When It’s Not Just Burnout: Recognizing Trauma in the Workplace
When workplace trauma happens, it's often hard to recognize for what it is. But workplace mental health problems can go beyond stress and burnout.
As a clinical psychologist who specializes in working with professional women, it’s become increasingly apparent to me that so much of American work culture is toxic to our mental health: The glorification of overwork and perfectionism. The lack of support for working parents and caregivers. The unforgiving productivity expectations. The expectation that we’re not just a person, but a “personal brand.”
We are overworked, underpaid, and burned out AF. Our mental health is suffering. And unfortunately, no mindfulness app subscription or corporate self-care workshop is going to fix that. Finally, it seems like there’s a reckoning brewing. The Great Resignation, changing norms and expectations for work among Millennials and Gen Z, and the surging interest in unions across the country are giving me hope.
When we think about unhealthy workplaces and their impact on mental health, we often think about stress and burnout. These are serious problems deserving care! But in the years since I opened our therapy clinic, Stella Nova, I’ve noticed another serious problem that gets less attention: workplace trauma.
When you’re not just “stressed out”
Sure, we know that military personnel and first responders like firefighters experience trauma on the job—putting oneself in harms way is a job requirement.
But when and how does trauma show up for other working professionals?
To answer that question, it helps to start with a definition. A trauma is a deeply disturbing, distressing event that we experience as a threat to our basic safety and survival. It may be a big, one time event, like a car crash or an attack. It can also be a series of smaller events that chip away at our sense of security over time. When we experience something traumatic, it’s not just unpleasant. It’s actually encoded in our bodies and brains differently than our other memories, meaning that it can impact us profoundly.
We’re more likely to experience something as not just unpleasant but traumatic when we feel we’ve lost control and autonomy. Negative experiences that involve cruelty or interpersonal harm are especially likely to be traumatic.
Many of my clients have come to therapy aware that they’re burned out, but not yet understanding that they’re dealing with trauma. Sometimes they’re trying to work through the aftermath, but other times, they’re still right in the middle of a traumatic situation.
Common Types of Workplace Trauma
Workplace power dynamics enable emotional abuse
Hierarchies in the workplace can make it easy for abuse to happen. Lack of protection for victims, the threat of retribution, and the possibility of damage to our livelihood all put employees at risk.
As a psychologist, I talk with clients whose relationships with their bosses sound a lot like the type of emotional abuse people can experience in relationships with an abusive partner or parent. That might look like:
Verbal put downs, insults, and harsh criticism
Deliberately embarrassing or humiliating an employee in front of peers
Gaslighting behavior, like promising a raise and then acting like the conversation never happened
Denying appropriate requests for necessary things like accommodations or time off, often as a power play or manipulation
Isolating the employee from sources of support, or playing peers off each other to foster distrust and unhealthy competition
Inappropriate boundaries, like texting an employee in the middle of the night to get support around their marriage problems
Because we often think of “abusive relationships” in the context of our personal or family life, it can difficult to recognize at work. But being able to put a label to this experience can sometimes be an important step in healing from it.
