The Resilient Career with Cyndi Bennett

Summary Your manager smiles and says “I knew you’d have it handled.” You thank her. You don’t mention that you were still working on it after midnight. That you woke at four and checked a number you had already checked three times. That when your colleague stayed behind and asked how you were really doing, you said “I’m okay, it’s just a busy week” and then opened the next document. People see the presentation. The finished project. The person they can count on. They don’t see the lost sleep, the tears between meetings, or the evenings spent recovering just enough to do it again. In this episode, Cyndi Bennett explores why being capable and dependable can become tangled up with feeling safe or valued, why praise may bring only a brief sense of relief before the exhaustion returns, and how you might begin making room for your own capacity alongside everything you are already committed to. Key Thoughts * The skills that make you excellent at your work and the patterns that make it hard to stop are not always separate things. * Being the person everyone trusts can quietly become a way of managing safety, not just a reflection of commitment. * When finishing something successfully only brings brief relief before the next deadline arrives, the exhaustion stays even when the work looks fine from the outside. * An offer of help can feel harder to accept than it looks, especially when asking has not always been safe or useful in the past. * Your capacity deserves to be part of the decision before you say yes, not something you absorb the cost of afterward. * Being trusted does not have to mean being endlessly available. * You can care about your work and your colleagues and your reputation while also needing something to change. What This Means For You If any part of this episode felt familiar, here are some things worth sitting with: * The presentation can be excellent and the way you had to get through it can be costing you too much. Both deserve to be part of the conversation about how work is going. * You don’t have to explain everything to make one request. Allowing someone to help can begin with one piece of work and a chance to see what happens. * Have a sentence ready before the next request arrives. You do not have to find the words while you are already feeling the pressure to say yes. Something like “Let me check my current deadlines and get back to you this afternoon” gives you room before you commit. * If a conversation about priorities feels possible, try naming the tradeoff. “I am working toward these two deadlines. If this new project takes priority, which one can move?” makes your capacity part of the decision. * Your needs belong in the picture. Over time, keeping your needs out of view leaves you with less energy for your life and less room to think about what you actually want from your career. Try This After Listening The next time a request arrives and you feel the pull to say yes before you have checked in with yourself, try this before you respond. Pause for one breath and ask: Do I have room for this, or am I about to absorb the cost of saying yes? If the answer is that you are already at capacity, practice reaching for one sentence. Write it down somewhere you can find it. You do not need the perfect response. You need one that gives you a little time. Continue the Conversation If you want to keep exploring what overworking and people pleasing are costing your career, and what it might look like to build something different, the Resilient Career Academy is where that work continues. Subscribe free for articles and tools, or join the paid tier for supported career development that takes your whole experience into account. Related Episodes Worth Revisiting Episode 1: You’ve Learned You Have CPTSD. What Could That Mean for Your Career? Episode 54: What Nobody Warned Me About Building a Business After Trauma (Your Trauma-Wise Career Guide) Episode 61: How to Ask for What You’re Worth When You’ve Been Taught to Be Grateful Just to Have a Job (Your Trauma-Wise Career Guide) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

A few days ago, someone left a comment on one of my YouTube Shorts that I’ve been thinking about ever since. The video was from a conversation with Patrick LaRose about hypervigilance and the idea that some of the abilities we’ve developed through trauma can become “superpowers.” But this person wasn’t experiencing hypervigilance as a superpower. He described it as a curse. Something that had ruined his life. Something that left him overwhelmed whenever he went out in public. He said he would have preferred to live an ordinary life. My heart hurt for him. Because I understood where he was coming from. When something has caused us so much pain, especially over many years, hearing someone describe it as a “superpower” can feel impossible to reconcile with our own experience. And I’ve been wondering whether what he really needed was for someone to acknowledge just how painful his experience has been. Not to tell him that there’s something positive he can take away from it. Not to convince him that he should see things differently. Just to recognize how much he’s been struggling. His comment got me thinking about something much bigger than hypervigilance. What happens when we’ve been trying so hard to get better, for so long, that we’re beginning to lose hope that anything will ever change? That’s the conversation I want to have with you today. If you’re new here, I’m Cyndi Bennett, a trauma-informed career coach and founder of the Resilient Career Academy. After spending more than 25 years navigating the corporate world, I understand how deeply our professional experiences can shape the way we see ourselves. Through my own journey as a trauma survivor, I’ve also come to understand how complex trauma can influence the choices we make, the opportunities we pursue, and the expectations we place on ourselves. I write this newsletter to help professionals who have experienced complex trauma and CPTSD understand the patterns affecting their work, explore practical ways to respond, and build careers they’re proud of with support, compassion, and room for their own definition of success. This week, we’re focusing on recognizing CPTSD and how childhood trauma may have followed us into our careers, and what it can mean when understanding those patterns hasn’t yet eased the pain. If you’d like to keep having these conversations with me, subscribe for free here . When Understanding Doesn’t Make the Pain Go Away This week, we’ve been talking about what happens when we discover that we have CPTSD and begin recognizing how childhood trauma may have followed us into our careers. For some of us, that discovery can explain things we’ve struggled to understand for years. Why feedback from a supervisor can feel so threatening. Why we anticipate problems before they happen. Why setting boundaries can leave us feeling guilty or afraid. Why we sometimes shut down, become overwhelmed, or find ourselves trying desperately to keep everyone happy. Why we may unintentionally sabotage our careers, pulling back from opportunities we want because being seen, taking a risk, or succeeding doesn’t feel safe. We may begin recognizing patterns that have been part of our lives for so long that we assumed they were simply who we were. And that understanding can bring relief. But it can also bring grief. We may begin looking back at all the years we spent struggling without understanding why. The opportunities we passed up. The relationships that were difficult to navigate. The energy we spent trying to manage things that other people didn’t seem to struggle with. And then comes another question. Now that I understand what’s happening, what am I supposed to do about it? Because understanding why we struggle doesn’t automatically make the struggle go away. We can recognize a trauma response and still experience it. We can understand why something triggers us and still find ourselves overwhelmed when it happens. And when we’ve already spent years trying to change, it can be difficult to believe that learning one more thing will make any difference. I Want You to Know That I See You If you’ve spent years struggling with the effects of complex trauma, I want you to know something… I see you. I see how hard you’ve been trying to make sense of what’s happening to you. How exhausting it can be to walk into work already anticipating what might go wrong. How much energy it can take to manage your reactions, navigate relationships, and get through an ordinary workday. I see the effort that other people may never recognize. The times you’ve pushed through when you were overwhelmed. The opportunities you’ve avoided because something didn’t feel safe. The conversations you’ve replayed over and over, wondering whether you said or did something wrong. And I see how discouraging it can be when you’ve tried so many things and still find yourself struggling. I’m not going to tell you that your trauma was a gift. Or that you should be grateful for the abilities you developed because of it. You don’t have to find a silver lining in your suffering. What happened to you matters. What you’re experiencing now matters. And so does what you want your life and career to become. I also want you to know that I believe change is possible. That doesn’t mean the work will be easy, or that there’s a single solution that works for everyone. It means there are ways we can begin understanding these patterns, developing different responses, and creating conditions that support us instead of continually working against us. And we don’t have to figure out how to do all of that alone. There Is a Path Forward One of the things I’ve learned through my own healing journey is that understanding what’s happening is an important beginning. But awareness alone doesn’t create the changes we’re hoping for. We also need opportunities to learn different ways of responding, practice what we’re learning, and discover what kinds of support will help us along the way. That’s part of why I developed the 5 R Framework for building a more resilient career. It’s a process we can use to begin working with the patterns that complex trauma may have created in our professional lives. Recognize the Pattern. We begin noticing what’s happening. What situations trigger us? What do we experience in our bodies, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors? What patterns keep showing up? Root Out the Cause. We explore what’s contributing to the response. Is something in our current environment genuinely unsafe? Is an earlier experience influencing how we’re interpreting what’s happening now? What choices and resources are available to us? Rebuild the Response. We begin identifying other ways of responding that may help us navigate the situation. This might involve regulation skills, boundaries, communication, environmental changes, or additional support. Rehearse It Live. We practice in real situations, starting with steps that feel manageable and safe enough. We don’t have to tackle the most difficult situation first. Reinforce for Good. We reflect on what happened, learn from the experience, make adjustments, and continue practicing. Over time, some responses may become more accessible and familiar. This isn’t a process we complete once and never revisit. We may find ourselves working through these steps many times, with different situations and different patterns. And there may be times when we need professional support, additional resources, or changes in our environment before we’re able to move forward. But the important thing I want us to recognize is that there are things we can begin working on, even when we don’t yet know what the outcome will be. We don’t have to figure out the entire journey before taking the next step. Sometimes We Reach the Limits of What We Can Do Alone I’ve been thinking about this in relation to my own experience as a trauma survivor building a business. There have been so many things I’ve needed to learn. Marketing. Developing a podcast. Understanding technology. Figuring out how to reach the peo… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

My First Substack Live with Patrick LaRose I joined Patrick LaRose, nurse, coach, and creator of The Second Shift , for my first Substack Live this month. We planned for 30 minutes and talked for nearly an hour. Apparently, we had a few things to say. LOL. We explored how trauma patterns can shape our careers, including people-pleasing, perfectionism, staying small around authority, and feeling like we always have something to prove. We talked about nursing and leadership, but these experiences can follow us into any workplace. One thread kept coming up: Looking capable on the outside doesn’t tell anyone how hard we’re working underneath it all. We also talked about what change can look like. Recognizing a pattern is a beginning. Practicing a different response takes time, support, and small steps that account for our capacity. And those steps deserve to be celebrated. We made room for another question, too: what strengths have we been overlooking because they come so naturally that we assume everyone has them? I left feeling grateful for the conversation and excited to have more of them. If you’ve been struggling at work while wondering why you can’t simply push through, I hope you’ll hear this: Your struggles don’t erase your capabilities. Your voice, your needs, and your career matter. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

