When CPTSD Makes You Question Everything, Including Your Career| Newsletter #4

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When CPTSD Makes You Question Everything, Including Your Career| Newsletter #4

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Last week I had a discovery call with a man who has spent almost three decades in the financial sector. He's the kind of person people trust in a room. Steady. Reliable. The one everyone assumes has it together.He was diagnosed with CPTSD last year.He told me that in the months since, nothing has felt safe. Not the people he works with, not the meetings he used to walk into without a second thought, not even his own reactions. He’s found himself questioning everything he thought he knew about himself. The way he reacts to feedback. The way he reads people. The way he’s built his entire career on staying in control. All of it suddenly looked different to him, like he was seeing his own life from outside of it for the first time.Here’s what he described, and what I hear so often from people in the early days of a CPTSD diagnosis.Suddenly, everyone feels like a threat. Not because anything around him actually changed, but because his nervous system is finally being honest about how much it’s been protecting him, for how long, from how far back. A coworker’s tone in a meeting. A boss’s silence after he speaks. Things that used to roll off him now land like something is wrong, something is dangerous, even when he knows, logically, that it isn’t.That’s a dysregulated nervous system at work, and it’s showing up for him in ways I recognize from so many conversations like this one.Common Workplace Struggles for Trauma Survivors:* A hyperactive threat-detection system that reads colleagues and leaders as adversaries, even when no real threat is present* A running fear about job security, about losing the income and stability built over years of hard work* The daily exhaustion of managing an internal alarm just to keep functioning* Defensiveness that others perceive as overreacting, while it feels like a necessary safety response from the inside* Performing well on the outside while feeling like everything is falling apart on the inside* A pull between ambition and the need to heal, unsure how to hold both at once* Not feeling safe naming any of this at work, even in cultures that claim to value mental health* A workplace moment reopening something much older, making ordinary stress feel exponentially heavier* Hypervigilance that makes even routine, safe situations feel like something is about to go wrongDo any of these sound familiar to you? They do to me, because I experienced the same things.He has done what many of us do when we get this diagnosis…we research the heck out of it. We do a deep dive on Google, YouTube, Discussion Forums, Podcasts, and so, so many books.I did the same thing, because I felt compelled to figure out “what was wrong with me and how to fix it.” Can anyone relate to that? Of course, you can.The first couple of years on the CPTSD healing journey are the hardest and most vulnerable, because you have all the emotions and very inadequate coping strategies.If you find yourself on this healing journey, I want you to know that you are not alone. You are really in good company, with over 80% of the workforce experiencing trauma at one point in their life.Regulation is the FoundationAs someone who has walked this journey myself, and walked alongside countless other survivors, the first order of business is to get your nervous system regulated, because the rest of your healing journey is based on this foundation.To help with this, I created a FREE tool called “The Workplace Trigger Tracker Toolkit”. It is a template you can use to create awareness of the workplace situations and scenarios where you are triggered, what set it off, and the intensity. Additionally, there is a picklist of coping strategies you can choose from to address the triggers. Almost 2K subscribers have requested this tool to help them in the workplace.You can get yours for FREE here:🌱 Become GroundedPattern PivotsIs this fire, or is this toast?Years ago, I set off my own smoke alarm making toast.Not burnt toast. Slightly golden, barely-there toast.The alarm didn’t know the difference. It just knew smoke, and smoke means danger, so it screamed the same way it would if the whole kitchen were on fire.That’s what a dysregulated nervous system does at work.You think the alarm is telling you:* “That email was hostile.”* “She’s building a case against you.”* “This meeting is a threat.”* “You need to defend yourself right now.”Oftentimes, the alarm isn’t reading the room. It’s reading old smoke from a fire that happened somewhere else, a long time ago.Let’s imagine you get a slightly terse Slack message and your whole body goes on alert before your eyes even finish reading it. How much of that reaction actually belongs to the message?Listen, you don’t need to silence the alarm. Silencing it isn’t the goal.The win is when you can hear it going off and ask, “Is there fire, or is there toast?”The win is catching the half-second between the alarm and the reaction.The win...

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