Am I Recreating My Trauma in My Work Life?

TRAUMA & WORK • March 2026

Elena is 37, a physician, and she’s sitting in her fourth meeting this week with the same supervisor — the one who cuts her off mid-sentence, dismisses her clinical suggestions, and somehow always leaves her wondering if she’s the problem. As the meeting ends and she walks down the corridor, she notices it: a familiar tightening in her chest, a hollowing just beneath her sternum. She’s felt this before. Not at work. At her father’s dinner table, where her ideas were routinely talked over, where being smart wasn’t quite enough, where love came with conditions she could never quite meet.

She stops at the water fountain. Takes a breath. A thought surfaces that she’s had before but never quite let herself follow all the way through: Am I doing this again?

If you’ve had a version of that thought — if you’ve looked around at your workplace and felt the unsettling déjà vu of a dynamic you thought you’d left behind — this post is for you. We’re going to look at what it means to recreate trauma at work, why driven women are especially susceptible, and what it actually takes to break the pattern.

What Does “Recreating Trauma” at Work Mean?

The contemporary understanding of repetition compulsion goes much deeper than Freudian theory. What we now know — thanks to decades of trauma research — is that the nervous system doesn’t simply remember trauma intellectually. It encodes it somatically, relationally, and procedurally. The body holds a blueprint of what relationships feel like, what safety feels like, what authority feels like. And it navigates toward the familiar, even when the familiar is painful.

Think of it like a compass that was calibrated in a chaotic magnetic field. It still points — it just doesn’t always point north.

In the workplace, this manifests in ways that can be genuinely confusing. You’re a competent, perceptive professional. You know, on an intellectual level, that your boss is critical and dismissive. You know the environment is unsupportive. And yet something keeps you tethered there — or keeps pulling you toward the same kind of dynamic at the next job, and the one after that. That’s not weakness. That’s the nervous system doing exactly what it was shaped to do. It’s the same mechanism at work in betrayal trauma — the body seeking the familiar even when the familiar was harmful.

The Science Behind Traumatic Reenactment

The research on this is substantial, and it spans psychiatry, neuroscience, and somatic therapy. Here’s what the leading voices in trauma have found.

Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and author of the foundational text Trauma and Recovery, wrote extensively about traumatic reenactment — the way survivors don’t just remember their trauma, but unconsciously repeat its relational structure. In her clinical observations, survivors frequently recreated scenarios involving powerlessness and rescue, victimization and control, even when doing so caused them harm. Herman understood this not as self-destructiveness, but as an attempt at mastery — an unconscious effort to finally get it right, to finally get a different outcome.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist at Boston University and founder of the Trauma Research Foundation, built on this in landmark ways. Van der Kolk’s research showed that the body itself drives the compulsion to return to traumatic scenarios. In his model, unresolved trauma creates what he calls “unfinished business” — incomplete physiological responses (fight, flight, freeze) that never reached resolution. The organism returns to similar situations in an effort to complete what was never completed. His work makes clear that trauma reenactment isn’t a failure of cognition — you can intellectually know better and still be pulled back. The pull happens in the brainstem and the body, not the prefrontal cortex.

Pete Walker, MFT, therapist and author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, brought particular clarity to one specific pattern relevant to driven women: the fawn response. Walker’s work expanded the classic trauma response taxonomy beyond fight/flight/freeze to include fawn — the habituated response of appeasing, pleasing, and accommodating authority figures as a survival strategy. For women who grew up in environments where making themselves agreeable was the path to safety or love, fawning becomes automatic. At work, it looks like over-accommodation, compulsive people-pleasing with supervisors, and an inability to advocate for oneself even when the professional stakes are high.

Together, these three bodies of work paint a coherent picture: trauma reenactment is not a choice, it’s not a character flaw, and it’s not something you can think your way out of through willpower alone. It requires a more integrated kind of healing. This is often rooted in developmental trauma — the foundational injuries that were installed before you had any tools to evaluate or resist them.

How Trauma Recreates Itself at Work in Driven Women

Back to Elena. After that moment at the water fountain, she starts paying attention. She realizes that this isn’t the first critical supervisor she’s had — it’s the third. She also notices that she consistently volunteers for the most grueling cases, stays late when no one asks her to, and feels genuine anxiety on the rare occasions when her supervisor says something positive. Praise doesn’t land; criticism does. The criticism feels real. The praise feels like a trap.

This kind of pattern has a texture that’s recognizable once you know what to look for. Here are five of the most common ways that childhood relational trauma recreates itself in professional settings for driven women.

1. Gravitating toward critical or dismissive authority figures. The pull here is subtle and often mistaken for ambition or high standards. Women who grew up earning love from a parent who was hard to please often interpret critical bosses as “demanding but worth it” — as the person who will finally confirm their worth if they just work hard enough. The dynamic replicates the original wounding relationship almost perfectly. And like the original relationship, the confirmation rarely comes. If the original critical authority was a narcissistic parent, this pull can be even more pronounced — the nervous system has been trained to seek approval from exactly the type of person least capable of providing it.

2. Over-functioning to earn approval. If you’re the person who takes on extra projects without being asked, who never says no to a request from leadership, who feels vaguely guilty when you leave at the end of the day — this may be less about professionalism and more about survival patterning. Over-functioning is a learned response to environments where love or safety was conditional on performance. At work, it looks like impressive dedication. Inside, it often feels like running on a treadmill that never stops. This is a form of what gets described in workaholism rooted in relational trauma — the use of achievement to outrun the underlying anxiety about worth.

3. Fawning under authority. Pete Walker’s work is particularly illuminating here. In meetings with supervisors or senior leaders, do you find yourself agreeing with things you don’t agree with? Editing yourself heavily before speaking? Feeling a wave of relief when the authority figure in the room seems pleased, and a wash of anxiety when they seem even mildly irritated? That’s fawn. It kept you safe once. At work, it keeps you small.

4. Tolerating mistreatment that others leave. This one is hard to name because it often comes wrapped in justifications: Every job has difficult people. This is just how medicine works. I’ve worked too hard to walk away now. But there’s a difference between tolerating normal professional friction and habituating to treatment that’s genuinely demeaning. Women who grew up in environments where their discomfort was consistently minimized often lose access to the internal signal that says: this isn’t okay. Their threshold for what’s tolerable has been recalibrated from the outside. This is closely related to the experience described in childhood emotional neglect — the disappearance of the internal compass that tracks one’s own needs.

5. Finding “home” in chaos or high-conflict environments. Some driven women don’t just tolerate high-conflict workplaces — they seek them out, and feel oddly understimulated in calmer ones. If you grew up in a household where emotional intensity was the norm, calm can feel like boredom. Conflict can feel like connection. The adrenaline of a dysfunctional system can feel like being alive. When a healthier workplace comes along, it can feel wrong in a way that’s hard to articulate — even as every rational part of you knows it’s better.

Marion Woodman was writing about a particular kind of feminine exhaustion — the kind that comes not from laziness or lack of discipline, but from pouring oneself into a system of achievement that was never really built for nourishment. She understood that the relentless striving of driven women often has roots that go deeper than ambition. It has roots in what was required for safety. The curse of competency is real — and it’s often installed long before the professional context where it becomes most visible.

The Both/And of Workplace Trauma Reenactment

Priya is 42, a partner at a mid-size law firm, and she came to therapy after what she described as “finally running out of road.” She’d left a previous firm after six years of working for a managing partner who berated associates in public, who called her “too sensitive” when she objected, and who she’d told herself was “just old-school.” She joined a new firm specifically because it had a reputation for a healthier culture. Within eighteen months, she’d found the one partner in the building who reminded her of the last one.

When she told me this story, her voice had the flattened tone of someone who’d been defeated — not by her latest boss, but by herself. By the feeling that no matter where she went, she recreated the same thing.

Here’s what I want to say directly to Priya, and to you if this resonates: this pattern is not your fault. Full stop.

The nervous system doesn’t choose trauma. It doesn’t choose the blueprint it was built around. The wounding that shaped your relational template happened when you were young and had no power to refuse it, metabolize it, or even fully name it. You didn’t ask for any of this. The reenactment isn’t evidence of weakness or self-sabotage. It’s evidence of adaptation — of a system that learned to navigate the environment it was given.

And: you are also the only one who can change it.

This is the both/and that matters. The pattern isn’t your fault, and it is your responsibility. Not because you’re to blame for it, but because no one else can do the healing for you. Priya couldn’t change her managing partner. She couldn’t change the firm’s culture, or the way power tends to corrupt in hierarchical systems, or the fact that some workplaces genuinely replicate toxic family dynamics at an organizational level. But she could change her nervous system’s relationship to authority. She could learn to recognize the pull before it pulled her under. She could develop the internal scaffolding to tolerate healthy dynamics even when they felt uncomfortable and unfamiliar.

That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole thing. And it begins, usually, with understanding the original wounding — whether that’s rooted in developmental trauma, intergenerational patterns, or the specific legacy of growing up with a narcissistic parent.

The Systemic Lens: Workplaces That Replicate Family Dynamics

It would be incomplete to talk about workplace trauma reenactment without naming something clearly: some workplaces are genuinely traumatizing, and some organizational structures are designed — consciously or not — in ways that replicate dysfunctional family dynamics at scale.

Hierarchical organizations with opaque decision-making and low psychological safety create conditions that are structurally similar to households where children had no voice. Rules are made by people in power and applied without explanation. Dissent is unwelcome or actively punished. The emotional temperature of the entire environment is set by whoever is at the top — and everyone else learns to read that temperature as a survival skill. Sound familiar?

Many institutions — law firms, medical systems, academia, financial services — have cultures that explicitly or implicitly reward fawning. They promote those who defer, who don’t challenge, who make authority feel comfortable. They punish those who dissent, even when the dissent is clinically sound or strategically correct. When an organization’s reward structure maps onto a fawn response, it actively selects for the very patterns that trauma instills. For women who already have trauma histories, these environments aren’t just difficult. They’re activating in a very specific way.

There’s also the question of the boss as a parental figure in the unconscious. This isn’t metaphorical — it’s structural. Authority figures in the workplace occupy a relational position that maps, at a deep neural level, onto the positions parents held in childhood. They have power over your livelihood, your professional development, your sense of being seen and valued. They can reward or withhold. They can acknowledge your worth or deny it. The unconscious doesn’t fully distinguish between a supervisor and a parent; it uses the same relational template for both. Which means that unresolved dynamics with primary caregivers will almost inevitably surface in the context of professional authority.

This doesn’t mean every boss is a stand-in for your mother. It means the nervous system uses what it knows. And for women with relational trauma histories, what it knows is a particular kind of authority — conditional, unpredictable, or dismissive — that it will recognize and respond to before the conscious mind has time to intervene.

It’s also worth naming a gender dimension here. Women in many professional environments have less institutional protection when they advocate for themselves, receive more scrutiny for displays of emotion or assertiveness, and face structural barriers that mean the consequences of stepping out of the fawn response are objectively higher. The workplace trauma reenactment isn’t only individual — it’s happening within an institutional context that shapes what options are genuinely available. The relationship between ambition, relational trauma, and overwork in women is partly individual psychology and partly a response to systems that were never designed with women’s full humanity in mind.

How to Stop Recreating the Pattern

The good news — and there is real, substantial good news here — is that the nervous system is not fixed. Neuroplasticity means that the relational templates built in childhood can be updated. They can’t be deleted, exactly; the old patterns remain encoded. But they can be joined by new ones. New experiences of safety, of being seen without conditions, of tolerating healthy authority — these don’t erase the old map, but they add new territory to it. Over time, the new map becomes the one you navigate from.

Here are five approaches that genuinely help.

