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

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

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.

1. A recap on what can make our work life traumatic.
2. Increasing your support is critical to avoiding trauma in your work life.
3. Be mindful of the place where guidance, advice, or attempt to soothe and support is rooted in.
4. So, how do you increase self-awareness and be curious about what your work life is reflecting back to you?
5. You can start by asking yourself the following:
6. Transforming Work From Trauma Recreation to Healing Laboratory

Two weeks ago, I shared the first in this two-part essay series: “Am I recreating my trauma in my work life?”

Today, I want to share the second half of my thoughts 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.

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 goes through 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.

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:

1) First, develop great internal support.

What does this mean?

I always think of it this way – “don’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg” (aka short-sighted destruction of the most valuable resource). 

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 better emotional regulation skills. 

Related reading: What does it mean to be an ambitious, upwardly mobile woman from a relational trauma background?

Learn to feel your feelings and use them for their signal value.  

Explore your maladaptive beliefs and behaviors. 

Cultivate better adaptive beliefs and behaviors. 

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. 

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.

So if you come from a trauma background or suspect you might have cracks in your proverbial psychological foundation, consider seeking out a trauma therapist specifically above and beyond any coaching you do.

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.

Related reading: Attachment Trauma: How Early Relationships Shape Your Adult Connections

I’m grounded in the pragmatic and the proven.

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.

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.

Related reading: Trauma and Relationships: When Your Professional Strengths Become Your Relationship Blindspots

But this opportunity only exists if we’re being mindful.

Mindful of work as a mirror for our own personal patterns, our triggers, and our growth edges.

With increased mindfulness, we can use our work lives as a laboratory to do the deep repairing work needed for our personal psychological histories.

It’s a beautiful opportunity (and, let’s face it, it can also be an AFGO, too).

So how do you bring that self-awareness and be curious about what your work life is reflecting back to you?

You can start by asking yourself the following:

• Did I relate to any part of this two-part essay?
• What’s NOT working well in my work life?
• 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

When You Catch Yourself Recreating the Pattern

One of the most disorienting experiences in trauma recovery is catching yourself in the middle of recreating the very dynamic you swore you’d never repeat. You said you’d never become your parent — and you hear your parent’s words coming out of your mouth. You promised you’d leave toxic work environments — and you realize you’ve been managing your team with the same fear-based dynamics you experienced. You intended to build a different kind of relationship — and you look up one day to realize you’re in a version of the original one.

This is not failure. It is the nature of trauma patterning — and more importantly, catching it is the first crucial step toward changing it.

The moment of recognition is valuable, even when it’s painful. Many people in this position respond to the recognition with shame — with a sharp internal narrative that says “I’m just like them,” or “I’ll never change,” or “I should have known better.” That shame response is understandable and not helpful. It’s also not accurate. The recognition itself represents a developmental capacity — a reflective awareness — that was not available to the people who shaped these patterns in the first place.

What to do when you catch yourself mid-pattern:

• Name it without self-attack. “I notice I’m doing the thing again” is more useful than “I’m terrible.” The neutral naming keeps you in your observing capacity rather than collapsing into shame, which makes change impossible.
• Pause, if you can. You don’t have to finish the pattern. The moment of recognition, even mid-dynamic, is the moment where something different becomes possible. Pausing — literally stopping, taking a breath, stepping back — inserts a choice point that the automatic pattern doesn’t include.
• Repair explicitly and quickly. If the pattern has impacted someone else — a colleague, a child, a partner — repair it explicitly. Naming what happened, taking responsibility, and making a different choice modeled in front of the person you affected is itself healing. It also teaches everyone present that awareness leads to change, which is a profoundly different message than the one many of us received.
• Bring it to therapy. The moment of pattern recognition is excellent material for therapeutic work. What was the trigger? What was the feeling underneath? What did the pattern give you — what need was it trying to meet — even imperfectly? This kind of exploration turns the “I did it again” moment from a source of shame into a source of information that can accelerate change.