Have you ever set out on a hike that seemed simple enough? You pick a trailhead, glance at the map, and decide to do the loop around the lake. Nothing too ambitious. Just some fresh air, a little movement, and time to clear your head. At first, you settle into it. You hear your footsteps on the dirt, catch glimpses of water through the trees, and feel your shoulders begin to loosen. Then you come to a fork in the path. There’s a sign, but it’s weathered and hard to read. Both trails look well-traveled. One seems to follow the lake, but the other could curve back toward it just beyond the trees. You look behind you, then down each path. Was there something on the map I missed? A few minutes ago, you were enjoying yourself. Now you’re wondering whether you can trust your own sense of direction. You don’t want to turn back. But you don’t want to spend the next hour walking the wrong way, either. That uneasy feeling can show up in your career, too. You might find yourself looking for the choice that feels safest before you’ve had a chance to consider where you want to go. And you may not recognize how much your early experiences have shaped which paths feel safe enough to consider. In this article, we’ll explore how childhood trauma can influence the career choices you make, why those patterns can be difficult to recognize, and what understanding them can make possible. The Map You Learned to Follow At a confusing fork in the trail, your first concern may be whether you can get back safely. You check the map, look for markers, and try to work out which route you can trust. When you grow up experiencing childhood trauma, the search for safety can become a pattern that shapes your life without your awareness. You may never consciously ask, What do I need to do to be safe here? Yet that question can quietly influence what you notice, what feels possible, and which choices you make. As a child, you may have learned to read someone’s mood before speaking. To be useful, so you were less likely to be criticized. To get everything right because mistakes brought consequences. Or to keep your wishes to yourself because expressing them could lead to conflict. You may have learned to make yourself small so your confidence, abilities, or independence wouldn’t be perceived as a threat by the person in power. You may have learned to stay invisible because being overlooked felt safer than being noticed. At work, those lessons can make visibility feel risky. You might downplay an accomplishment, hold back an idea, or avoid a promotion that would put you in the spotlight. You may want recognition and still feel an urge to hide when attention turns toward you. With repetition, those responses can become automatic. You may carry them into adulthood without recognizing where they began. When you make career decisions, you might experience them as being practical, responsible, or realistic. You may feel certain that an opportunity “isn’t for someone like me” without noticing the fear of criticism or rejection beneath that certainty. That’s part of what makes these patterns difficult to recognize. You’re making a decision that feels sensible, while an old need for safety may be helping determine which options you allow yourself to consider. A job with clear expectations might feel reassuring because you know exactly how to avoid getting something wrong. Being indispensable might feel like protection against being let go. Staying quiet about your ambitions might seem safer than risking someone’s judgment. You might choose work you know you can do rather than work you’re curious about. You might stay with an unpredictable boss because you’ve become skilled at anticipating what they need. Or you might dismiss an opportunity before you’ve had time to consider whether you want it. From the outside, these can look like straightforward career preferences. Inside, the stakes may feel much higher. Will I be accepted? Can I keep everyone happy? What happens if I fail? Safety belongs in every career decision. Income, stability, benefits, and respectful working conditions matter. But when avoiding criticism, conflict, or rejection takes up most of your attention, there may be little room left to ask what interests you or what kind of working life you want. That can be painful to recognize, especially if you’ve worked hard to build a career that looks successful. You don’t have to judge yourself for the choices you’ve made. You can begin by asking: How much of this path have I chosen because it suits me, and how much have I chosen because it felt like the safest way forward? Before We Go Further, Let Me Introduce Myself I’m Cyndi Bennett, a trauma-informed career coach and Founder of the Resilient Career Academy. I help professionals who have experienced complex trauma and CPTSD understand what’s holding them back at work and build careers they’re proud of. Sometimes that work begins with a question that’s hard to say out loud: How much of my career have I chosen around what I want, and how much around what I’ve needed to do to feel safe? You may have become indispensable. You may have learned to keep your abilities out of sight. You might have spent so long responding to what other people expected that you’re unsure what you would choose for yourself. That’s what we’re exploring here: how early experiences can influence the work you choose, the opportunities you pursue, and what you believe is possible for your future. When Being Good at Something Keeps You Stuck You’re looking at a job posting, and for a moment, you feel excited. The work sounds interesting. You have ideas already. You can almost picture yourself doing it. Then you imagine being interviewed. Being evaluated. Being expected to prove that you belong. Within minutes, you’ve closed the tab. Later that day, someone asks you to take on another task in your current job. You’re already stretched thin, but you hear yourself say, “Of course.” The opportunity you wanted felt risky. The extra work you didn’t want felt difficult to refuse. If being useful once helped protect you from criticism or rejection, you may feel more secure when other people need you. You become the person who fixes things, fills the gaps, and rarely asks for anything in return. Your abilities are real. So is the exhaustion of feeling that you must keep demonstrating your value. For someone else, safety may have meant hiding those abilities. Perhaps doing well attracted resentment, scrutiny, or demands you couldn’t escape. You learned to let someone else take the credit, keep your ideas to yourself, or act as though an achievement didn’t matter. Now you might want a promotion and still feel relief when nobody suggests you for it. You might feel hurt when your contribution goes unnoticed, then uncomfortable when someone praises you publicly. That push-and-pull can be confusing. It can leave you wondering why you keep stepping away from things you thought you wanted. You don’t have to assume that every hesitation is an old protective response. A promotion may bring responsibilities you don’t want. Extra work may genuinely interest you. The question is whether you feel able to consider your preferences alongside the possible consequences. Am I free to say no when I’m capable of helping? Am I free to be seen when I have something to contribute? When You Haven’t Had Room to Discover Who You Are “What do you want to be when you grow up?” For some children, that question opens up possibilities. They get to imagine, experiment, change their minds, and discover what interests them. For a child experiencing trauma, attention may be focused on a different set of questions. * What mood is everyone in today? * What do I need to do to keep things calm? * Is it safe to ask for something? When so much attention goes toward getting through the day, there may be little room left to explore preferences, try unfamiliar activities, or imagine a future. You may also learn to hide the things you enjoy or do well. An interest becomes somethin… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

Summary You are sitting in the parking lot after your appointment. On the passenger seat is a paper with two words written across the top. Complex PTSD. You pick up your phone and start searching. Symptoms. Treatment. How long to get better. Then you type one more search before you pull out of the lot. Complex PTSD and work. And you find the same symptom lists you just read. Nothing about how to walk back into that office at two o’clock. That is where this podcast begins. In this opening episode of The Resilient Career, Cyndi Bennett explores why ordinary work situations can feel so much harder after a CPTSD diagnosis, what the fear of being found out is quietly costing your career, and seven ways complex trauma may be shaping your working life without you ever realizing it. This is not therapy and it is not another podcast telling you to push through. It is a conversation about understanding the patterns beneath your professional life so you can make different choices. Key Thoughts * What you are experiencing at work right now may not be a capability problem. It may be a capacity problem shaped by patterns that developed for good reasons. * The fear that everyone can see you falling apart may not match what is actually visible to the people around you. * Hiding the struggle takes energy too. The more you spend keeping things looking fine, the less you have for the work itself. * Your need to feel safe can quietly start making career decisions for you without your awareness or consent. * The seven patterns explored in this episode are not diagnostic criteria. They are possibilities worth getting curious about. * Emotional regulation is a set of skills. Like other skills it can be learned, practiced and strengthened over time with the right support. * What you are experiencing now does not have to be how work feels forever. What This Means For You If any part of this episode felt familiar, here are some things worth sitting with: * You are not broken. You are a person having a hard time after carrying more than most people around you will ever know. That is someone who deserves support, not a verdict about capability. * Start with one moment, not the whole pattern. You do not need to understand everything at once. Notice one situation this week that feels hardest, and get curious about what might be underneath it. * Have one sentence ready. When you need space at work, “Let me think about that and get back to you by end of day” is a complete response. It gives you room to steady yourself without explaining anything. * Bring your workday into therapy. You do not need a polished explanation. “I am having a hard time getting through meetings” is enough to begin. * The patterns can change. Because they were learned, you can learn other ways of responding too. That kind of change usually happens gradually, one small shift at a time. Try This After Listening Pick one work moment this week and sit with these five questions: * What happened? Describe the observable facts. * What did I do? Name the response without judgment. * What was I trying to prevent? Treat the answer as a possibility, not a verdict. * What did it cost? Consider your capacity, your contribution, or your choices. * What could I try? Choose one small, context-appropriate alternative. Your Free Resource Get the free Workplace Trigger Tracker Toolkit at resilientcareers.substack.com/start-here . It gives you a place to record the situations, interactions, and people that affect you at work, along with a picklist of coping strategies to try out. It is the tool Cyndi wishes she had when she first learned she had CPTSD. Come Journey With Us If you recognized yourself in this episode and want to go deeper with the exact tools, resources, and community built specifically to support professionals navigating CPTSD and complex trauma at work, consider joining us in the Resilient Career Academy. You do not have to figure this out alone. There is a place where people understand exactly what you are carrying, and where your pace, your healing, and your story are not just welcomed, they are honored. Subscribe free at resilientcareers.substack.com Related Episodes of Your Trauma-Wise Career Guide Podcast Episode 52: I Don’t Know What I Want and That’s Not Your Fault Episode 60: How to Stay Professionally Visible When You Want to Disappear This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

There is a word that quietly shapes more careers than most people realize. Should. I should be further along by now. I should be able to speak up in meetings. I should know how to set limits. I shouldn’t get so upset when someone criticizes my work. And then comes all the career advice layered on top of it. Just be more confident. Advocate for yourself. Stop people-pleasing. Don’t take things so personally. Sounds simple enough. But what happens when you already know what you should do, and knowing isn’t the problem? What happens when you try to speak up and your mind goes blank? When you want to say no but the words won’t come? When you’re ready for the next opportunity but something inside keeps telling you it’s safer to stay right where you are? What if traditional career advice has been overlooking something important? If you live with CPTSD or the effects of complex trauma, your past doesn’t stay neatly outside the office. It shows up in how you respond to feedback, authority, conflict, and change. It influences the jobs you choose, the behavior you tolerate, the limits you set, and what you believe you’re capable of professionally. And most career advice has no framework for any of that. The Resilient Career is where we talk about what’s actually happening beneath the surface. Hosted by career coach and trauma survivor Cyndi Bennett, this podcast explores the intersection of CPTSD, complex trauma, and work. Together, we’ll get curious about the patterns that may be shaping your professional life and explore practical, trauma-informed strategies for navigating them. Because awareness alone doesn’t create change, and knowing the right career strategy doesn’t mean your nervous system is ready to put it into practice. This is not therapy. And it is not another podcast telling you to push through. It is a conversation about understanding yourself well enough to build a career that no longer requires you to abandon yourself in order to succeed. Topics include CPTSD at work, complex trauma, workplace trauma, toxic workplaces, people-pleasing, perfectionism, hypervigilance, burnout, limits at work, difficult managers, self-advocacy, career confidence, trauma-informed leadership, career transitions, entrepreneurship as a trauma survivor, and career resilience. Subscribe now and join the conversation. Because your past may be part of your story. It doesn’t have to write the rest of your career. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

