How do I NOT recreate my own personal trauma in my work life?
How do I NOT recreate my own personal trauma in my work life?
Driven Women & Perfectionism • July 23, 2023
SUMMARY
You might be unknowingly replaying painful relational patterns from your past in your work life, causing stress and emotional overwhelm that feels both familiar and harmful without your conscious awareness. Trauma isn’t defined by the event itself but by your personal experience of feeling overwhelmed and unable to cope, which means your work environment can become traumatic if your internal and external supports aren’t strong enough.
Trauma is any event, series of events, or ongoing situation that you experience as overwhelmingly harmful or threatening—so much so that it exceeds your ability to cope effectively in that moment. It’s not about what others might think is traumatic or about experiencing dramatic events alone; trauma is defined by your personal emotional and mental experience of overwhelm. This matters deeply because your work life can trigger these overwhelming feelings without obvious cause, leaving you emotionally stuck or reactive in ways that feel confusing or unfair. Recognizing trauma as your unique experience of overwhelm allows you to approach your work struggles with curiosity instead of judgment, setting the stage for real healing and change.
You might be unknowingly replaying painful relational patterns from your past in your work life, causing stress and emotional overwhelm that feels both familiar and harmful without your conscious awareness.
Trauma isn’t defined by the event itself but by your personal experience of feeling overwhelmed and unable to cope, which means your work environment can become traumatic if your internal and external supports aren’t strong enough.
To stop retraumatizing yourself at work, you need to move beyond just noticing these patterns and actively increase your support systems and strategies, so you can metabolize difficult experiences instead of letting them embed as harmful, unconscious responses.
Two weeks ago, I shared the first in this two-part essay series: “Am I recreating my trauma in my work life?”
SUMMARY
Once you recognize that you’ve been recreating relational trauma dynamics at work, the natural question becomes: how do I stop? This post moves from awareness into action — offering concrete strategies for interrupting the unconscious patterns that turn your professional life into a replay of your personal history.
Today, I want to share the second half of mythoughts with you.
And to be clear, this essay could be titled “How do I not traumatize myself at work (period)?” vs recreating our trauma.
The thoughts, tips, and inquiries I’ll share below could be salient for anyone, regardless of whether or not they come from a relational trauma history.
A recap on what can make our work life traumatic.
DEFINITION RELATIONAL TRAUMA
Relational trauma refers to psychological injury that occurs within the context of important relationships, particularly those with primary caregivers during childhood. Unlike single-incident trauma, relational trauma involves repeated experiences of emotional neglect, inconsistency, manipulation, or abuse within bonds where safety and trust should have been foundational.
Definition
Trauma Repetition in the Workplace: Trauma repetition compulsion is the unconscious tendency to recreate familiar relational dynamics — even painful or dysfunctional ones — in adult life. This pattern, first described by Freud and refined in modern trauma research, often plays out in workplaces, friendships, and romantic relationships.
As I mentioned several weeks ago, the definition of what makes something traumatic – whether at work or in any other sphere of our life – is highly subjective.
As a trauma therapist, the way I define trauma is this:
“Trauma can be an event, series of events, or prolonged circumstances that are subjectively experienced by the individual who goesthrough it as physically, mentally, and emotionally harmful and/or life-threatening and that overwhelms this individual’s ability to effectively cope with what they went through.”
For me, the emphasis is on that specific part: “that overwhelms this individual’s ability to effectively cope with what they went through.”
Therefore, when we have adequate internal and external support, we don’t overwhelm ourselves, and/or we reduce the opportunity for potentially traumatic overwhelm.
Moreover, we increase the odds that we can properly metabolize and digest the overwhelming experiences so they don’t lodge in our nervous systems and neural pathways as traumatic responses, allowing us to respond more functionally and adaptively to the situation(s).
So, in essence, one of the primary ways we can avoid recreating our trauma history (or traumatizing ourselves, period) in our work lives involves increasing our support.
But how can we increase our support?
Increasing your support is critical to avoiding trauma in your work life.
TAKE THE QUIZ
What’s driving your relational patterns?
A 3-minute assessment to identify the core wound beneath your relationship struggles.
When it comes to increasing the support in our lives to avoid recreating (or creating for the first time) trauma, we can imagine the following will be helpful:
YOU are the most important asset in your work life.
So take care of yourself.
