A few years ago, my father had a stroke. And in the middle of processing that, in the middle of being terrified about whether my father was going to be okay, I was actually at work and I was in a meeting. And during that meeting, I said something that I thought was important, something I thought was worth saying. I connected my father's stroke to history, specifically to the fact that black people's poor health outcomes, like hypertension, diabetes, strokes, traced directly back to nutrition and slavery, to the fact that enslaved people were only given access to food scraps, the parts of animals and plants that our slave masters threw away, the feet, the skin, the fat, the greens nobody else wanted, that became our food culture. And that food culture became our black American health crisis. And that health crisis became my father lying in a hospital bed. My boss at the time, someone I really, really respected, looked me dead in my face and essentially dismissed it. He minimized the significance of what I had shared, and he made me feel like I had gone too far, like I had said too much, like I had made it too heavy. And I remember in that moment just going completely quiet. Not because I was wrong, but because I didn't know what else to do. What I didn't realize then, and what I only understood three roles later, was that something happened to me in that moment. Not just hurt feelings, not just professional disappointment, but I got a wound, a real, real deep wound that quietly shaped how I showed up in every room after that. I started expecting to be misunderstood. I started waiting for it. I started pulling back my depth before anyone else could dismiss it. I started making myself smaller so no one could make me feel that small again.
And today we're gonna talk about it. So you might be thinking, what is career trauma?
SPEAKER_01Have I experienced it? Or you might be saying, hell yeah, I've experienced career trauma. But maybe you don't know the technical definition. So let's talk about what that is. Career trauma is the psychological and emotional injury that results from sustained harmful experiences in the workplace and the behavioral patterns those injuries create long after the original experience is over. Career trauma is not being sensitive, it's not having a bad day, it's not struggling with confidence, and it's not needing to toughen up. But career trauma is a rational response to working in an irrational system. Career trauma is a protective mechanism that once kept you safe, but now keeps you stuck. And career trauma is invisible while it's actually happening and only becomes visible in the pattern that it leaves behind. Now, most black women don't recognize career trauma. I didn't career recognize career trauma, and I'm a psychologist, right? So most black women don't recognize career trauma as the trauma is actually happening. Instead, they recognize it as confusion, maybe frustration, sometimes exhaustion, maybe even self-doubt. That's what you're feeling and thinking in the moment. The trauma label only becomes clear in retrospect when you look back and you see the pattern it carved into your behavior. So the pattern, it can show up as expecting and waiting to be misunderstood before you even speak. Or it can show up as stopping sharing of ideas because the last time that you did that, the last time you actually shared your thoughts, they were stolen or they were ignored. Or
the pattern of behavior that contributes to work trauma, it can show up as you overworking to prove you belong in rooms where you've already earned your seat. Or the pattern of behavior can show up as you freezing up or going completely quiet in spaces where you used to be able to speak freely. The pattern can show up in a variety of different ways, including you shrinking your intellectual depth and historical knowledge to make others comfortable. And the cruelest part of all of this is that the system that created the wound also gets to name it. And it's never called trauma. It's called something like you need to work on your executive presence, or you struggle with confidence. Or maybe you're not quite ready for the next leadership level. Sometimes it's called your communication style. It needs to be developed more. Or it might be called you don't speak up enough in meetings. So you spend weeks, months, years trying to fix a symptom while the wound underneath goes untreated. Now imagine, imagine if you broke your leg and you go to the hospital to see the doctor, and the doctor examines you, and then he says your leg is broken, and then he hands you lip balm. Your lips are not the problem. But every time you point to your leg, he hands you more lip balm, more confidently, more urgently. Have you tried this lip balm? That is what traditional executive presence advice does for black women who are carrying career trauma. Now, let's talk about why this matters specifically for introverts.
