgment, more than the next person gunning for your position. Navigating career paths from the seat of ambiguity will stunt professional (and personal) growth in any industry or role.
2. Emotional outbursts
Experiencing difficulty with affect regulation or emotional dysregulation is one of three indicators of cptsd in children and adults (ICD-11, W.H.O). However, emotional dysregulation doesn’t always look the same across the board as it’s expressed differently in different scenarios, even in the same person.
What’s dangerous about emotional outbursts related to professional life is that they lead to irrational decisions and actions that later turn into shame and rumination. Over time, you bury the feelings of shame and move past rumination by any means necessary, but the longer you ignore these feelings, the more likely you’ll have another outburst. The cycle continues and chips away at your self-esteem and confidence at each turn. Outbursts don’t always look like the raging lunatic throwing their fists in the air or slamming staplers on their desk. It can be suddenly withdrawing in a social setting, bringing in heavy, dark energy to the group, and making everyone feel uncomfortable or hysterically laughing during an intense conversation of someone sharing bad news. It can also look like someone quietly walking out of a job, never to return, with everyone wondering, “what the hell happened?”
When a person’s response is out of sync, and the cause and effect don’t match, there is no predictability; without predictability, there can be no trust, which is a crucial element in moving up the totem pole. In workplace settings, trust always out weighs the value of skill, and while trust alone can take you far, skill alone cannot. Ultimately, those who are superior at managing stress will quickly move up in their careers, while those who are prisoners of their emotional outbursts will not.
3. Terrible response to criticism and rejection
This is an extension of #2, but it deserves a spot on its own because it’s common for terrible responses to throw someone off their track completely.
In this setting, the cliché is the truth – success is about falling seven times and getting up eight. Advancement, in any capacity, requires gracefully accepting and evaluating negative feedback and unexpected outcomes and using them to make improvements. It’s a valuable way of uncovering your blind spots and managed correctly; goals draw within reach, and success seems to be right around the corner. It’s the same formula at every tier.
Nobody likes criticism, no matter how constructively delivered, and rejection hurts, regardless of where it’s coming from; that’s a given. Yet folks with cptsd take it harder than most. It feels like our world is crumbling before our eyes and that we may never recover from this present, crushing moment when we’re getting it handed to us. At the core, it concerns how our caregivers criticized and rejected our needs, ultimately shaping our self-image as awful, shameful, and unworthy. Any negative feedback feels like a personal punch in the gut, and we internalize it as confirmation of our unworthiness and self-hatred. When the limbic brain kicks in and intense emotions set in, unwise decisions ensues. It can look like checking out of the conversation entirely or disrespecting the person speaking to you. You may start searching for other jobs at the current workplace or display general acts of defiance that risk termination, even causing unnecessary upheaval at the office, like writing a nasty email to the person who criticized you and cc’ing everyone in the office as “payback.”
Again, behavior destroys trust. Once you’re marked as someone who can’t take criticism or rejection in stride, employers will see a ceiling to your growth and overlook your candidacy for promotions and leveling up.
4. Settling for less
Anyone familiar with complex trauma knows low self-esteem is a pervasive symptom and an exhausting one at that. Its effect is most visible in lopsided romantic relationships, but did you know it’s just as apparent in professional dynamics too? It takes shape in the form of settling for less and manifests in various ways. Accepting less than your desired wage or faithfully showing up to a job that doesn’t fulfill or excite you is another. Allowing others to take credit for your job well done is a big one many career professionals with cptsd encounter too. Then, there are the not-so-obvious signs: dressing provocatively to work, being overly flirtatious with colleagues and overseers, or “paving the way to the top” by using their sexuality, constantly complaining about the job, being too controlling, and even being the person who’s there for everyone anytime they need someone to talk to. They all exemplify a lack of boundaries, and allowing the job or the people at work to walk over you indicates something amiss in one’s inner world.
When you value yourself and believe your work is an extension of your values, you will treat it respectfully. Contrary to popular opinion, life is pretty serious and setting yourself up to be financially secure should be serious priority. Your actions and inactions tell your employers how committed you are and settling for less automatically reduces the likelihood you're taking your job seriously. Outside matches inside. If you're doing it right and you're on the right track at work, it will show: in your actions, how you conduct business, and how you treat yourself and others. Conversely, it will also show if you’re not going for your best.
5. Addicted to drama
“Who me? Never!” It’s what most reading this would think to themselves, but take a moment and review your career trajectory from the beginning when you first got hired as an intern or started that entry-level position to your current. Was it “a wild ride,” or did you “go through a lot to get here”? Was it “a crazy experience” filled with “crazy bosses” that required “crazy things” to “get the job done”? Do you get bored at work when things are quiet? When the job becomes easy or routine? Do you often quit or think of quitting a job when things don’t go as you expected? If these descriptions resonate, then you’re probably addicted to drama, and it’s costing you your financial and career stability.
I was one of those people who ghosted friends and quietly quit jobs because I didn’t want the drama in my life, but little did I know I was responsible for repeating my own “trauma drama” with my actions. Sure, I always had reasons to quit or leave a job, and it was never my fault… but was it? Looking back, my unhealed self had the tendency to gravitate towards jobs (and people) that were “interesting, exciting, and different” without realizing “interesting” was often “unstable,” “exciting” usually turned out to be “toxic,” and “different” was “shady .”The jobs I chose were my own doing; no one forced me to go for the “exciting” position over the “boring” job with “a bunch of squares,” nor did anyone push me to pick up and leave across the country for that promotion.
Dramatic decisions create dramatic lives. It doesn’t just happen to people who are “not about the drama.” If truly, I wasn’t; it would have shown. It showed in my professional life because it was the one area of my life I couldn’t isolate from. Many people suffering from complex ptsd can separate themselves from personal relationships, and we do, even if it's for a short while, but rarely can we stop earning money to make a living. If your professional life is filled with drama or the entire experience can be described as tumultuous and rocky, it will continue to cost you in the most frustrating way until healing from your childhood trauma becomes your number one priority.
Are we running back to our trauma?
Survivors of long-term childhood trauma indeed find themselves in traumatic situations as adults. We continue to recreate the trauma we left behind by responding to the world from a traumatized identity.
“Scared animals return home, regardless of whether the home is safe or frightening.” In the book “The Body Keeps the Score,” Bessel van der Kolk writes, “further animal studies involving mice, rats, cats, monkeys, and elephants brought more intriguing data. For example, when researchers played a loud, intrusive sound, mice that had been raised in a warm nest with plenty of food scurried home immediately. But another group, raised in a noisy nest with scarce food supplies, also ran for home, even after spending time in more pleasant surroundings” (The Body Keeps the Score, page 31).
We tend to run back towards what’s familiar to us, our home base, regardless of the abusive and neglectful upbringing. We do this by unconsciously choosing the people, the job, and the decisions we’re comfortable navigating through. For people with a long history of trauma, we go for the people, employment opportunities, and decisions that closely resemble our traumatic experience because we know what to expect.
Luckily, we’re not mice; we can become conscious of our trauma responses and identify patterns that don’t serve us.
The first step to healing is always education. You must know what’s wrong, how, when, and where it all went south before assigning a remedy. Once you arrive there, the avenues for recovery and eventually mastery over one’s life are endless. Healing begins on the inside and will show on the outside, your career health included.
So don’t delay. Reach out for help and start educating yourself on cptsd. Your next career move might turn out differently!
Wishing you continued recovery and a beautiful, stable career path,
Nari