Keys to Unlocking Your Career Potential as a Trauma Survivor

This week I spent some time doing a career audit from a trauma perspective. When I share my story of what got me started as a Trauma Recovery Career Coach, I usually start at the point where I had a zip file of repressed memories open up, which led me to go from being a high-functioning overachiever to not being able to function at all.

In reality, my career journey started long before that. We don’t often like to look back at past struggles because we are just glad they are over and we’ve moved on. In this case, however, it is important to review my past because it was an essential part of my journey and something you can probably relate to.

As a result of this audit, I realized that the zip file opening was the beginning of my breakthrough in overcoming the legacy effects of trauma on my life and career. I think it is essential for you to hear the summarized version of the whole story so you can understand that you are not the only one that struggles with the effects of trauma in the workplace.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

In high school, students are usually asked to write an essay about their career or what they want to be when they grow up. In high school, I was focused only on making it through that day. I could not look ahead more than that because I was using all my energy trying to survive.

I wore some significant armor that protected the secret I was carrying about being sexually abused. I didn’t let anyone get too close to me, which resulted in not having guidance about my direction for the future. I had no idea what I wanted to do or what I was good at. I had no direction, no guidance, and no plan.

I got a degree in psychology/counseling, mostly because I was trying to heal myself. I started my career as an Adolescent Substance Abuse Counselor to help a friend going out on leave to have surgery. I got the job because I had a degree, not because I was looking for it. After three years, I burned out and decided to leave that job because, emotionally, I had nothing to give my young children.

I told myself I needed to do something less emotionally taxing…like business (LOL). I worked as a temp doing administrative work and was determined to learn everything the company had on its desktop (from a software perspective). I learned that I had a propensity for picking up technology quickly. Because I didn’t have a sense of myself or what I was good at, this experience was my first lesson in aptitudes.

Even though I changed assignments all the time, I loved the variety of it. I was figuring out what I was good at and not good at. I learned what I liked and didn’t like doing…mostly what I didn’t like.

I liked working because it gave me a purpose; it gave me positive feedback and mental challenges that distracted me from the emotional baggage that threatened to drag me down.

My first full-time corporate job came from one of my temp assignments. I worked in the word processing department of an insurance brokerage corporation. I still remember what it felt like when I was told that they wanted to hire me as an employee. It was an amazing feeling to be wanted for the value I brought to the company…and not for my body.

I’m pretty sure this is where my overachieving ways started. I was determined to prove that they made the right decision to hire me and that I could do more. You could say I had a chip on my shoulder.

I discovered that I loved to learn, and I taught myself from a book how to create a database application that helped our department with productivity reporting. I got such good feedback from my boss for taking that initiative that I started creating various applications to help the company.

After that, I was recruited by the risk management group of the company to assist them with their consulting practice because of my analytical abilities. I remember feeling so wanted, and I liked that feeling. So again, I worked hard to find ways to help my group…until the company downsized and I was let go.

That was a difficult time, especially with all the attachment wounds I had but didn’t know I had. I remember sitting in the HR office, being told my job had been cut, and trying to hold my emotions together. My only thought was that I needed to get out of there and go to the bathroom, where I balled my eyes out. I was so shocked. I never saw it coming. I felt rejected. It tore my heart out. It was a bitter lesson for me, and that was the last time I allowed myself to “attach” to a company.

Having a sense of belonging is difficult for trauma survivors, but when you go through the traumatic experience of downsizing, the desire to protect your wounded heart takes precedence over the feeling of belonging. I now lived in the reality that at any moment, I could have the carpet pulled out from under my feet and be discarded by the company I worked for, so I decided that I would not get that close again.

After getting let go from that company, I figured out that I wanted to go into consulting because I enjoyed working with the consultants at my last company. This period was before Google, so there were no online job boards. I had a phone book that I used to send my resume to every consulting company in Charlotte. I left no stone unturned, but I couldn’t seem to get any interest in my resume.

I finally contacted the regional director of consulting for Accenture, who reviewed my resume and spoke candidly with me. He asked me if he could be honest with me about my resume, and I told him I wished someone would.

I have so much respect for people willing to have hard conversations with people so that they can receive the advice being given, and he did that for me. He said that I had great administrative experience, but I didn’t have a lot of business knowledge, so I could either go back to school to get my MBA and walk in the front door of a consulting company or leverage my administrative experience to get into a company that would provide the opportunity to train me as a consultant.

That was the first career advice I ever got from anyone, and it was a game-changer for me. I shifted my approach to finding a job as an administrative assistant and secured a job at my current company.

As I look back at my career as a whole, I can clearly see the legacy effects of trauma showing up, even though I knew nothing about trauma for most of that time. Three significant obstacles impacted my ability to advance in my career.

Safety/Emotional Regulation.

After the traumatic experience of losing a job that I loved and built my identity on, I have never felt truly safe in the workplace again. There continues to be a little voice in my head telling me that leadership could decide they don’t want me at any moment. There is this constant hypervigilance around performing, adding value, and ensuring that leadership knows my name and what I bring to the table.

The challenge with safety is not only related to the corporate side of work but also the interpersonal side of work. As with many trauma survivors, learning to trust people comes extremely slowly for me. I experienced managers who have built cases against me to create a case for dismissal with cause due to a power trip. I experienced managers who have stolen my ideas and claimed them as their own to make themselves look better. I’ve experienced perfectionistic managers; nothing was ever good enough for them.

I have plenty of reasons not to trust people. However, I’ve learned that performance is not enough to advance my career. It takes relationships plus performance to advance.

Early in my career, I would get feedback during reviews that I was “passionate.” I didn’t know what they meant by that. I often wondered if “passionate” was a code for something else. Why was being passionate bad?

For all of my trauma survivor friends reading this, let me decode this for you… when they are referring to being “passionate,” they are talking about emotional dysregulation. As trauma survivors, we have a lot of triggers — especially in the workplace — that cause us to experience sudden emotional changes. I was experiencing these changes long before I knew I had trauma.

Powerlessness.

As a sexual abuse survivor, I had no concept of empowerment. There was a part of me that was always waiting to be rescued, which is pretty common for trauma survivors.

In contrast, the attachment style I developed due to my trauma worked in my favor. I had an avoidant attachment style that resulted in me concluding that no one would rescue me and that I didn’t need anyone else.

In some areas of my career, like career planning, I felt powerless and fawned for a long time. While in other parts of my career, I fought to be seen, heard, and noticed.

Feeling like you have no control over your career is not good. Hoping beyond hope that someone…anyone…would see potential in you is a terrible feeling.

Boundaries.

For the longest time, I did not have a concept of boundaries. I had no real personal identity, meaning that I had no concept of who I was. As I progressed in my career, I started to learn what I liked and didn’t like, what I was good at and not good at, and what I wanted to do and not do.

I didn’t realize I was allowed to have boundaries. My parents never taught me that I was allowed to have boundaries…quite the opposite. My personal boundaries were violated every day.

What makes this difficult is that when you don’t have boundaries, you expect that other people don’t have boundaries too, but that is not always the case. I struggled to handle situations where I unknowingly violated someone else’s boundary.

Having and respecting others’ boundaries is a critical skill set in the workplace that I didn’t have at the beginning of my career, and it cost me dearly.

The Good News.

The good news is that we can be taught all of these things. It took me a long time to learn these things because I didn’t have anyone teaching me, but I was able to learn them on my own.

We can learn how to manage the biology of trauma that still lives in our bodies and the triggers associated with the trauma. We can learn empowerment, which is AWESOME, by the way! We can learn what boundaries are, why we need them, how to establish personal boundaries, and how to handle boundary violations.

I am developing an online course that will come out soon on these three critical topics that are keys to unlocking your career potential. Once I started to master these three elements, I progressed from an administrative assistant to a Senior Vice President.

I invite you to join the waiting list for the online course. You won’t want to miss it.

As always, you are not alone on this journey. I would love to accompany you on your courageous path to healing. Contact me to schedule your free discovery call.

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