Sleep, nutrition, exercise, regular medical appointments, whatever it means and looks like for you to take great care of your basic biological needs to show up consistently and be well-resourced for your work life.
And taking care of yourself and cultivating great internal support can and should also mean doing your own personal psychological work.
Develop great internal support by tending to your physiology and psychology to show up well-resourced for your work life.
And often, in pursuit of cultivating these internal supports, you may need and want to develop great external supports to help you do so.
2) Develop great external supports.
Again, part of what can lead to childhood trauma (or adult trauma) is not only the absence of internal support to cope with what happened but also the absence of external support to help us cope with what happened/is happening.
Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
FREE GUIDE
A Reason to Keep Going
25 pages of what I actually say to clients when they are in the dark. Somatic tools, cognitive anchors, and 40 grounded, honest reasons to stay. No platitudes.
>
Take this 5-minute, 25-question quiz to find out — and learn what to do next if you do.
START THE QUIZ
(function() { var qs,js,q,s,d=document, gi=d.getElementById, ce=d.createElement, gt=d.getElementsByTagName, id=”typef_orm_share”, b=”https://embed.typeform.com/”; if(!gi.call(d,id)){ js=ce.call(d,”script”); js.id=id; js.src=b+”embed.js”; q=gt.call(d,”script”)[0]; q.parentNode.insertBefore(js,q) } })()
If a parent is the abuser of a child and that child has no one to turn to for emotional support, that’s one example of a lack of external support.
If a young girl experiences abuse from her church community and the entire church community blames her and fails to support her, that’s another example of a lack of external support.
Whether you’re a child or an adult, all of us crave and need external support to help us process and move through the challenging experiences of life (and our work life).
So develop your “team” of external supports as a key strategy to avoid recreating trauma in your work life. Seek out a therapist. Look for an executive coach. Find great legal counsel. Line up a solid financial team. Pursue generous and equitable peer groups. Seek out a mentor. Join a church or spiritual groups that nourish you.
Now, a caveat and a very quick word about seeking out a therapist vs. a coach or business mentor:
By all means, trust your intuition and seek out who you truly believe will be the best fit for you but also remember that the work of therapists vs. coaches can be summarized like this:
Therapists actually have the tools and training to address any cracks in the proverbial psychological foundation that needs to be repaired whereas coaches are only equipped to deal with further building upon a firm, non-faulty foundation.
A well-trained trauma therapist can, of course, be one of your key external supports, but they can also help you develop those above-mentioned internal supports and provide evidence-based treatment to help process any memories, triggers, maladaptive beliefs, and behaviors triggered by your work life.
3) And finally, to not recreate your trauma in your work life, question anything that would harm or fail to support “the little ones inside.”
Admittedly, this is my most esoteric point in the essay.
And to be clear, I’m an Ivy League graduate, a New Englander, and a trauma-trained clinician with a skill set grounded in evidence-based interventions.
But still, there’s this other piece of me, the part that’s lived in Northern California for 17 years, the part that feels connected to her soul, and the that is a mom that wants us all to think very deeply about this piece, too:
Question anything or anyone that would harm or fail to support “the little ones inside.”
What do I mean by this?
Business and work – as with any other social, structural system in the world – has been historically Patriarchal, Racist, and Capitalistic.
These are forces that have shaped the modern business world and that most traditional business advice stems from (think profits above people, bigger margins at all cost, more is better, grind hard now so you can rest later, and other messages that tend to sacrifice self and others for traditional markers of “success.”)
So my last piece of advice speaks to being wary when we do seek out external support and attempt to cultivate internal support.
Be mindful of the place where guidance, advice, or attempt to soothe and support is rooted in.
“aw-pull-quote”
Ask yourself: Does this advice, guidance, and support feel good to the 4-year-old in me? The 8-year-old in me? The 12-year-old in me?
Be mindful that as you seek out support to help you avoid recreating your trauma in your work life that much business advice may be well-intentioned but accidentally retraumatizing.
And tying this all together – the more you get comfortable questioning what would harm or fail the little ones inside, the more you develop those internal supports I mentioned above.
Remember: no one is the expert of your experience except for you, so please question the kind of guidance you receive through the filter of what would harm or fail to support “the little ones inside” of you.
So, how do you increase self-awareness and be curious about what your work life is reflecting back to you?
Before I explore what it means and may look like to increase your self-awareness and be curious about what your work life is reflecting back to you, I want first to reframe what a wonderful opportunity work provides all of us with.