You will not change these patterns perfectly or immediately. Recovery from relational trauma is not a linear process, and the patterns laid down in childhood are deeply grooved. But each time you catch the pattern sooner, or interrupt it, or repair what it created, you are building the alternative. The work is cumulative. It does not require perfection to succeed — only persistence.

Both/And: Your Work Can Be Both a Trigger and a Healing Laboratory

Here is the Both/And that I want to hold with you as we close: your work life can be both the place where old wounds get reactivated AND the place where new patterns get practiced. (PMID: 9384857)

The impulse, once you understand how trauma recreates itself in professional settings, is often to want to protect yourself from those dynamics entirely — to find a low-stakes job, to withdraw from high-visibility roles, to stop taking on the kinds of leadership challenges where the relational heat gets turned up. I understand that impulse. And sometimes a strategic retreat from an acutely toxic environment is genuinely the right call.

But here is what I also know: the workplace, for many driven women, is where some of the most powerful healing can happen. Not despite the fact that it activates old patterns — but because it does. When you stay conscious, when you bring the right support, when you’re able to notice “this feels like my father’s criticism” and not automatically collapse into it or fight it, you are practicing something that changes your nervous system. You are accumulating evidence that you can handle intensity, that you can speak when speaking feels dangerous, that you can be evaluated without being destroyed.

Aarti, a physician who grew up with a chronically critical mother, initially tried to heal by avoiding any feedback-heavy environments. Eventually, she realized that avoidance was just another way the trauma was running her life. The work wasn’t removing herself from situations where she’d be evaluated — it was building the internal scaffolding that could hold her while she was in them. “My mother used to make me feel like my mistakes defined me,” she told me. “Learning to separate feedback from annihilation — that was the whole thing.”

The Systemic Lens: It’s Not Just Your Trauma — It’s Also the System

A conversation about recreating trauma at work would be incomplete without naming this: not all of the difficulty you experience at work is a trauma response. Some of it is the work environment actually being difficult, unfair, or outright toxic.

Organizational psychologist Amy Edmondson, PhD, professor at Harvard Business School and author of The Fearless Organization, has documented how psychological safety — the belief that one can speak up, take risks, and make mistakes without fear of punishment — is the single most important predictor of team learning and performance. Most high-pressure professional environments operate with significantly degraded psychological safety, particularly for women and people from underrepresented groups. In these environments, the hypervigilance and people-pleasing that look like “trauma responses” are also accurate reads of genuinely hostile dynamics.

This matters for healing because it changes the question. The question isn’t only “How do I stop recreating my trauma at work?” It’s also: “Is this environment actually safe? And if it isn’t, what are my options?” Sometimes the most powerful healing decision is leaving a system that was never going to let you be well. That’s not failure — it’s discernment.

For driven women navigating this dual question — what is mine to heal, and what is the system’s problem? — the combination of trauma-informed therapy and executive coaching can be particularly powerful. Therapy helps you understand your own relational patterns. Coaching helps you build the external scaffolding and strategic clarity to navigate systemic dynamics. Both are worth having. Neither alone is enough.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

How to Heal: Interrupting the Trauma-to-Work Cycle

What I see consistently in my work with clients like Aarti is that the awareness comes first — and it’s often destabilizing. You recognize the pattern: the boss who replicates the critical parent, the workplace dynamic that has you shrinking yourself the way you did at age nine, the high-stakes environment where you both thrive and lose yourself. Naming it is necessary. But naming it doesn’t automatically stop it. What happens next — after the recognition — is where the real work lives. And that next step almost always requires more than insight alone. Willpower won’t restructure a nervous system that learned to equate conflict with danger. Strategic thinking won’t heal the wound that makes a dismissive manager feel catastrophically personal. Here’s the path that actually moves things.