October Community Update Have you ever looked at your calendar and realized that several things you’ve been working toward are suddenly happening at once? That’s how this season feels for me. There are new conversations on the horizon, a podcast I’ve been preparing to share, and an opportunity to connect with fellow trauma survivors in a space that means a great deal to me. As I’ve been thinking about all of this, I’ve also been reconsidering how we stay connected here. I want what lands in your inbox to be useful, relevant, and worth your time. More on that in a moment. Before We Go Any Further, Let Me Introduce Myself If this is your first time here, welcome. And if you’ve been here for a while, I’m glad you’re back. I’m Cyndi Bennett, a trauma-informed career coach and founder of the Resilient Career Academy™. After spending more than 25 years navigating the corporate world, I understand how deeply our professional experiences can shape the way we see ourselves. I also understand how complex trauma can influence the choices we make, the opportunities we pursue, and the expectations we place on ourselves. Let’s Connect: What’s Coming Up Navigating work and life with complex trauma can feel isolating. Connecting with people who understand can remind us that we don’t have to figure everything out on our own. That sense of community matters to me, and I want to keep creating opportunities for us to learn from and support one another. Here are a few ways we can connect in the weeks ahead: Sunday: A Live Conversation With Patrick LaRose I’m so excited to be going live with Patrick LaRose , host of The Second Shift, to talk about how trauma triggers show up at work and how they can shape the trajectory of our careers. Patrick and I share a deep appreciation for nurses and others in the medical community. If you’re a nurse, first responder, or healthcare professional, I hope you’ll join us for a conversation about the ways trauma can affect our working lives. Join us live in the Substack app on Sunday, October 25, at 1 p.m. CDT / 2 p.m. EDT . We look forward to seeing you there! Tuesday, October 27: The Resilient Career with Cyndi Bennett | CPTSD, Trauma, & Resilience at Work Podcast Launches Why does work feel so hard when you know you’re capable? If you’ve ever spiraled after feedback from your boss, overthought an interaction, or struggled to set a boundary, you know that complex trauma doesn’t stay neatly outside the office. That’s what we’ll explore on The Resilient Career with Cyndi Bennett | CPTSD, Trauma, & Resilience at Work , podcast launching Tuesday, October 27. As a career coach and trauma survivor, I’ll bring both my professional experience and my lived understanding to conversations about workplace triggers, difficult managers, people-pleasing, boundaries, and career confidence. My hope is that these conversations help you understand the patterns beneath your professional life so you can make choices that support both your career and your well-being. Your past may be part of your story. It doesn’t have to write the rest of your career. Speaking at the Healing Together Conference 2027 I’m also preparing to speak at the Healing Together Conference 2027, a gathering for people living with dissociative identity disorder (DID) and those who support them. This opportunity is personal for me. I live with a DID diagnosis, and I’m grateful for the chance to bring together my lived experience and my work as a trauma-informed career coach. One question at the heart of my work is: What might become possible when we stop assuming the ways we struggle mean we are incapable, and start understanding what our systems need to succeed? My presentation is Building a Career That Fits the Whole System : A Practical Guide for Plural People and Those Who Support Them . I‘ll have a table there to promote The Resilient Career Academy, so please consider this a personal invitation to visit me in person. I would treasure an opportunity to connect. The conference takes place February 26–28, 2027 , at the DoubleTree by Hilton Orlando at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida, with virtual attendance available. Presentation time to be announced. Explore Healing Together 2027 In Case You Missed It Recently, we’ve been exploring the many ways complex trauma can shape our working lives, from workplace triggers and professional identity to what we want from our careers beyond simply getting through the day. We’ve also looked at how these patterns can show up in caring professions, including nursing. If you missed an article or want to revisit a topic that spoke to you, you can catch up in the Resilient Career Academy publication . Inside the Resilient Career Academy I’m planning upcoming webinars for the Resilient Career Academy, and I’d love your help deciding what to offer first. My goal is to focus on what you’re navigating right now and give you practical strategies to take your next step. Here is a list of topics I am considering: * When Work Triggers You: Recognize the Pattern and Find Your Next Step * Boundaries at Work When Saying No Feels Unsafe * Beyond Survival: Figuring Out What You Want From Your Career * When Your Business Triggers You: Recognize the Pattern and Find Your Next Step These are potential topics, with dates and details still to come. Paid subscribers can attend these webinars at no additional cost. Free subscribers are welcome to register for a fee. Cast your vote below to help shape what we explore next. There’s no deadline to share your preference. Your vote will help shape upcoming webinars, whenever you find this issue. Not seeing what you need here? Message me and let me know what you’re navigating or what you’d like us to explore. I’d love to hear from you. You can explore the Resilient Career Academy membership here . One Question for You: What Would Make These Emails Most Valuable? As the podcast launches and this community grows, I’ve been thinking about the role of this newsletter. I’ve considered moving to a monthly roundup, so you have one place to catch up on recent content and see what’s coming next. But I’ve also been reminded that connection isn’t just about how often an email arrives. It’s also about feeling understood, finding something that helps, and knowing you’re part of a community where you don’t have to navigate these experiences alone. Rather than making that decision without you, I’d love to hear your thoughts. When you open an email from me, what do you most hope to find? Is it a personal story, a practical strategy you can try at work, a deeper exploration of CPTSD and careers, a podcast recommendation, or news about opportunities to connect? And how often would hearing from me feel genuinely useful? You can simply reply to this email. I read your responses, and they’ll help me decide how to make our time together here more meaningful. Thank you for being here and for helping shape this community. Whether you join a conversation, share what’s on your mind, or quietly read along, I’m glad you’re part of it. Take good care of yourself. I look forward to hearing from you. Warmly,Cyndi This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

Have you ever sat in your car after a grueling twelve-hour shift as an emergency room nurse and just couldn’t move? The fatigue hits hard once you leave those doors and finally sit down without someone needing you. The day was chaotic. Perhaps it was a full moon. Critical patients were everywhere. You barely had a chance to go to the bathroom. Lunch was a quick pass through the break room to inhale the food you brought. And a young child, the same age as your son, did not survive a car accident. You kept working afterward, carrying that heaviness through the rest of your shift. Now you’re looking at your phone. There’s a reminder for the in-service training you signed up to attend but never reached. You missed it again. You had wanted to be there. It was an opportunity to learn, build your skills, and take another step toward the career you wanted. But sitting in your car, you feel relieved that you don’t have to take on one more thing. Then comes the question: How are you supposed to grow in your nursing career when getting through a shift takes everything you have? When Getting Through the Shift Takes Everything You signed up for that training because you wanted to be there. Maybe it would help you earn a certification, prepare for another role, or explore a specialty that interests you. Now you have missed it again. Other people manage to do this. Why can’t I? You think about the colleague who stayed late for a class last week. You tell yourself you should have planned better, pushed through, found a way. During the shift, pushing through was what you did. When someone needed help, you stepped in, even though you were already behind. When you needed help yourself, you hesitated. Everyone’s busy. I should be able to handle this. You noticed the change in your supervisor’s tone and wondered whether you had done something wrong. You checked your patient notes again. You wanted to be certain there was nothing anyone could question. After the child died, someone asked if you were okay. “I’m fine.” There were patients waiting. And you weren’t sure what would happen if you let yourself stop. Perhaps some of this feels familiar beyond nursing: watching other people closely, trying to anticipate what they need, feeling uneasy about disappointing them. Being useful may have become a way to feel secure long before it became part of your job. Now those habits can be difficult to separate from being a good nurse. You may volunteer for another shift while postponing the course that matters to you. You may want a transfer but worry that your manager will think you cannot cope. You may hear about an opening and immediately think of every qualification you lack. * I need more experience first. * They probably have someone better in mind. * I can’t leave the team when we’re already short. Meanwhile, your own plans keep moving further down the list. The staffing shortages, missed breaks, and distressing events are real demands. When your response is to ask even more of yourself, it becomes harder to see what support is missing or what choices might be available. Career development begins to involve questions you may not have expected: What happens to my goals when I keep putting everyone else’s needs ahead of them? And what would help me give those goals some room? Before We Go Further, Let Me Introduce Myself I’m Cyndi Bennett, a trauma-informed career coach and Founder of the Resilient Career Academy. I help professionals who have experienced complex trauma and CPTSD understand how their experiences may be shaping their working lives and career decisions. For nurses, that can mean recognizing the pressure to keep pushing through, making room for their own professional goals, and exploring career options that fit their strengths, needs, and aspirations. Today, we’re exploring how childhood caretaking patterns can become part of your work identity, how the armor that helps you get through a shift can make your needs difficult to acknowledge, and what it might mean to include yourself in the care you give. When Caring for Others Became a Way to Be Safe Perhaps you were taking care of people long before you became a nurse. As a child, you may have learned to notice what someone needed before they asked. You watched expressions, listened for changes in tone, and tried to keep people comfortable. Being helpful might have brought approval, reduced conflict, or made the day feel more predictable. Your own needs could wait. Sometimes, expressing them made things harder. Over time, caring for others became something you did almost automatically. You simply knew how to be the responsible one, the helpful one, the person who could manage. Then you entered a profession where caring for others is central to the work. Your compassion, knowledge, and clinical skills matter. Alongside them, there may be an old expectation that you must keep giving, whatever it costs you. They need me. I can wait. You postpone the bathroom break. You offer to help before checking whether you have anything left to give. You feel uncomfortable resting while someone else is struggling. Sometimes there genuinely is no coverage or opportunity to step away. At other times, help may be available, yet accepting it still feels uncomfortable. Both deserve attention. If being needed once helped you feel safe, someone else’s unmet need may feel like something you must personally resolve. That can make it difficult to recognize where your responsibility ends, especially in a workplace where there is always more to do. When Being Capable Becomes Your Armor At work, you may be the nurse people turn to when things get difficult. You stay composed. You keep moving. You know how to put your feelings aside until later. Perhaps you have been doing that for years. The armor can be hard to recognize because it looks like competence. People see someone dependable. They may not see the effort involved, or how difficult it feels to say, “I need help.” You might hear yourself agreeing to another request before you have considered whether you can manage it. If I say no, will they think I don’t care? You might want to tell your manager that you are struggling, then decide against it. What if they stop trusting me? Being the person who handles things may have become so closely tied to your identity that having limits feels unsettling. If I’m not the person who always steps in, who am I? That question can follow you into professional growth. Learning something new involves asking questions, needing guidance, and allowing others to see what you do not yet know. Pursuing an opportunity may mean disappointing someone who wants you to stay exactly where you are. When being capable and available has helped you feel secure, those steps can carry more emotional weight than anyone else realizes. What You Carry Beyond the Shift You get home, but your thoughts are still at the hospital. You remember the child’s face. You think about your own son. Someone asks about your day, and you pause before answering. “Busy.” You may worry about upsetting the people you love, or simply feel too tired to find the words. Later, you open the information about that training. You read the same paragraph twice. I’ll look at it on my day off. But your day off already has a job: helping you recover enough to return. Repeated exposure to other people’s traumatic experiences can contribute to secondary traumatic stress. Recognizing that exposure is part of supporting professionals whose work brings them into contact with others’ trauma. National Child Traumatic Stress Network Alongside your own history, there may now be experiences from work that need attention too. Some may touch something familiar. Others may be painful because of what you witnessed that day. Yet the habit of putting others first can continue at home. My family needs me. They’ve had a long day too. You may care for everyone around you while struggling to find somewhere you can speak honestly about what you are carrying. Having that s… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

Imagine spending years building something you’re proud of. You’ve invested your time, developed your skills, earned the trust of others, and created a career that means something to you. Then, seemingly without warning, things that once felt manageable become overwhelming. A meeting you would have walked into confidently now fills you with dread. A conversation with your manager leaves you questioning your abilities. You sit down to complete work you’ve done hundreds of times before, but your mind won’t cooperate. You know how to do your job. You’ve proven that over and over again. So why does it suddenly feel so difficult? For those of us living with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD), the answer may have less to do with our professional capabilities and more to do with what is happening in our nervous systems. And sometimes, we don’t recognize that connection until our careers begin to feel like they’re slipping through our fingers. When Work Stopped Feeling Like My Safe Place I’m Cyndi Bennett, a trauma-informed career coach and Founder of the Resilient Career Academy. For most of my career, work was where I felt the most competent and confident. I knew what I was doing. I loved the work. I had built a successful career in a large financial corporation, and my professional identity was an important part of how I understood myself. Then, in 2019, everything changed. I began experiencing an overwhelming flood of previously inaccessible memories of childhood trauma. Although I knew I had experienced abuse, I hadn’t understood the extent of what I was carrying or how profoundly it could affect my everyday life. I knew very little about trauma or what was happening in my nervous system. Suddenly, the skills I had relied on throughout my career didn’t seem to be working anymore. I struggled to concentrate. I experienced emotional flashbacks and dissociation. Situations I had previously navigated with confidence began triggering intense fear and insecurity. I went from being someone who could manage enormous responsibilities to struggling with tasks that had once been routine. And I was terrified. Not only because of what I was experiencing internally, but because I was afraid of losing the career I had worked so hard to build. I couldn’t understand how I could still possess the same knowledge, skills, and experience yet feel so incapable of using them. What I didn’t know then was that my professional capabilities hadn’t disappeared. My ability to access them was being affected by a nervous system overwhelmed by trauma. That distinction would eventually change the way I understood my career, my healing, and the support I needed. What We’re Exploring Together In this article, I want to introduce the connection between CPTSD and our experiences at work, including why workplace situations can activate trauma responses, how those responses may affect our performance and relationships, and why understanding what is happening can help us begin developing more choices. I also want to share what my own experiences taught me about the importance of support and why trauma-informed career development became such an important part of my work. If you’re beginning to recognize these patterns in your own career, I invite you to subscribe for free to Resilient Career Academy . We explore how CPTSD can affect our professional lives and the practical skills that can help us navigate work with greater awareness, confidence, and choice. How CPTSD Can Show Up at Work One of the things I’ve learned is that CPTSD doesn’t stay neatly contained outside our professional lives. We bring our nervous systems to work with us. And our nervous systems bring everything they’ve learned about relationships, authority, expectations, conflict, safety, and belonging. For someone who experienced childhood trauma, certain workplace situations may activate responses that developed much earlier in life. A manager’s disappointed expression might trigger an intense fear of having done something wrong. Constructive feedback might feel like rejection. A disagreement with a coworker might activate an urge to withdraw, defend ourselves, or do whatever is necessary to restore the relationship. Even positive opportunities, such as promotions, leadership responsibilities, or increased visibility, can sometimes activate fear. These responses aren’t necessarily conscious decisions. Our nervous systems may recognize similarities between a present situation and an earlier experience of danger, even when the circumstances are very different. When that happens, we may find ourselves responding automatically rather than choosing how we want to respond. At work, that can look like: * Overworking or perfectionism: Feeling compelled to prove our value or prevent criticism by doing more than is expected. * People-pleasing: Agreeing to responsibilities we don’t have the capacity for because saying no feels threatening. * Avoidance or shutdown: Struggling to initiate tasks, respond to messages, or participate in conversations when we’re overwhelmed. * Hypervigilance: Constantly monitoring our environment, our manager’s mood, or other people’s reactions for signs that something might be wrong. * Difficulty receiving feedback: Experiencing correction as a threat to our competence, belonging, or security. * Challenges with concentration and memory: Finding it difficult to think clearly or access information when our nervous systems are highly activated. Not everyone with CPTSD experiences these patterns, and these behaviors can have other explanations. But when trauma is part of our history, understanding that connection may give us a different place to begin. Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I handle this?” We can begin asking, “What’s happening in my nervous system, and what might I need to navigate this situation differently?” That shift matters. Because when we understand what’s happening beneath our responses, we have more information about what to do next. The Conversation That Changed Something for Me When I was struggling most intensely, I began withdrawing from the people around me, including the team I was leading. I had spent years learning how to protect myself by keeping people at a distance. I often describe that protection as titanium armor. The armor had served a purpose. It helped me maintain control and keep difficult experiences from reaching parts of me that felt vulnerable. But it also made receiving support incredibly difficult. Eventually, I realized I needed to talk with my manager. I remember walking into her office feeling physically sick with fear. I told her about what I was experiencing, how much I was struggling, and how concerned I was about my ability to continue performing my responsibilities. I even told her I would understand if she needed to find someone else to do the work. Her response surprised me. She told me she had hired the right person for the job. She still believed I was capable and qualified. And then she asked a question I’ll never forget. “How can I help?” Those four words meant more to me than I can adequately explain. At a time when I was questioning everything about myself, someone I respected still saw my capabilities. She didn’t need me to prove that I deserved support. She simply wanted to understand what would help. That conversation didn’t resolve everything I was experiencing. I still needed therapy, time, and opportunities to develop new skills. But it helped me begin to understand that receiving support didn’t have to mean surrendering my professional identity. I could be struggling and still be capable. I could need help and still have value. And perhaps most importantly, I didn’t have to navigate every difficult moment alone. I also recognize that not everyone has a manager who can respond this way. Disclosing a trauma history at work is a personal decision, and there may be very real reasons to protect that information. We can advocate for what we need without necessarily… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

Have you ever stood over an open suitcase, trying to decide what absolutely needs to go because you are not paying for another piece of luggage? You run through the trip in your head. What’s the weather supposed to be? Will you need a jacket? How much walking will you be doing? Can one pair of shoes work for everything? You’ve figured out what you need for the daytime outings. But what about the evenings? What are you going to do when you get back to the hotel room at night? Well, there’s that article you could work on. A few emails you could catch up on. Maybe you could make some progress on that project once you’re settled in for the evening. And just like that, your computer starts looking like an essential item. That’s where I found myself before the first trip of my five-week sabbatical. But this time, with more fear and trepidation than leaving a laptop behind probably warrants, I decided it was staying home. I wanted to be present with my husband, even if part of my brain was convinced I would spend the rest of my sabbatical catching up. And as we traveled, something unexpected happened. Without work filling every available space, there was room to think about the future of my coaching business. What could it look like? What possibilities had I been too busy to consider? Making Room for What Could Be Maybe you recognize that busyness, too. Between getting through the workday, taking care of the people who depend on you, and keeping up with everything else, when is there room to think about what you want next? You can spend so much time managing the life you have that you rarely get to consider what you’d like your future to look like. You may know exactly what needs your attention today. But if someone asked what you want your work to make possible over the next few years, would you know where to begin? In What Do You Want From Your Career When Survival Is No Longer the Only Goal? , we explore that question without asking you to abandon the stability you’ve worked hard to build. The article offers a place to begin noticing what you want more room for. Paid members can go further with a worked example and The Beyond-Survival Career Reflection Guide, a companion worksheet for exploring possibilities and choosing one manageable next step. Help Choose the Podcast Art With all the traveling during my sabbatical, there was less time to work on The Resilient Career than I’d imagined. Since returning home, I’ve been working hard to get everything in place for the new podcast. The Resilient Career launches October 27! You’ll be able to watch on YouTube, listen here on Substack, or tune in wherever you get your podcasts. Before launch day, there’s one decision you can help with: the podcast art! Take a look at the two options below and cast your vote. Option 1: Green shirt, purple background Option 2: Blue shirt, navy background Thanks for helping bring this podcast to life. Your vote gives me a little more direction as launch day gets closer! And beyond the artwork, what would you like us to talk about on The Resilient Career? What questions about work or your career have been on your mind? Reply to this email or leave a comment. Your questions can help shape future episodes. Until next time, Take good care. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

“I wish I would’ve started earlier.” That is the thought that ran through my head before my husband and I reluctantly met with our Financial Advisor to see if we were prepared for retirement. He was turning 65 this year, and things, like Medicare, had to be done by a certain time. We put this meeting off for years because we were afraid we would be told we couldn’t retire until we were 80. The regret of not starting my 401K until a few years into my career was palpable, because at the time, there was more month than money. I could feel us holding our breath as she did the math. Our hearts were pounding. And I’m sure we were sweating. The exhale was in stereo when we heard her say, “You are not as bad as you think.” Whew!!! Sometimes the future we've imagined is more frightening than the possibilities actually available to us. My husband is fortunate that he is six years older than me, and that I will be working until Jesus comes. But even with the reassurance that our financial situation wasn’t as dire as we’d imagined, I realized there was another part of retirement we hadn’t really prepared for. What would the next season of our lives actually look like? We’d spent so much time worrying about whether we could afford to retire that we hadn’t given nearly as much attention to what we wanted retirement to mean for us. That sense of regret is something that I often hear from trauma survivors who have found my work in the twilight of their careers. “I wish I had come across your teaching twenty years ago.” My first thought always is: “Yeah, me too.” As someone who spent 25 years learning how to navigate the corporate world as a trauma survivor, that sense of regret and longing for what could have been are not lost on me. I feel it in the depths of my being, and if I’m not careful, these thoughts and feelings can lead me to a very dark place. But alas, we cannot change the past. Oh, how I wish we could sometimes. And while there’s room to grieve the opportunities we missed or the things we wish we’d understood sooner, I wonder how often that regret keeps us looking backward when there are still meaningful decisions waiting for us in the present. Whether we’re preparing for retirement, considering a career transition, or simply beginning to question what we want for the next chapter of our lives, there’s another question worth exploring. Who are we becoming when the careers we’ve spent decades building are no longer at the center of our lives? Before We Go Any Further, Let Me Introduce Myself If this is your first time here, welcome. And if you’ve been here for a while, I’m glad you’re back. I’m Cyndi Bennett, a trauma-informed career coach and founder of the Resilient Career Academy™. After spending more than 25 years navigating the corporate world, I understand how deeply our professional experiences can shape the way we see ourselves. I also understand how complex trauma can influence the choices we make, the opportunities we pursue, and the expectations we place on ourselves. Today, we’re going to explore something traditional career development often overlooks: what happens to our sense of identity when we begin transitioning away from careers we’ve spent decades building. We’ll talk about the emotional side of that transition, the desire to leave a meaningful legacy, and how we can begin preparing for a next chapter that reflects who we are becoming. When Our Careers Become Part of Who We Are Think about how often we introduce ourselves by telling people what we do for a living. “I’m a project manager.” “I’m a teacher.” “I’m an executive.” “I’m a nurse.” For many of us, our professional roles become much more than descriptions of how we earn a living. They’re connected to our daily routines, our relationships, our accomplishments, and the ways we contribute to the world around us. Over time, our careers can become woven into how we understand ourselves. We may be the person others depend on to solve difficult problems. The one who knows how everything works. The person who can step into a complicated situation and figure out what needs to happen next. There’s often a sense of pride that comes with developing that kind of expertise. And after 25 or 30 years, we’ve invested an enormous amount of time, energy, and effort into becoming the professionals we are today. But what happens when we begin imagining a future where those roles are no longer part of our everyday lives? What happens when we’re no longer the person everyone calls when something goes wrong? Or when the title we’ve worked so hard to earn no longer appears beside our name? For some of us, those changes may feel exciting. For others, they may bring uncertainty, sadness, or a sense of loss. And sometimes, we experience all of those feelings at once. When Professional Identity and Personal Worth Become Entangled This conversation can become even more complicated for those of us who’ve experienced complex trauma. When we’ve spent years trying to prove our competence, earn approval, or establish a sense of security, our professional accomplishments can become deeply connected to how we measure our worth. Maybe we’ve learned to feel valuable when we’re needed. Maybe being the dependable one gives us a sense of belonging. Or perhaps our professional achievements have become evidence we use to challenge an internal belief that we’re somehow not enough. I recognize how powerful that can be. And I also wonder what happens when the career we’ve relied on to provide that evidence begins to change. If we’re no longer achieving, producing, solving problems, or meeting other people’s expectations in the same ways, where do we look for that sense of value? That’s a question worth exploring before we reach the point of transition. Because the skills, talents, and qualities that made us valuable contributors throughout our careers don’t disappear when we leave a particular position. But we may need time to discover how we want to express those parts of ourselves differently. Preparing for More Than a Financial Transition When my husband and I met with our financial advisor, we were focused on whether we had enough money to retire. And that was an important conversation. But financial readiness is only one part of preparing for a major career transition. We may also need to consider what our days will look like, where we’ll find connection and community, what will give us a sense of purpose, and how we’ll navigate the changes in our professional identity. For someone who’s spent decades working within a structured environment, the idea of having fewer external expectations can be both appealing and unsettling. We may discover that we’ve become so accustomed to organizing our lives around our careers that we haven’t spent much time imagining what we want outside of them. And if we’re beginning to recognize how trauma responses have influenced our professional lives, there may be additional questions to explore. What parts of our professional identity reflect who we genuinely are? What parts developed because we were trying to feel safe, accepted, or capable? And which parts do we want to carry into the next chapter? These aren’t questions we have to answer overnight. But they’re worth considering while we still have opportunities to make intentional choices about what comes next. What Will Your Next Chapter Look Like? After spending decades building a career, transitioning into something different can bring up questions we haven’t had much reason to consider before. Who am I beyond my professional role? What do I want to do with the knowledge and experience I’ve accumulated? What would a meaningful next chapter look like for me? These are questions we can explore together through individual career coaching . Whether you’re considering retirement, a career change, consulting, entrepreneurship, or a different way to contribute, we can work together to explore your professional identity, identify what matters most to you, and develop a tr… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

Do you remember learning how to ride a bike? Maybe you started with training wheels. And with those training wheels on, you could ride. You weren’t thinking about balance or wondering whether you could stay upright. You climbed onto the seat, put your feet on the pedals, and took off. Maybe you rode up and down the sidewalk or raced the other kids in the neighborhood. You learned to steer around cracks in the pavement and how hard you had to push the pedals to climb a hill. You might have even gotten pretty fast. You knew how to ride your bike. Until someone decided it was time to take off the training wheels. Suddenly, the bike you had been riding confidently felt like an entirely different machine. There was nothing on either side to catch you if you leaned too far. The bike wobbled underneath you, and something you had felt perfectly capable of doing five minutes earlier suddenly didn’t feel so certain. Could I really do this without the training wheels? What if I fell? What if I couldn’t do it? Maybe you weren’t convinced. So someone offered to hold onto the back of the seat. They would give you a little push to get you started, then run alongside you while you pedaled. And once you had a little momentum, something wonderful happened. You could balance! You could steer, pedal, and keep the bike upright without the training wheels. As long as you were moving, you were fine. The hard part was getting started. When the bike was standing still, with one foot on the ground and the other on the pedal, it was a different story. You had to push off, get your feet onto the pedals, and build enough momentum to balance before the bike tipped over. That was the scary part. So you asked for another push. And every time, once you were moving, you could ride. You were doing the pedaling, the steering, and the balancing. But you still believed you needed someone holding the back of the seat to get you going. Until one day, the person helping you did something you weren’t expecting. They gave you that familiar push, but instead of running alongside you, they let go. You kept pedaling, gripping the handlebars and concentrating on staying upright. You were so focused on riding that you didn’t notice anything had changed. Until you realized you couldn’t hear their footsteps anymore. You looked back. They were standing halfway down the sidewalk, watching you. They hadn’t been holding on for a while. You’d been riding the bike by yourself. And that’s the part of this story that has me thinking about our careers. Because I wonder how many of us have spent years learning, growing, developing skills, and accomplishing things we once weren’t sure we could do, yet still approach every new challenge as though we’re that child gripping the handlebars, terrified that we’re going to fall. What if we’ve already demonstrated that we’re capable? What if the person we’re still trying to convince is ourselves? Before We Go Further, Let Me Introduce Myself I’m Cyndi Bennett, a trauma-informed career coach and Founder of the Resilient Career Academy. I help survivors of complex trauma and CPTSD recognize the patterns that may be holding them back, rediscover the strengths and capabilities they bring to the workplace, and build careers based on their own vision of success rather than the limitations trauma taught them to believe in. I’m also someone who spent a lot of my career trying to prove what I could do. For a long time, I didn’t necessarily see that as a problem. Being determined to demonstrate my capability helped me develop skills, solve problems, navigate difficult situations, and build a career I’m proud of. But as I began to understand how my own experiences with complex trauma had shaped the way I saw myself, I started questioning something I hadn’t really considered before. Who was I trying so hard to convince? And perhaps more importantly, why did I still need convincing after everything I’d already accomplished? That’s what I invite you to explore with me today. How can beliefs we developed about ourselves long before entering the workforce influence our professional identity? Why might accomplishments fail to change those beliefs? And what might become possible if we could begin seeing ourselves through the evidence of who we’ve become rather than the beliefs we learned about ourselves long ago? Want More Trauma-Informed Career Support? If you’re navigating the ways complex trauma or CPTSD can affect your career, I invite you to subscribe to my Substack for free. You’ll get access to trauma-informed career development articles and resources designed to help you recognize patterns that may be holding you back, discover strengths you may not recognize in yourself, and explore new possibilities for building a career you’re proud of. When We’re Trying to Prove Something to Ourselves There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to demonstrate what we’re capable of. When we’re learning something new, we don’t always know whether we can do it. We develop confidence through experience, practice, and discovering what happens when we try. But for some of us who experienced complex trauma, the uncertainty can run deeper than whether we have the skills to accomplish a particular task. We may have grown up with experiences that taught us to question our abilities, our judgment, our value, or whether we were good enough. Perhaps our accomplishments were overlooked, our mistakes were magnified, or the expectations placed on us seemed impossible to satisfy. Those experiences can shape beliefs about ourselves that follow us into adulthood. I’m not smart enough. I’m not capable enough. I’m not good enough. And sometimes, without realizing it, we begin building careers around trying to overcome those beliefs. We work hard. We figure things out. We take on challenges that stretch us beyond what we thought we could do. We earn credentials, develop expertise, receive recognition, and accomplish things that once seemed impossible. Each accomplishment offers another piece of evidence that we are capable. But something unexpected can happen. We accumulate the evidence without changing what we believe about ourselves. And so we keep trying. When Accomplishment Doesn’t Change What We Believe Have you ever accomplished something you weren’t sure you could do, only to find that the feeling of accomplishment didn’t last very long? Maybe you earned the promotion you’d been working toward for years. You were excited, relieved, and proud of yourself. But before long, the questions started creeping back in. What if I can’t handle this new role? What if they realize I’m not as capable as they think I am? Or perhaps you completed a difficult project, received recognition for your work, and immediately started thinking about everything you could have done better. Instead of allowing the accomplishment to become evidence of your capability, you found reasons to discount it. * That wasn’t really that difficult. * Anyone could have done that. * I just got lucky. * But can I do it again? And before long, you’re looking for the next opportunity to prove yourself. This is one of the more exhausting ways complex trauma can influence our careers. We may be trying to use professional accomplishments to change beliefs about ourselves that were formed long before we ever entered the workplace. The accomplishments are real. The skills we’ve developed are real. The career we’ve built is real. But the beliefs we’re trying to overcome may not respond to evidence the way we expect them to. We can spend years becoming more capable without ever feeling more capable. And when that happens, the next accomplishment can start to feel like the one that will finally settle the question. Maybe this time I’ll believe it. When Proving Becomes Part of Our Professional Identity Over time, that need to prove ourselves can become more than something we do. It can become part of who we believe we have to be. We become the capable one. The dependable one. The one who figures t… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

When was the last time you thought about what kind of work jazzes you ? Not what you’re qualified to do. Not what someone would hire you to do. Not what you’ve already spent 10, 15, or 20 years doing. I’m talking about the kind of work that makes something in you come alive. The problem you can’t resist trying to solve. The conversation you could have for hours. The thing someone asks for your help with and, instead of feeling drained afterward, you find yourself thinking about three more things you could have told them. That kind of jazzed. Somewhere along the way, many of us learned to think about our careers from the opposite direction. * What can I do? * What am I qualified for? * What’s available? * What will pay enough? * What feels safe? Those are important questions. We have bills to pay and responsibilities to consider. There are practical realities involved in almost every career decision we make. But what if those aren’t the only questions we get to ask? Before We Go Any Further, Let Me Introduce Myself I’m Cyndi Bennett, a trauma-informed career coach and the founder of the Resilient Career Academy™ . I spent more than two decades building my own corporate career before I began to understand how much our lived experiences can shape the way we navigate work. Today, I help trauma survivors explore what can become possible in their careers when we begin recognizing the patterns that may have been limiting our choices and start building careers around more than survival. And one of the things I believe deeply is this: Every person is uniquely equipped by the Creator with gifts and talents specific to them, and our lived experiences can deepen and enhance those abilities. That’s what I want to explore with you today. We’re going to look beyond job titles and résumés and begin looking for the clues that can help us identify our unique equipping : our gifts, talents, interests, lived experience, curiosity, and the things that make us come alive. Because maybe the question isn’t simply: What job should I do next? Maybe there’s another question worth asking first: What have I been uniquely equipped to contribute? We Don’t Have to Start With a Job Title Think about the way we typically approach career exploration. We pull up a job board. We search for titles similar to the one we already have. We read the qualifications and start sorting opportunities into two categories: * I could do that. * I couldn’t do that. And before long, the possibilities for our future have been narrowed by our past. We’re looking for the next version of something we’ve already done. But a résumé tells us where we’ve been. It doesn’t necessarily tell us everything we’re capable of becoming. That’s why I like starting somewhere else. I believe every person is uniquely equipped by the Creator with gifts and talents specific to them, and that our lived experiences can deepen and enhance those abilities. Our unique equipping is bigger than a list of skills. It’s the combination of the things that seem to have always been there and everything life has added along the way. Our natural gifts. Our talents. Our interests and curiosities. The way our minds work. The things we’ve learned. The experiences we’ve had. The problems we’ve solved. The perspectives we’ve developed. The skills we’ve practiced until they’ve become second nature. Put all of those things together, and the combination is uniquely ours. So instead of beginning career exploration with: What job should I do next? I think there’s another question worth asking first: What have I been uniquely equipped to contribute? Our Lived Experience Can Change How We Use Our Gifts I want to be careful here, especially when we’re talking about trauma. I don’t believe we need to call what happened to us a gift. We don’t have to be grateful for painful experiences or believe we needed them in order to become valuable. Our gifts don’t have to come from our trauma for our lived experiences to influence how we’ve learned to use them. Maybe you’ve always had a gift for recognizing patterns. Life may have sharpened your ability to notice things other people miss. Maybe you’ve always been a communicator. The experiences you’ve navigated may have taught you how to explain complicated things in ways people can understand. Maybe you’ve always been deeply curious. The problems you’ve encountered may have given that curiosity somewhere meaningful to go. Maybe you’re naturally good at bringing order to chaos, connecting people, creating something from nothing, seeing possibilities, teaching, organizing, advocating, analyzing, building, designing, listening, leading, or solving problems. Then life happens. We work. We learn. We struggle. We succeed. We make mistakes. We recover. We change directions. We encounter people and situations that teach us things we never would have learned in a classroom. Our lived experience becomes another layer of our equipping. And that creates a career question I find much more interesting than “ What am I qualified to do?” Where could I use this unique combination of gifts, talents, abilities, interests, and lived experience in a way that jazzes me? But What If I Don’t Think I Have Any Special Gifts? Maybe you read all of that and thought: That’s a nice idea, Cyndi. I’m just not sure it applies to me. I think we need to talk about that. Because some of us may genuinely struggle to believe we’re uniquely equipped at all. When someone asks what we’re good at, our mind goes blank. We can identify talent in everyone around us, but when the attention turns toward us, suddenly we can’t think of anything. Or the things we’re good at seem so ordinary that we don’t count them. Anybody can do that. That’s not really a skill. It’s easy. It’s not anything special. But here’s something worth considering: Maybe it feels easy because it’s one of your gifts. We’re experiencing our abilities from the inside. We don’t necessarily know what it’s like for someone who doesn’t think the way we think or see what we see. And for some trauma survivors, there may be another layer. We may have spent years becoming experts at identifying what was wrong with us. What needed fixing. Where we weren’t enough. What we needed to do better. How we needed to change to be accepted, valued, successful, safe, or loved. When we’ve spent that much time looking for deficiencies, being asked to look for gifts can feel almost unbelievable. You mean there’s something already in me that’s valuable? Sometimes the idea that we might have been uniquely equipped feels too good to be true . So I’m not going to ask you to suddenly believe something about yourself that you don’t believe yet. Let’s look for evidence instead. Start Looking for the Clues Maybe you don’t know what your gifts are yet. That’s different from not having them. So instead of trying to declare what your unique equipping is, I invite you to become curious about it. Grab a notebook, open a blank document, or just sit with these questions for a while. What seems to come naturally to me? What do you do that feels relatively easy to you but seems harder for other people? Maybe you organize information quickly. Maybe you make people feel comfortable. Maybe you can connect dots like nobody’s business. Maybe you can look at a complicated problem and immediately see where to start. Don’t dismiss something because it seems too easy to count. That might be exactly why we need to pay attention. What do people consistently come to me for? Think beyond your job description. What do coworkers, friends, family members, clients, or leaders ask for your help with? * Advice? * Problem-solving? * Explaining something? * Making a decision? * Creating a plan? * Handling a difficult conversation? * Seeing something they’ve missed? Sometimes other people have been giving us clues about our gifts for years. What has my life taught me? Think about the knowledge and abilities you’ve developed through living. That can include your education and professional experience, but it doesn’t stop there. What have you had to figure out? What… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

Have you ever had a reaction to your boss that felt much bigger than what was actually happening in the moment? I have. I had been with the company for almost 22 years when a manager told me she wanted me to start accounting for my time. By that point in my career, I was a tenured senior leader. I knew how to manage my workload. I knew how to get my work done. No one needed me to account for how I spent every hour of my day before. But my response to her request wasn’t simply, I disagree with this management approach. It felt much bigger than that. I felt insulted. Controlled. Diminished. It felt like I had suddenly gone from being a capable professional who had spent more than two decades building a career to being a child who couldn’t be trusted to manage herself. And that intensity was information. Because my manager wasn’t the first authority figure I’d encountered in my life. Long before I had bosses, managers, performance reviews, deadlines, or corporate hierarchies, I learned what it meant to live with adults who held power over me. My nervous system learned to pay attention to control, criticism, expectations, unpredictability, and the possibility of getting something wrong. So when I encountered some of those same dynamics at work, my nervous system didn’t necessarily experience them as isolated workplace interactions. Sometimes, it recognized something familiar. And I don’t think I’m alone in that. For those of us with histories of complex trauma or CPTSD, our relationships with authority at work can carry more weight than anyone around us realizes. A manager’s tone, a request for a meeting, unexpected feedback, being questioned about a decision, or even a message that says “Can we talk?” can activate a response that seems much bigger than the situation in front of us. That doesn’t mean we’re overreacting. It also doesn’t automatically mean our boss is doing something wrong. It may mean there is more information our nervous system is responding to than what is happening in this particular moment. And learning to recognize that difference can matter enormously for our careers. Because the goal isn’t to make ourselves impossible to trigger. The goal is to understand what’s happening well enough that an automatic response doesn’t have to be our only response. That’s where we begin to create choice. Before We Go Any Further, Let Me Introduce Myself If we haven’t met yet, I’m Cyndi Bennett. I’m a trauma-informed career coach, and I help professionals understand how the after-effects of complex trauma and CPTSD can show up at work and create obstacles in our careers. But I don’t come to this work only as a coach. I’ve spent more than 25 years building my own career in corporate America while navigating many of these patterns myself. For years, I didn’t understand why certain workplace situations seemed to affect me so differently, or so much more intensely, than they appeared to affect the people around me. It wasn’t until my own childhood trauma surfaced later in life that I began to recognize something I hadn’t understood before: the survival responses we learned long before we ever had a career don’t necessarily stay at home when we go to work. They can show up in how we respond to feedback, conflict, authority, visibility, boundaries, expectations, and even success. That’s what much of my work is about today. I help us get curious about those patterns without judging ourselves for having them, understand what may be underneath them, and explore what becomes possible when an automatic survival response doesn’t have to be our only response. Because I’ve experienced these patterns in my own career, too. Including with my bosses. Why Authority Can Feel Different When We Have a History of Complex Trauma A boss isn’t just another person we interact with at work. They may have influence over our workload, our performance reviews, our opportunities, our compensation, our reputation, and sometimes whether we get to keep our job. There is a real power dynamic built into the relationship. For those of us who experienced complex trauma in childhood, power and authority may already carry a history. The first authority figures in our lives were the adults we depended on for safety, care, protection, and survival. When those relationships were also a source of fear, control, criticism, neglect, unpredictability, or harm, we may have learned very early that being around someone with power required us to pay attention. * We learned to notice changes in tone. * We learned to anticipate what someone might need before they asked. * We learned to avoid mistakes, keep the peace, stay out of the way, become indispensable, or figure things out on our own. Those responses may have helped us navigate the environments we grew up in. And then we went to work. Suddenly, we’re in another environment with hierarchies, expectations, evaluations, consequences, and people who have some degree of power over what happens to us. Our circumstances may be completely different, but something about the dynamic can feel familiar. A manager who closely monitors our work may activate an old response to being controlled. A boss who is difficult to read may leave us scanning for signs that something is wrong. Critical feedback may feel like more than information about our performance. An absent manager may activate the familiar belief that when we need help, we’re going to have to figure it out on our own. And sometimes, we may find ourselves working incredibly hard to stay in an authority figure’s good graces by saying yes, overdelivering, avoiding disagreement, or trying to become the employee they could never be disappointed in. None of this means every difficult interaction with a boss is about our past. It means our past may be one of the things our nervous system brings with us into the interaction. And that can help explain why two people can walk out of the exact same meeting having experienced it very differently. One person may leave thinking, That was uncomfortable. Another may leave with their heart racing, replaying every word, wondering what they did wrong, worrying about their job, or already figuring out what they need to do to make things okay. The meeting may be over. But their nervous system may still be responding to what it believes is at stake. Your Nervous System May Hear Something Your Manager Didn’t Say Have you ever received a message from your boss that simply said: “Do you have a few minutes to talk?” That’s it. No explanation. No context. Just a request to talk. And suddenly, your mind is off to the races. * What did I do? * Did I miss something? * Are they upset with me? * Am I in trouble? * Am I going to lose my job? By the time the meeting happens, we may have replayed our last several interactions, reviewed everything we’ve worked on recently, and prepared ourselves for a conversation that hasn’t even happened yet. Then we get on the call, and our manager says, “I wanted to get your thoughts on this project.” Nothing was wrong. But the response we experienced before that conversation was real. This is one of the ways our past experiences can shape what we hear in the present. Our manager may say, “I’d like you to make a few changes to this.” We may hear, “You didn’t do it right.” They may say, “I noticed something I want to give you some feedback on.” We may hear, “You messed up.” They may disagree with an idea we proposed. We may hear, “Your ideas aren’t valuable.” They may make a decision we don’t understand. We may hear, “You don’t matter here.” The words our manager actually says and the meaning our nervous system assigns to those words aren’t always the same thing. And that doesn’t mean we’re making it up. Our nervous system has learned from experience. If criticism once came with humiliation, if mistakes had consequences that felt dangerous, if someone’s changing tone told us we needed to prepare for what was coming next, or if keeping an authority figure happy helped us feel safer, it makes sense that w… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

Do You Remember Darth Vader? From the moment Darth Vader appears in Star Wars , there is no question that he is someone to be reckoned with. He doesn’t have to announce his power. You can feel it. The black helmet. The cape. The mechanical breathing that lets you know he’s coming before he even enters the room. He is intimidating. Commanding. Driven. Powerful. He walks into a room and people respond. He doesn’t appear uncertain. He doesn’t appear overwhelmed. He certainly doesn’t look like someone who needs help. He is strong in the dark side of the Force, capable of taking control of a situation without ever raising his voice, and seemingly unfazed by whatever stands in his way. For most of the original Star Wars trilogy, that’s the Darth Vader we know. Powerful. In control. A force to be reckoned with. And then, near the end of Return of the Jedi , something happens that changes the way we see him. Luke removes his father’s mask. For the first time, all of that armor is stripped away. And the man underneath looks nothing like the figure we’ve been watching. He is pale. Scarred. Frail. He is dying. Suddenly, there is this enormous contrast between the person everyone else could see and the person who had been underneath the armor all along. The armor hadn’t just protected him. It had hidden how vulnerable the person underneath it really was. We may not walk into work wearing a black helmet and cape, but many of us have learned to wear armor of our own. Armor that helps us look strong, confident, and in control, even when something very different may be happening underneath. And for some of us, part of that armor is being the capable one . * The person who can handle it. * The person who figures it out. * The person everyone can count on. * The person who never seems to need much from anyone else. And sometimes our armor can be so convincing that no one thinks to ask what it takes to keep wearing it. If We Haven’t Met Yet If we haven’t met yet, I’m Cyndi Bennett , a trauma-informed career coach and founder of the Resilient Career Academy. You’re listening to or reading Issue #10 of The Resilient Career Academy Newsletter , where we explore how the after-effects of complex trauma can show up in our careers and what becomes possible when we begin recognizing the patterns they can create. Today, I want to talk about one piece of armor I know well: being the capable one. Because being capable can be a tremendous strength. It can help us build successful careers, earn the trust of the people around us, and open doors to opportunities we worked incredibly hard for. But what happens when being capable becomes more than something we know we are? What happens when it becomes someone we believe we have to be? “I Can Handle It.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said some version of those words throughout my career. And most of the time, they were true. I could handle it. I could figure things out. I could walk into complicated situations, make sense of what was happening, and find a way forward. Give me something I’d never done before, and I’d learn. Give me a problem no one knew how to solve, and I’d start looking for answers. That capability has served me incredibly well throughout my career. It helped me become someone people trusted. I was given more responsibility because people knew I would follow through. I was invited into bigger conversations and given increasingly complicated problems to solve. And every time I handled the next thing, I reinforced something for the people around me and for myself: Cyndi can handle it. That’s where this gets complicated. Because there is a difference between knowing we’re capable of handling difficult things and believing we have to handle everything ourselves . For a long time, I’m not sure I recognized the difference. Being capable wasn’t the problem. My capability was real, and I’m proud of what it helped me accomplish. But somewhere along the way, “I can handle it” became part of the armor. It meant I could keep functioning without anyone knowing how much effort it was taking. I could solve the problem instead of admitting I didn’t know what to do. I could take on one more thing rather than acknowledge that I was already carrying too much. And because I kept handling it, the people around me had very little reason to believe I couldn’t. They could only respond to the version of me I was allowing them to see. When Being Capable Feels Safer For some of us, being capable became valuable long before we ever entered the workplace. Maybe we learned that the safest person to depend on was ourselves. Maybe asking for help didn’t always result in help. Maybe we learned to anticipate what needed to happen before anyone had to ask, or discovered that being responsible, independent, and easy to take care of earned us approval. We may not have consciously decided, I’m going to become the person who never needs anything from anyone. We adapted. We figured things out. We learned how to solve our own problems. We became resourceful. We learned how to keep functioning when things around us weren’t functioning particularly well. And then we entered the workplace, where many of those adaptations were rewarded. The employee who doesn’t need much direction can be seen as a self-starter. The person who always finds a solution becomes the problem-solver. The one who takes responsibility when something goes wrong becomes dependable. The person who can carry an enormous workload becomes the person everyone turns to when there is more work to be done. The workplace may have had no idea what it took for us to become that person. It just knew that we delivered. And every promotion, compliment, difficult assignment, and “Give it to Cyndi, she’ll figure it out” could reinforce something we’d already learned: Being capable works. It helps us feel in control. It reduces the need to depend on other people. It can protect us from the vulnerability of admitting we don’t know, can’t do something, or need support. And it may help us build a pretty successful career. That’s why I don’t think the answer is to stop being capable. The question is whether we still have a choice about when we put the armor on . Because there’s a significant difference between: I can figure this out myself. and I can’t let anyone see that I need help figuring this out. Between: I can carry this. and I can’t let anyone know this is too heavy. Between: I’m capable. and I have to be the capable one. And when that last one starts driving us, the armor that helped us succeed can also make it incredibly difficult for anyone to see when we’re struggling underneath it. What Happens When Everyone Believes the Armor? There is an interesting consequence to becoming the person who can always handle it. People start believing us. If we consistently show the people around us that we can figure things out, carry the extra load, solve the problem, and keep going no matter what is happening, eventually they stop wondering whether we need help. Why wouldn’t they? We’ve given them every reason to believe we’re fine. They may not see how much energy it takes to keep everything moving. They don’t know how long we stared at the computer trying to make our brain cooperate. They don’t see the anxiety before the meeting, the tears after we log off, or how little of ourselves may be left by the time we get home. They see the work getting done. They see capable . And this is where the armor can become incredibly isolating. We may desperately want someone to notice that we’re struggling while simultaneously doing everything we can to make sure they don’t. We may wish someone would offer to take something off our plate while continuing to reassure everyone that we’ve got it. We may feel hurt that nobody checks on us while presenting ourselves as the person nobody ever needs to check on. That’s a painful contradiction. And I don’t think it means the people around us are necessarily uncaring. They may simply be responding to what we’ve shown them. Our armor is doing e… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

Sometimes the hardest part of the workday isn’t the work. It’s the deadline that suddenly gets moved up. The meeting where you’re expected to present without much notice. The manager who checks on your progress for the third time today. The project that changes direction after you’ve already spent hours getting it right. The performance review sitting on your calendar next week. The disagreement with a coworker you can’t stop thinking about. The vague announcement about “organizational changes” that leaves you wondering whether your job is safe. Any one of these could be a normal part of working. They can also be incredibly activating. And when we’re triggered by them, we may tell ourselves that we should be able to handle it. It’s just a deadline. It’s just feedback. It’s just a meeting. Everyone else deals with this. But knowing intellectually that something is part of work doesn’t necessarily change what happens inside us when we experience it. That’s what I want to talk about: why certain workplace situations can trigger such strong responses, what those responses might be telling us, and what becomes possible when we begin to recognize our own patterns. If we haven’t met, I’m Cyndi Bennett. I’m a trauma-informed career coach, founder of the Resilient Career Academy™, and a trauma survivor myself. I spent more than 25 years working inside corporate America, and much of the work I do now focuses on something I wish more of us talked about: the ways our past experiences can follow us into the workplace and quietly shape how we respond to pressure, feedback, uncertainty, conflict, authority, and the everyday demands of our jobs. That’s why I think workplace triggers are worth talking about. Not because we need to eliminate every uncomfortable reaction we have at work, but because understanding what activates us can give us more awareness and more choice about what happens next. What Do We Mean When We Say We're “Triggered” at Work? The word triggered gets used pretty casually. We might say a frustrating email triggered us, a coworker got on our nerves, or a difficult meeting ruined our day. But when I talk about workplace triggers, I mean something more specific. A workplace trigger is a situation, interaction, or experience that sets off a strong internal response. Something happens in the present, but our reaction may be influenced by what that experience represents to us, what it reminds us of, or what we have learned could happen next. And that distinction matters. A tight deadline can simply be stressful. But for someone whose sense of safety has become connected to getting everything right, that deadline might activate an intense fear of making a mistake. Micromanagement can be irritating. It can also leave someone feeling watched, controlled, or unable to trust their own judgment. A change in priorities can be inconvenient. For someone who has learned to rely heavily on predictability, that unexpected change may create a much stronger sense of uncertainty or loss of control. And criticism can be difficult for almost anyone to hear. But if criticism has historically been accompanied by humiliation, rejection, punishment, or shame, even constructive feedback in the workplace can sometimes activate a response that feels much bigger than the conversation happening in front of us. That doesn’t mean every strong reaction we have at work is rooted in trauma. * Sometimes we’re stressed. * Sometimes we’re exhausted. * Sometimes we’re dealing with unreasonable expectations, poor leadership, unfair treatment, or a genuinely unhealthy workplace. Our reactions can also give us important information about what is happening around us. That’s why I don’t think the most useful question is immediately, “Is this a trauma response?” I think we can start somewhere simpler: Something happened. I had a reaction. What can I learn by getting curious about both? We don’t have to judge the reaction, explain it away, or decide immediately whether it belongs to the past or the present. We can begin by noticing it. And when we start paying attention over time, we may begin to see that certain situations, people, dynamics, or experiences at work consistently create a stronger response for us. Those patterns are where workplace trigger awareness begins. Workplace Triggers Can Come From More Places Than We Realize When we think about being triggered at work, we may immediately think about the obvious moments: a difficult conversation with a manager, conflict with a coworker, harsh criticism, or someone treating us poorly. But workplace triggers can be much less obvious. A deadline can be a trigger. So can an unexpected change in plans, unclear instructions, being interrupted repeatedly, having too much work and not enough time, being asked to speak in front of a group, or waiting for the results of a performance review. Even things that might look positive from the outside can be activating. Being recognized for our work can increase our visibility. Being offered a new opportunity can create uncertainty. Getting promoted can change our relationships with coworkers and put us in a position where more people are watching, evaluating, or depending on us. What makes this complicated is that the same workplace experience won’t necessarily trigger everyone in the same way, or for the same reason. * A manager who frequently checks on our progress might activate feelings of being watched or controlled. * A vague assignment might leave someone else feeling anxious because they don’t know exactly what is expected of them. * A disagreement with a coworker might create an intense urge to restore the relationship as quickly as possible. * A heavy workload might activate the belief that we have to prove we can handle everything without asking for help. Sometimes the trigger isn’t even the event itself. It is what the event seems to threaten. Pressure and performance can bring up fears of making a mistake, failing, disappointing someone, or not being good enough. Power and control can show up through micromanagement, rigid policies, authority figures, or situations where we have little say in what happens next. Relationships and belonging can be affected by conflict, criticism, office politics, exclusion, lack of recognition, or changes in how someone interacts with us. Uncertainty and unpredictability can come from unclear expectations, changing priorities, organizational changes, poor communication, or concerns about job security. And capacity can matter too. Excessive workloads, constant interruptions, technology problems, competing priorities, and too little time to recover can leave us with far less capacity to navigate something that might feel manageable on another day. This is one reason simply asking “What triggers me?” may not go far enough. We can also become curious about: What is it about this situation that feels difficult for me? Is it the possibility of failure? The loss of control? Being evaluated? Disappointing someone? Not knowing what is going to happen? Feeling excluded? Being visible? Having to depend on someone else? We don’t have to know the answer immediately. In fact, we may discover that two situations that look completely different on the surface activate something very similar underneath. And that’s where tracking our triggers can become useful. Instead of looking at each difficult workday as an isolated experience, we can begin noticing what repeats. That pattern may tell us much more than any single trigger ever could. What triggers you at work? Sometimes we know we’ve had a strong reaction without recognizing exactly what set it in motion. And because our workplace triggers are personal, what activates one person may barely register for someone else. I created the free Workplace Trigger Tracker Toolkit to help you identify the situation… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

Have you ever thought, “Maybe I should just work for myself”? Maybe it came after another difficult interaction with your boss. Or after leaving a workplace that had become unbearable. Maybe you were exhausted from constantly managing triggers, personalities, expectations, office politics, and trying to hold yourself together while still doing your job. Maybe you lost a job and couldn’t imagine putting yourself through another workplace like the one you’d just left. And somewhere in all of that, entrepreneurship started to look like an answer. If I work for myself, I can control my environment. I can choose who I work with. I can set my own schedule. I won’t have a boss triggering me. I can finally do things my way. That possibility can hold a tremendous amount of hope. And maybe some relief, too. But there’s something I don’t think we talk about nearly enough: We may leave the workplace. But we don’t leave our nervous system, our history, or the survival strategies we developed there behind. A quick introduction, if we haven’t met If we haven’t met yet, I’m Cyndi Bennett, a trauma-informed career coach and founder of the Resilient Career Academy. You’re reading or listening to The Resilient Career Academy Newsletter #9 , where we explore how the after-effects of complex trauma can show up in our careers and what becomes possible when we begin recognizing and removing the obstacles they can create. Today, I’m starting a new conversation about something we haven’t talked about nearly enough: what happens when trauma survivors become entrepreneurs. Leaving a difficult workplace and building something of our own can change a lot about our working environment. We may have more control over our time, the people we work with, the work we choose to do, and even the conditions under which we do it. But becoming an entrepreneur doesn’t give us a clean slate. We bring ourselves with us. Our experience. Our strengths. Our resourcefulness. Our hopes for what this business might make possible. And we may also bring some of the adaptations we developed long before we ever thought about starting a business. Over the next several months, I want to explore what that can look like, not because there is one universal experience of entrepreneurship as a trauma survivor, but because I think there are conversations we need to start having. And today, I want to start with a simple question: What happens when the survival strategies that helped us get this far become part of how we build a business? We Don't Start Our Businesses From a Blank Slate When we start a business, we bring decades of experience with us. We bring the skills we’ve developed throughout our careers, the things we’ve learned about people, the problems we know how to solve, and the experiences that have shaped what matters to us. For trauma survivors, some of those experiences may have helped us develop strengths that serve us incredibly well as entrepreneurs. We may be resourceful because we’ve spent much of our lives figuring things out. We may notice things other people miss because we’ve learned to pay close attention to what’s happening around us. We may understand people deeply, anticipate needs, adapt quickly when circumstances change, and keep going when things don’t go according to plan. Those things come with us. But so do the strategies we developed to protect ourselves. And here’s where entrepreneurship gets interesting. Some of the very same adaptations that helped us navigate difficult circumstances can look remarkably useful when we’re building a business. * Self-reliance can look like independence. * Hypervigilance can look like being exceptionally prepared. * People-pleasing can look like outstanding customer service. * Perfectionism can look like having incredibly high standards. * Over-functioning can look like the work ethic entrepreneurship supposedly requires. Sometimes the things that helped us survive can also help us succeed. Until they don’t. That’s what makes these patterns so difficult to recognize. They don’t necessarily show up in our businesses looking like trauma responses. They may look like the qualities of a really committed entrepreneur. And that’s what I want us to start becoming curious about. I Thought the Triggers Would Go Away One of the things I didn’t expect when I started my own business was that the things that triggered me would change. In my corporate career, I had become pretty familiar with the situations that could knock me off-center. I understood what it felt like to navigate difficult workplace relationships, authority dynamics, conflict, feedback, and the unpredictability of working inside a large organization. Entrepreneurship gave me more control over many of those things. I could decide what kind of work I wanted to do, who I wanted to work with, how I spent my time, and what I wanted to create. And yet, I discovered that having more control over my working environment didn’t mean I stopped getting triggered. The triggers were just different. Suddenly, I was navigating things I hadn’t encountered in quite the same way as an employee. * I had to put a price on my own work. * I had to talk publicly about what I could offer. * I had to make decisions without knowing whether they would work. * I had to invest time and money without any guarantee of a return. * I could create something I believed deeply in and have nobody buy it. And because I didn’t initially recognize some of those experiences as triggers, I didn’t necessarily recognize my responses to them as protection strategies either. I just thought I was trying to figure out how to be an entrepreneur. When Survival Strategies Put on Entrepreneurial Clothes The tricky thing about survival strategies in entrepreneurship is that they don’t always look like survival strategies. They can look like working hard. Being committed to our clients. Doing our research. Caring deeply about the quality of our work. Being careful with money. Wanting to make the right decision. Trying to build something we’re proud of. And sometimes, that’s exactly what they are. But sometimes there may be something else happening underneath. * We might spend months perfecting an offer because putting something into the world before we’re certain it’s good enough feels incredibly vulnerable. * We might give clients far more than we promised because the thought of disappointing them is difficult to tolerate. * We might keep our prices low, not because the market won’t support more, but because asking someone to pay us more brings up something we weren’t expecting. * We might research a decision endlessly, ask multiple people what they think, or sign up for another program because making a decision without knowing how it will turn out feels uncomfortable. * We might spend weeks figuring out something ourselves because asking for help doesn’t even occur to us until we’re already overwhelmed. * And we might work far beyond our capacity because no one is standing there telling us to stop. That’s part of what makes this so complicated. Entrepreneurship can actually reward some of these behaviors , at least for a while. * The over-functioner gets a lot done. * The perfectionist produces exceptional work. * The people-pleaser has happy clients. * The hyper-independent entrepreneur becomes incredibly resourceful. Until the very thing that helps us build the business starts making it harder to sustain. And if we don’t recognize what’s happening, we may assume we simply need a better business strategy. Maybe sometimes we do. But sometimes the business problem and the protection pattern are sitting right next to each other. The Same Strategies May Also Be Some of Our Greatest Strengths One of the things I want to be careful about in this conversation is turning every behavior we developed because of trauma into something we need to fix. Because I don’t believe that’s true. Some of the adaptations we developed to survive difficult circumstances may have also helped us develop qualities that serve us incr… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

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 wrong Do 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 Foundation As 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 Grounded Pattern Pivots Is 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 is when your body eventually learns the difference between smoke and danger, the same way it learns anything else, through repetition. That takes more than white-knuckling through the moment. That takes naming it. Like catching yourself mid-sentence and starting over, the kind of small correction that changes the whole outcome of the conversation. 🎬 Your Grounded Action Step The next time your body reacts before your mind catches up, ask yourself one question: Is this fire, or is this toast? Not “am I overreacting.”Not “what’s wrong with me.”Be specific. Examples: * Is this person actually a threat, or does their tone remind me of someone who was? * Is this deadline actually dangerous, or does urgency itself feel unsafe to me? * Is this silence from my manager actually a bad sign, or does silence itself put me on alert? Naming the alarm is what starts to change how loud it rings next time. That's the first skill, not the last one. If you're bracing before meetings, holding back what you actually think, or running on empty by noon just from managing what nobody else can see, that's the cost of staying here. Emotional Regulation in the Workplace walks you through how to build this into a lasting practice, so naming the alarm stops being something you do once and starts being how you move through your day. 👁️ Become Seen Spotlight Strategy Stop Translating, Start Telling For the first few years I coached, I described my work in the most polished way possible. Trauma-informed methodology. Nervous system regulation. Resilient career advancement frameworks. It sounded impressive. It also sounded like nobody, including me on a hard day. You think being seen means: * “Let me explain my expertise more clearly.” * “Let me use the right terminology.” * “Let me sound credible.” * “Let me have the polished answer ready.” Oftentimes, the polish is the thing keeping you unseen. People don’t connect with your credentials. They connect with the one true sentence underneath them. Let’s imagine you finally tell someone, plainly, “I don’t feel safe most days at work, and I don’t know why yet.” No framework. No explanation. Just that. How much more real would that conversation become? Listen, you don’t need the perfect language to be seen. You need one honest sentence. The win is when someone hears you and thinks, “she’s not performing this, she’s actually in it.” The win is when the polished explanation stops being the thing standing between you and being understood. That takes more than finding the right words. That takes telling the true one first. 🎬 Your Seen Action Step Before your next hard conversation, whether it’s with a therapist, a coach, or someone you trust at work, answer this one question: What is the one true sentence I’ve been avoiding saying out loud? Not the polished version.Not the explanation.Be specific. Examples: * “I don’t trust my own reactions right now.” * “I’m exhausted from holding it together all day.” * “I don’t know how to ask for what I need.” Saying the one true sentence is what turns being unseen into being understood. Learning how to build t… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

"He's been a little fussy lately," the mom said, handing her baby over to me in the church nursery like it was nothing. I’ve rocked six grandbabies to sleep over the years, so by the time she passed him to me, I was confident I could handle it. I know the bounce that works, the hold that works, the lullaby that buys me another ten minutes. And this baby was normally the calm one, the one who’d smile at you from across the room before you even picked him up. So when she said “a little fussy,” I wasn’t worried. I had this. Except nothing worked. Not the bounce, not the hold, not the lullaby that had never once failed me with any of my six grandsons. This baby, who usually lit up the second you picked him up, would not settle. And somewhere in there I remember thinking, this isn’t fussy. This is something else, and none of my tricks are touching it. I think about that Sunday a lot now, when I talk with managers about high-performing employees who’ve suddenly stopped showing up the way they used to. Because most managers aren’t new at this either. They’ve handled missed deadlines, skill gaps, off days. They’ve got a toolkit too. But nobody trained them for a high performer who’s quietly unraveling, someone who’s usually the calm, capable one, and none of the usual moves are working. That’s a different kind of unsettling than a straightforward problem employee. It’s the gap between what you know how to fix and what’s actually in front of you. That gap is where most managers make the decision that ends up defining everything that comes after. Standing there, not knowing what’s actually wrong, feels unbearable. Doing something, even the wrong something, feels safer than doing nothing... and most managers aren’t careless; they’re just caught in that discomfort. So they reach for the form. The Performance Improvement Plan (PIP). The tool that’s already sitting on a shared drive somewhere, filled with deadlines and checkboxes, because at least it looks like leadership. At least it looks like they’re handling it. But there's a way to close that gap before it turns into a document. It comes down to three moves, and none of them require you to already have the answer. The Pause, Plan, Pivot Framework Most performance issues get documented before anyone actually understands them. That's not because managers are bad at their jobs; it's because there's no built-in step for finding out what's really going on before the process kicks in. This framework gives you that step. It doesn't replace formal processes when they're genuinely needed; it just makes sure you're not reaching for one before you know if it's the right tool. Pause Before anything gets documented, there’s a question worth asking that most managers skip entirely: Is this a performance problem, or is this a human problem showing up as performance? They look identical on paper. Missed deadlines are missed deadlines. But a skill gap and a person quietly struggling through something require completely different responses, and you can’t tell them apart from a spreadsheet. The pause isn’t about waiting indefinitely. It’s about resisting the pull to document before you understand what you’re actually documenting. Sometimes what looks like a sudden drop in performance is actually a nervous system working overtime somewhere else, and the work in front of them just couldn’t compete. Plan This is where curiosity gets built into the process instead of skipped over it. A conversation that starts with “ I’ve noticed a change, and I want to understand it ” lands entirely differently than one that opens with a PIP already drafted. The plan isn’t the paperwork. The plan is deciding how you’re going to find out what’s actually going on before you decide what tool the situation calls for. This is also where safety matters more than most managers realize. People don’t tell you what’s really happening in a room that feels like it’s building a case against them. They tell you in a room that feels like it’s trying to understand them. Pivot Sometimes the answer really is a formal process, and that’s fine. But sometimes the pivot is smaller than that. An adjusted deadline. A reduced load for a few weeks. A direct, human question asked once instead of a form filled out by default. The pivot is choosing the tool that matches the problem, instead of reaching for the one tool you already know how to use. That baby in the church nursery wasn’t fussy. He needed something none of my usual tricks were built for, and I only found out what by staying with him instead of running through the same routine faster and louder. Employees aren’t babies, and managers aren’t grandmothers with a lifetime of bounces and holds. But the instinct is the same. The tools that have always worked will keep getting reached for, right up until someone decides to pause long enough to ask if this situation actually calls for something else. Bringing it together Pause before you document, so you find out what’s actually happening instead of assuming you already know. Plan a conversation built on curiosity, not a case built on evidence. Pivot toward the response the situation calls for, whether that’s a formal process or something much smaller and more human. None of it requires you to have the answer before you start. It just requires you to be willing to find out. That baby settled eventually, not because I found the right bounce or the right hold, but because I finally stopped cycling through my usual moves and just held him, quiet, and let him show me what he needed instead of telling him what I thought that was. That’s the whole shift. From having the answer to being willing to find out. From the tool you already know to the one the moment actually calls for. Want the full toolkit? Everything in the Pause, Plan, Pivot framework works on its own, but if you want the scripts, the self-assessment, and the trigger response guide that go deeper into trauma-informed management, I put it all together in the Trauma-Informed Management Quick Reference Guide. It’s available to Paid Members of the Resilient Career Academy. Joining gets you this guide along with the rest of the Premium Content Library, and it helps keep this work sustainable so I can keep writing pieces like this one. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe

Summary In this episode, Cyndi Bennett uses a simple but honest metaphor to open the conversation: the moment you realize the house you loved no longer fits. That same tension, loving where you are and knowing you have outgrown it, is exactly what a lot of people are feeling in their careers right now. Cyndi gets personal here too, sharing what hitting the ceiling of her own knowledge with this podcast taught her about effort versus strategy, and walking through the three-step process she used to move forward on purpose rather than out of panic. The Pause, the Plan, and the Pivot. This is also a season finale of sorts, with the podcast going on a planned break until October while Cyndi works with a coach to redesign the show. She is not going anywhere, just building something better. Key Thoughts * The moment you stop asking whether to grow and start asking how to grow is the moment the real work begins. * Effort alone hitting a ceiling is not a sign of failure. It is a sign that a different kind of knowledge is needed, one that effort cannot substitute for. * A pause is not the same as stopping. It is the space that lets you see clearly before you commit to what comes next. Without it, most of us default to the fastest fix available just to make the discomfort stop. * Planning requires your executive functioning brain to be online. If you are still in the middle of the storm, trying to plan from that state usually means reaching for the fastest exit rather than the right one. * The clearer you get about what you are moving away from specifically, the less likely you are to walk into the exact same situation wearing a different name tag. * You do not need the whole staircase figured out before you are allowed to move. You just need enough clarity to take the next right step. * A pivot built from a real plan is different from a leap made out of frustration. You know what you are moving away from, what you are moving toward, and what is within your control. When you move, you are not moving blind. What This Means For You If you are sitting in that in-between space right now, here are some things worth working through: * Check whether you are trying to plan from inside the storm. Before you map out next steps, ask yourself honestly whether you are regulated enough to think clearly. If the answer is no, giving yourself more time is not avoidance. It is information, and it is the smarter move. * Get specific about what you are moving away from. Not just “unhappy” or “stuck.” Is it the role itself, the environment, the ceiling on growth, the mismatch between what you do and what lights you up? Specificity here protects you from repeating the same chapter. * Get honest about what is actually within your control. You cannot control the job market or how quickly something shows up. You can control how you prepare, who you talk to, what you sharpen, and how intentionally you use the space you are creating. * Bring in outside eyes if you have been inside the situation too long. When you have been standing in something for a long time, it can be genuinely hard to see the shape of it clearly. Someone outside the situation often can. * Trust that you do not need the whole picture before you take the next step. The moving itself is often how the rest becomes clear. Come Journey With Us If this resonated with you and you would like to go deeper with the exact tools, resources, and community built specifically to support trauma survivors navigating their careers, consider joining us in the Resilient Career Academy. You don’t have to figure this out alone. There is a place where people understand exactly what you are carrying, and where your pace, your healing, and your story are not just welcomed, they are honored. If you are ready to move from understanding what you are feeling to knowing what to do about it, the rest of this article is waiting for you inside The Resilient Career Academy. I would love to have you there. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.resilientcareeracademy.com/subscribe