Work, for most of us, is where we spend the bulk of our hours and life energy.
There is ample “grist for the mill,” so to speak if we pay attention to our relationship to work and what gets triggered in us at work.
What in my work life feels hard, wrong, and familiar but not necessarily functional?
How am I showing up in my work life, in my role, in a way that feels like an extension of the role I played early on in my family? For example: Sacrificing myself first for others? Going it alone versus asking for support? Fearing that I can’t trust anyone?
How’s this – the ways that I’m showing up – working out for me?
What’s the likely outcome if I keep playing out this familiar role? Doing this same dance? Staying locked into those same patterns?
What and who did I not have back then that I could give myself now that would help me?
How can I show up for myself with different, more functional, and adaptive beliefs and behaviors in my work life now?
What would that take? What would be possible if I gave myself more support and used work as a laboratory to change my patterns consciously?
Sit with these questions. Journal about them. Bring them to your therapist for exploration and conversation. See what comes up for you.
Transforming Work From Trauma Recreation to Healing Laboratory
When your work environment triggers feel suspiciously familiar—like you’re replaying childhood dynamics with different actors—mental health support becomes essential for transforming workplace trauma into healing opportunities.
Research shows that individuals who experience workplace triggers often develop physical symptoms (chronic headaches, digestive issues, insomnia) that mirror post-traumatic stress disorder responses, especially when current work situations echo earlier traumatic events.
A skilled trauma therapist helps you recognize how seemingly normal workplace dynamics can activate old survival patterns, understanding that what presents as work stress might actually be complex trauma manifesting in professional settings.
The therapeutic work addresses both immediate workplace trauma and its long-term impact on your nervous system. Your therapist can help you navigate employee assistance programs effectively, distinguishing between generic workplace wellness offerings and the specialized trauma treatment you might need.
Through therapy, you learn to identify which form of workplace stress is normal pressure versus trauma recreation—does this deadline panic feel proportionate, or does it echo childhood experiences of never being good enough? Understanding workaholism and ambition as it relates to relational trauma reveals how professional drive often masks unprocessed pain, with the work environment becoming a stage for replaying unfinished emotional business.
In session, you explore how posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms manifest specifically in professional contexts: hypervigilance during meetings, dissociation during conflict, or physical symptoms before presentations that seem disproportionate to actual threat. Research shows that workplace healing happens when mental health support directly addresses the intersection of past trauma and present triggers.
Your trauma informed therapist helps you recognize when you experience workplace situations through a trauma lens versus responding from your resourced adult self. With consistent therapeutic support, even a challenging work environment becomes a laboratory for practicing new responses—learning that asking for help doesn’t mean abandonment, that conflict doesn’t mean danger, and that your worth exists independent of productivity.
This isn’t about eliminating all workplace stress but developing capacity to distinguish between normal challenges and trauma responses that need therapeutic attention or other forms of health care.
Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.
Warmly,
Annie
Free Quiz
What’s Running Your Life?
The invisible patterns you can’t outwork…
Your LinkedIn profile tells one story. Your 3 AM thoughts tell another. This quiz reveals the childhood patterns keeping you running — and why enough is never enough.
). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. International Psycho-Analytical Library.American Psychiatric Association (
). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (
th ed.). American Psychiatric Publishing.van der Kolk, B. A. (
). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.Walker, M. P. (
). Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Scribner.Gross, J. J. (
). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology.Bowlby, J. (
). A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Basic Books.Norcross, J. C., &#
Why do I keep finding myself in similar stressful work situations, even when I try to avoid them?
It’s common for unresolved past traumas to unconsciously influence our choices and reactions in the present, leading us to recreate familiar, albeit painful, dynamics. Recognizing these patterns is the first crucial step towards breaking the cycle and fostering healthier professional environments.
I’m a high-achiever, but I often feel overwhelmed and burnt out. Is this related to my past trauma?
Yes, for many driven, ambitious women, a drive for perfection or over-responsibility can stem from early experiences of neglect or needing to earn validation. This often leads to chronic stress and burnout, as you constantly push yourself beyond sustainable limits. Learning to identify these underlying motivations can help you cultivate a more balanced and compassionate approach to your work.
How can I set healthy boundaries at work without feeling guilty or fearing negative consequences?