1. Trauma-informed therapy. This is foundational, and it’s different from general talk therapy. A trauma-informed therapist understands that the patterns you’re working with aren’t primarily cognitive — they’re somatic, relational, and encoded at the level of the nervous system. They won’t just help you understand why you do what you do; they’ll help you actually change the underlying physiology. Approaches like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), trauma-focused CBT, and somatic experiencing have substantial evidence bases for processing the relational wounds that drive reenactment. If you’re wondering what this kind of work looks like, exploring individual therapy with a trauma-specialized clinician is the most important first step.

2. Internal Family Systems (IFS). Developed by Richard Schwartz, IFS is a model that works with the different “parts” of the self — including the parts that run protective patterns like over-functioning, fawning, and conflict-seeking. IFS is particularly useful for workplace reenactment because it doesn’t pathologize these parts. The fawn part isn’t the enemy; it’s a very young, very loyal part that learned to protect you when you needed protecting. IFS therapy helps you build a relationship with these parts so they can gradually relax their grip and allow you more choice in how you respond.

3. Somatic awareness at work. You don’t have to be in a therapy session to begin noticing the body’s signals. The tightening in Elena’s chest — that’s data. That contraction is the nervous system registering something familiar and threatening. Learning to track somatic responses in real time at work creates a gap between stimulus and response that didn’t exist before. You notice the contraction. You take a breath. You ask yourself: What just happened? What did that remind me of? Over time, this practice builds what therapists call “window of tolerance” — the capacity to stay regulated even in activating environments.

4. Building a corrective emotional experience. This term, coined by Franz Alexander and elaborated by many clinicians since, refers to an experience with an authority figure or caregiver that directly contradicts the old relational template. In therapy, the therapeutic relationship itself can provide this — a consistent, safe, non-conditional relationship with someone in a role that previously signified threat. Outside of therapy, this can happen with mentors, with supervisors who are genuinely supportive, or even within peer relationships. The corrective experience doesn’t undo the old template, but it provides neurological evidence that not all authority means threat. That evidence accumulates.

5. Learning to tolerate the discomfort of healthy dynamics. This one is counterintuitive and often underestimated. For many women with trauma histories, healthy workplace dynamics feel wrong at first. They feel too quiet, too uncomplicated, too good to be true. The absence of the familiar tension can register as boredom, as distrust, even as evidence that something bad is coming. Learning to sit in that discomfort — to let the unfamiliar become familiar without fleeing back to what you know — is its own kind of therapeutic work. It requires tolerating the anxiety of not-yet-knowing, of waiting for the dynamic to prove itself rather than assuming the worst. Over time, healthy becomes familiar, and familiar stops feeling like a threat.

Nadia, a 39-year-old marketing executive, describes the moment this shift began for her as almost anticlimactic: “I got a new manager who was just… fine. Supportive, clear, consistent. And I spent the first three months waiting for the other shoe to drop. I kept thinking: this can’t be right. Something’s coming. And slowly I realized — nothing was coming. This is just what a normal work environment feels like. And I’d never been in one.”

That recognition — that what you’d always experienced as normal was actually exceptional and damaging, and that something different is possible — is often the turning point. You don’t have to be entirely healed to begin behaving differently. You just have to be willing to stay in the discomfort of healthy long enough for your nervous system to catch up.

If you’ve read this far, there’s something in these patterns that you recognized. That recognition is not a small thing — for many women, it takes years to see clearly what’s been happening, to stop blaming themselves entirely or explaining it away entirely, and to arrive at the more nuanced truth: that something shaped you, and that shaping is showing up at work, and that it’s possible to change.

You didn’t choose the original wound. You didn’t choose the blueprint your nervous system built around it. And you’re also not stuck with it forever. The work is real and sometimes it’s slow and it often asks you to tolerate discomfort in places you’d rather be numb. But the women I see do this work — really do it, not just intellectually understand it — come out the other side with something that can’t be taken away: a relationship with themselves that doesn’t depend on whether their supervisor had a good day.

That’s worth working for.

Medical Disclaimer