Introversion already gets pathologized in corporate spaces. It's treated as something to fix rather than a strength to actually be leveraged. Now, if you add career trauma on top of that, and the introvert who was already being told to speak up more, to be more visible, to be more present, also starts to believe that her quietness is the problem when the real problem is that she learned quietness was safer. There's a difference between choosing to be strategic and selective about when you speak, which is an introvert strength that we talk about all the time on this podcast, and going quiet because you learned that speaking up gets you dismissed, gets you stolen from, or gets you labeled as difficult, because those things are a career trauma response. All right. So let's talk about the wounds. It might be helpful if we kind of unpack what these wounds could look like so that you can determine whether you can connect with this, whether you've experienced this, whether you too have been suffering from some form of career trauma. So let's talk about the specific wounds, or at least a few common ones. The first wound that I want to talk about is what I call the misunderstanding wound. So that is where you shared something true, something deep, something historically grounded or just strategically brilliant, and it was dismissed
or it was minimized or it was ignored. Now, today, as a result of that, you pre-edit yourself before you even open your mouth. You decide what's quote unquote too much before anyone else gets to tell you. That is the misunderstanding wound. A second type of wound that is very much related to career trauma is the stolen credit wound. Your idea left the room in your voice and came back in someone else's name. How many times have that happened to you? Now, you hold back your best thinking in meetings today because of that happening. And you only share it in writing or privately, or even worse, not at all. And that's because you've learned that visibility is risky. A third type of wound that's associated with career trauma is what I call the overworking wound, which means you work four times as hard to prove that you belong. And then twice as hard again
on top of that. Yet it was never quite enough. And so today, now you can't stop overworking. Not because you're necessarily enjoying the work, but because some part of you still believes the day you slow down is the day they find out you were never supposed to be there. Wound number four is the room wound. Now, there was a time you walked into rooms with complete confidence. You knew who you were, you knew what you could contribute, you would have bomb, right? But then something happened. Maybe it was a dismissal or a humiliation or a moment of being talked over or talked around. And now you feel it every time you approach that kind of room or that kind of meeting. The hesitation that you feel at the door, the voice that gets smaller before you've said a word. My question to you is as you listen to these wounds, which of these are you still carrying into rooms that have nothing to do with where you got hurt? Okay, so you heard a little bit about something that contributed to my personal career trauma, which I hope was helpful for you to hear. Then we talked about what career trauma is and what career trauma is not. And then we went into a little specifics around the type of wounds that show up when you might be suffering from career trauma. Now I want to talk about, because you're probably like, all right, yes, I think I may be suffering a little bit here from career trauma. Or at a minimum, you might not be labeling it as career trauma, but you are relating to one or more of the things that we've talked about. So it's only natural for us to talk about, okay, how do you start treating this? How do I start recovering from this? How do I deal with this while I'm still trying to grow my career
and become an executive? So let's talk about this. The first thing I want to point out is you've got to name it. You cannot heal what you refuse to identify. And this is not just about career trauma. That's about anything in life. You can't heal it if you don't identify it. So today, specifically as we're talking about career trauma, that same rule applies. The first act of healing is calling it what it is. Not I struggle with confidence, not I need to work on speaking up, but calling it career trauma caused by specific events in specific rooms or specific work locations with specific people that created specific patterns. The second step is you need to start separating the pattern from the present. So the boss who dismissed your depth is not in this room with you today. The colleague who stole your idea is not in this meeting with you. The system that made you feel like you had to earn your seat is not making that decision today. Ask yourself before you walk into every high-stakes situation, am I responding to what's actually happening right now, the reality of my current time? Or am I responding to what happened to me before? The third step is you've got to start reclaiming what you gave away. What did you stop doing because of the wound that you now hold? Did you stop sharing historical and intellectual depth? If you did, then it's time to start again. Did you stop proposing bold ideas in meetings? If you did, then it's time to start again. Did you stop advocating for yourself in salary conversations and performance reviews? If you did, then it is time to start again. Reclaiming is not reckless. It's strategic. You don't reclaim everything at once in every room, but you choose the right room, the right moment, the right relationship. And you take one piece of yourself back at a time. The fourth step in starting to heal and starting to treat the wound that you have is building the right container.
Healing career trauma alone is slow and incomplete. The most powerful way to accelerate is in community, being with other black women who see the pattern, name it without shame, and reflect your power back to you when you yourself have forgotten that it's there. Now I want to go back to that meeting for a second, the one where I went quiet, the one that I talked about at the top of this episode. I know now that I wasn't wrong to connect my father's stroke to black history in America and slavery. I was right. I was deeply, completely right. And the dismissal wasn't about the quality of my thinking, it was about someone's inability to hold the weight of what I was saying. That was never my problem
to solve. And whatever wound you're carrying from your own version of that moment, whatever made you smaller, whatever feedback made you doubt yourself, whatever colleague or boss or company or system taught you that your full self was too much, that was never, never your problem to solve either. You were wounded, and wounds deserve to be treated, not hidden away, not worked around, not ignored, and not rebranded as a development area. You have to treat it. And that's what we're doing on March 14th. So join me for my free webinar on March 14th. It is called Command the Room, Build Executive Presence in 90 Days as a Black Introverted Woman without code switching
or selling out. The registration link is in the show notes. Next week's episode, we are talking about the difference between being respected and being liked as a leader in your organization and why one will get you promoted and the other is going to get you stuck. So until next time, lady leader, keep leading your introvert way.