Setting boundaries can feel incredibly challenging, especially if your past trauma taught you that your needs don’t matter or that saying ‘no’ leads to abandonment. Start by practicing small boundaries in low-stakes situations to build confidence. Remember, healthy boundaries protect your energy and well-being, ultimately making you more effective and resilient.
What does it mean if certain workplace interactions trigger intense emotional reactions in me?
When workplace interactions evoke strong, disproportionate emotional responses, it’s often a sign that they are touching upon unhealed wounds from your past. These ‘triggers’ are not a weakness, but rather an opportunity to understand and address the underlying trauma. Seeking support to process these reactions can help you respond more consciously rather than reactively.
Is it possible to heal from relational trauma and childhood emotional neglect while still maintaining my demanding career?
Absolutely. Healing is a journey that can happen alongside your professional life, not separate from it. By integrating trauma-informed practices into your daily routine and seeking appropriate support, you can learn to manage triggers, build resilience, and create a work life that feels empowering rather than depleting. It’s about transforming your relationship with yourself and your work.
Further Reading on Relational Trauma
Explore Annie’s clinical writing on relational trauma recovery.
The Sunday conversation you wished you’d had years earlier.
Weekly essays, practice guides, and workbooks for driven women whose lives look great on paper — and feel heavy behind the scenes. Free to start. 20,000+ subscribers.
Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
25 pages of what I actually say to clients when they are in the dark. Somatic tools, cognitive anchors, and 40 grounded, honest reasons to stay. No platitudes.
What would it mean to finally have the right support?
A complimentary consultation to discuss what you are navigating and whether working together makes sense.
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist, relational trauma specialist, and the founder and successfully exited CEO of a large California trauma-informed therapy center. A W.W. Norton published author, she writes the weekly Substack Strong & Stable and her work and expert opinions have appeared in NPR, NBC, Forbes, Business Insider, The Boston Globe, and The Information.
Coaches build upon solid foundations—they're equipped for strategy, goals, and performance optimization. Therapists repair cracks in the foundation itself, addressing trauma responses, maladaptive beliefs, and nervous system dysregulation. If you suspect childhood trauma influences your work patterns, start with a trauma therapist who can do the foundational repair work that makes coaching actually effective.
Notice what feels familiar but dysfunctional: sacrificing yourself first, going it alone instead of asking for help, or playing the same family role (overachiever, peacemaker, scapegoat) in your workplace. If your stress responses feel disproportionate to actual threats, or if work triggers feel eerily similar to childhood dynamics, you're likely recreating patterns rather than experiencing normal workplace stress.
It means filtering advice through your body's wisdom—does this guidance feel safe to your inner four-year-old, eight-year-old, twelve-year-old? Traditional business advice often glorifies self-sacrifice, endless grinding, and profits over wellbeing. If advice makes your younger self feel exploited, unsafe, or unseen, it's likely rooted in the same systems that created your original trauma.
Work genuinely offers opportunities for reparative experiences—but only with adequate support. When you have therapeutic backing and conscious awareness, workplace triggers become chances to practice new responses, challenge old patterns, and experience different outcomes than childhood provided. Without support, work just retraumatizes; with support, it becomes transformative.
Start with one—preferably a trauma therapist who can help you build internal resources first. Many therapists offer sliding scales, and some workplace benefits cover therapy. As you develop better boundaries and emotional regulation, you'll make better decisions about which additional supports are essential versus optional, and you'll have more capacity to seek affordable options.
What's Running Your Life?
The invisible patterns you can’t outwork…
Your LinkedIn profile tells one story. Your 3 AM thoughts tell another. If vacation makes you anxious, if praise feels hollow, if you’re planning your next move before finishing the current one—you’re not alone. And you’re *not* broken.
This quiz reveals the invisible patterns from childhood that keep you running. Why enough is never enough. Why success doesn’t equal satisfaction. Why rest feels like risk.
Five minutes to understand what’s really underneath that exhausting, constant drive.
“You can outrun your past with achievement for only so long before it catches up with you. Strong & Stable is the conversation that helps you stop running.”
— Annie Wright, LMFT
×
Strong & Stable — Annie Wright, LMFT
Does your resume look better than your life actually feels?
You wake at 3 a.m. You manage everyone else’s crises. You’ve built something real — and underneath, the foundation isn’t stable.
Join 20,000+ driven women reading weekly essays on why rest feels like risk — and how to finally change that.