Here’s the path I walk with clients, in roughly this order:

1. Stabilize the nervous system so you can see your patterns clearly. When your work environment is chronically activating — when you’re in a state of low-level threat more days than not — your window of tolerance narrows, and with it, your capacity to distinguish between a real crisis and a trauma echo. Aarti told me she couldn’t tell, in the middle of a tense meeting with her director, whether what she was feeling was reasonable concern or a full-body flashback to being fourteen and waiting for her father’s mood to turn. Before we could interrupt the pattern at work, we needed to give her nervous system enough regulation that she could access that distinction. Understanding the connection between trauma and your nervous system is foundational here — the goal isn’t to stop having reactions, but to create enough space between trigger and response to make a different choice.

2. Name your specific trauma patterns in your specific work context. Generic insight — “I have attachment wounds” or “I struggle with authority figures” — doesn’t give you enough to work with in a Tuesday morning meeting. What I ask clients to do is get specific: Which dynamics at work most reliably activate you? What role do you tend to collapse into under pressure — the appeaser, the overachiever, the invisible one? When do you find yourself doing things at work that later make you wince — working until midnight to avoid a hard conversation, tolerating behavior you’d never allow from a peer, shrinking in a meeting where you had something important to say? Naming the pattern in that kind of operational detail is what makes it workable. You can’t interrupt what you can’t see clearly enough to name.

3. Run deliberate experiments in low-stakes work moments. You don’t have to start with your most triggering dynamic. Aarti started with the smallest possible experiment: sending an email once a week with a clear ask that she would previously have softened into near-incomprehensibility. She asked for what she needed directly. She waited without apology. She noticed the feared catastrophe — disapproval, abandonment, retaliation — didn’t arrive. These small experiments build what I think of as lived counter-evidence: data that gently updates the nervous system’s predictions about what happens when you take up space at work. Start with the lowest-stakes container you can find. Then build.

4. Do the deepest relational work inside a reliable therapeutic relationship — and consider adding coaching for the structural layer. The patterns that show up at work were learned in relationship, and they tend to shift most reliably inside a new relational experience. Individual therapy — particularly trauma-informed approaches — can help you understand the roots of the patterns you’re recreating, grieve the relational experiences that created them, and practice being met differently in a context specifically designed to support that. Executive coaching serves a different but complementary function: it helps you build the strategic clarity, communication tools, and structural scaffolding to navigate your actual work environment more effectively while the deeper healing is happening. As we explored in this post, both are worth having. Neither alone is enough.

5. Keep the systemic lens in view — it’s not just your trauma, it’s also the system. Aarti’s workplace genuinely had problematic dynamics: a culture of overwork normalized as ambition, a management structure that rewarded compliance, an environment where psychological safety, as Amy Edmondson, PhD, organizational behavior professor at Harvard Business School, has documented in her research, was more aspirational than real. Part of what Aarti needed to heal was permission to name that clearly — to stop treating every difficult dynamic as a mirror of her own pathology and start asking which parts were also about a broken system. Holding both is important. The personal work matters. And sometimes the work environment genuinely needs to change, and the most courageous act of self-care is acknowledging that.

6. Decide consciously what role work plays in your identity — and what it doesn’t. For many driven women from relational trauma backgrounds, work has carried a disproportionate share of identity, worth, and belonging — because those needs weren’t reliably met elsewhere. That’s not a flaw; it’s an adaptive strategy. But it means that work becomes an enormously high-stakes arena, where every setback feels existential and every success brings only temporary relief. Part of healing is building enough life outside of work — relationships, meaning, embodied pleasure — that work doesn’t have to carry the entire weight of who you are. That redistribution of identity is itself a form of freedom, and it tends to make work paradoxically better: more effective, more boundaried, and far less depleting. The Fixing the Foundations course was built to address exactly this structural rebalancing.

Interrupting the pattern of recreating trauma in your work life is possible — and it tends to move faster than people expect once the right support is in place. If you recognize Aarti’s story in your own, I’d encourage you to explore individual therapy, executive coaching, or schedule a consultation to talk about where to begin. You don’t have to keep replaying the past in the present. There is a different way to inhabit your professional life — and you deserve to find it.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer