- Childhood trauma can manifest at work in a variety of ways, including people-pleasing, avoidance, anxiety, and depression.
- Workers can learn to manage residual trauma at work by recognizing early signs, handling conflict effectively, and aligning their values with their daily actions.
- An expert outlines a few steps that individuals can take to address and resolve trauma, such as the TEB Cycle (thoughts, emotions, and behavior cycle) and building interpersonal relationship skills.
People-pleasing. Avoidance. Anxiety. Depression.
Unfortunately, what you’re struggling with internally is often impossible to keep bottled up at all times. It can negatively manifest at work — even when the root cause is unrelated to your job. Over the last few years, many workers have experienced this firsthand while dealing with pandemic-related isolation and the subsequent return to office life. But emotional experiences that happened way before the pandemic, say during childhood, for example, could be rearing their ugly heads in your day-to-day at work.
Research shows that the more trauma a person experiences early in life, the more likely they are to have depression, anxiety, and more days absent from work. For many of us, unaddressed childhood trauma can lead to poor boundaries, strained relationships, and toxic workplaces.
We sat down with Dr. Luana Marques, associate professor at Harvard Medical School and former president of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, to learn more. She says that, while therapy can help workers identify and address deep-seated trauma, there are also effective strategies that employees can do on their own to better handle residual trauma at work.
Responses have been edited for length.
Recognizing early trauma when it shows up at work
Glassdoor: What are some childhood behaviors that can show up in your work?
Dr. Luana Marques: As your brain is developing, if you are experiencing trauma, you are on fight, flight, or freeze. That part of your brain that is designed to protect you — the amygdala, the limbic system — is hyperactive. You are scanning for danger; you are sort of predicting that things are going to go wrong. If you hyper-train that part of your brain during childhood as a protection mechanism, then, as an adult, you are left with a brain that is more likely to fire under perceived threat than the general population.
Glassdoor: Can you give an example of how that type of “perceived threat” could come up at work?
Dr. Luana: You get an email from a new boss that is ambiguous. If you have a history of trauma, and it's untreated, you're more likely to use those lenses that you formed early in life to read it into it and predict worst-case scenarios. You're going to jump to conclusions. You're going to catastrophize what we call cognitive distortions. The brain does two things: It has to predict the future based on what we know, and it has to protect us. If your lenses are “people are going to hurt me,” the worst case will always happen.
Handling conflict at work
Glassdoor: How do childhood traumas shape our conflict styles? Are they likely to lead to conflict avoidance at work?
Dr. Luana: If you had parents who discussed conflict in front of you and worked it out, you learned that it's okay to be upset with somebody. If you had very avoidant parents who never even fought in front of you, you learned that conflict is not acceptable. If you look at the data and the literature, it's always much better— especially in the workplace — to approach conflict instead of avoiding it.
Glassdoor: What does conflict avoidance in the workplace look like? Are there different types of avoidance?
Dr. Luana: There are three ways that people avoid conflict. Some people, when they get anxious upon the idea of conflict, react. This is still a form of avoidance because they eliminate the threat by going towards it. This is the kind of employee that bursts into the boss's office and says, “I can't believe you said that.” They show anger as a reactive avoidance; they're trying to make that discomfort go away. Second, there are people that retreat in the sense of conflict. Those are the people that don't ask for a raise, they don't raise their hand when somebody says something to them that feels upsetting; they just eat it up and walk away. Then there's the third type of avoidance when it comes to conflict in relationships, especially at work, which is the remaining: It's the frozen deer in the headlights. You are in a meeting and you check out; your brain basically abandons you.
Glassdoor: Do you have any advice for people, especially those who tend to engage in these three types of avoidance?
Dr. Luana: The three strategies that I recommend people do to get them to engage instead of avoid are shift, approach, and align.
- Shifting is really widening your perspective — understanding, “What am I saying to myself?” and often asking yourself something like, “If my best friend was in the same scenario at work, what would I tell my best friend to do?” Take a third-person perspective to be able to clarify; that usually calms down the limbic system.
- When discomfort comes, we want that discomfort to go away as fast as possible, so we'll avoid it. We'll react, retreat, or remain. Approach is creating an opposite action. If anxiety tells you, I can't ask for a raise, my coworker is mad at me, or I don't produce enough, what can you do to go towards those things in a way that you can handle it? In the case of the raise, can you write ten reasons why you deserve a raise? In the case of conflict, can you say to a coworker, ”What you did upset me, and here's why”? Instead of avoiding, find action steps towards that discomfort. What we're trying to do is teach the brain that we are perceiving a threat when it's not a real threat. Conflict is always going to be uncomfortable, but it's not a lion eating you up.
- At work, what are your top two or three values related to work, and how can you do more of the things in your job that are related to that? If you care about innovation, are you working for a company that actually needs innovation? If you care about adventure, is your job leading to the adventure? It's really being creative about daily actions aligned with values. When we do that, there's less depression, less anxiety, and a better quality of life.
Resolving childhood trauma
Glassdoor: Are there steps we can take as individuals to address and resolve trauma?
Dr. Luana: My recommendation is something I call the TEB Cycle, or thoughts, emotions, and behavior cycle: Really pausing, taking a piece of paper, and linking what you're saying to yourself and how it makes you feel. When you “take a picture” of what's in your brain, you slow it down; you're activating your thinking brain. One, it's calming down that limbic system, and, two, it allows you to understand what it is that's driving this cycle of anxiety and avoidance. If it's my thoughts, then I can shift my perspective. If it's my behavior, I can approach, instead of avoid. It's my emotions, I can look at a more values-driven life. But you can't intervene on those skills until you pause.
Glassdoor: Do you have tips to help workers search for a therapist to work on issues like people-pleasing or a toxic workplace?
Dr. Luana: The Anxiety and Depression Association of America has a great database of therapists, so it's one way. Of course, your insurance is another one. But I believe in strategies. A lot of the skills that I'm sharing with you, I learned from my grandmother before I even went to graduate school. I really think that all of us could be bringing our emotional temperature down by practicing the skills I'm talking about.
Dr. Luana Marques is the author of Bold Move: A 3-Step Plan to Transform Anxiety into Power. To learn more about interpersonal relationship skills, explore Dr. Luana’s free EdX course, Building Personal Resilience: Managing Anxiety and Mental Health.