When Work Gets Ugly: Righting Your Emotional Ship as a Trauma Survivor | Your Trauma-Wise Career Guide Ep 50

Have you ever been triggered at work so badly you couldn't function? 😔 You're not alone.

In this raw, real, and deeply personal episode, trauma-informed career coach Cyndi Bennett takes you behind the scenes of a workplace blowup — and walks you step-by-step through how she got herself regulated in under 24 hours.

This is Episode 1 of a 3-part series on navigating conflict in the workplace as a trauma survivor. 

🎙️ What You'll Learn:

✅ What happens in your nervous system when you're triggered at work

✅ Why trauma survivors default to self-blame — and how to break that cycle

✅ How to separate past trauma from present conflict

✅ The power of setting boundaries when you're dysregulated

✅ How curiosity leads to compassion (even toward the person who hurt you)

✅ Why music, movement, and sleep are non-negotiable regulation tools

✅ How to use the FREE Workplace Trigger Tracker to prepare before blowups happen 

🆓 Get Your Free Workplace Trigger Tracker: 👉 https://www.cyndibennettconsulting.com/resources

🔔 Subscribe so you never miss an episode!

👍 Like this video if it helped you feel less alone.

💬 Comment below — how do YOU get regulated after a workplace blowup?

📌 Share this with a trauma survivor who needs it today. 

00:00 – Welcome & Episode Overview

01:30 – Series Preview: 3-Part Workplace Conflict Series

02:00 – Cyndi's Background & Why It Matters

03:30 – The Workplace Blowup: What Happened

05:30 – The Private Text & Public Fallout

06:30 – Stepping Away & First Regulation Steps

07:30 – Telling Her Manager & Taking Accountability

09:00 – What Was Happening on the Inside

10:00 – The Trauma Survivor's Knee-Jerk Response: Self-Blame

12:30 – Reaching Out to Repair Relationships

14:00 – Replaying the Event & Why Your Brain Does This

15:30 – Using Music & Movement to Regulate

19:00 – Getting Outside Perspective to Validate Your Reality

21:00 – Setting a Clear Boundary: Declining the Meeting

23:00 – Separating Past Trauma from Present Conflict

25:30 – Containing the Past & Returning to the Window of Tolerance

27:00 – Moving from Pain to Curiosity to Compassion

33:00 – Regulated in Under 24 Hours: A Major Win

35:00 – Closing Encouragement & Call to Action

When you're ready, here are 3 ways I can help you grow your career journey:

1. Free trauma-informed career development resources from my website! Visit https://www.cyndibennettconsulting.com for always up-to-date tips.
2. Ready to build a fulfilling career with trauma-informed support? Join The Resilient Career Academy Learning Community, where trauma survivors support each other, share resources, and develop career resilience in a safe, understanding environment
3. Ready for personalized trauma-informed career coaching? Explore my range of virtual coaching packages designed for different stages of your career journey. Visit my website to find the right support for where you are now. [Visit my website: https://www.cyndibennettconsulting.com/1-on-1-coaching]

DISCLOSURE: Some links I share might contain resources that you might find helpful. Whenever possible I use referral links, which means if you click any of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation at no cost to you.

Transcript

Cyndi: [00:00:00] Welcome back to your Trauma Wise Career Guide. This is episode 50, and boy do I have a doozy for you. This week I want to talk about a situation that happened for me in the workplace that I am still trying to process and figure out. This week is about what happens when, you get triggered at work or when things blow up in the workplace. How do you get yourself regulated as a trauma survivor?

This is going to be part of a three part series where I'm going to break down number one, how do you get yourself regulated after a big blow up in the workplace because it does happen, number two, the rupture repair process. So what happens when things go badly between two colleagues and how do you repair the relationship after something blows up. And then third part is about leadership and what that means [00:01:00] as opposed to the power dynamic. I've got some interesting thoughts about that and I want to talk about that.

So that's where we're headed in the next three sessions, and also, I have a surprise up my sleeve after that, because I'm bringing my dear friend in to talk about what does working with a narcissist look like in the workplace. Anyway, stay tuned for that.

But here we go on this one. 

Did you know that trauma impacts how we navigate our careers, but most career advice ignores this reality? Imagine feeling confident and safe at work while honoring your healing journey. Welcome to Your Trauma-Wise Career Guide, the podcast that reimagines career development for trauma survivors. I'm your host, Cyndi Bennett, a trauma survivor, turned trauma-informed career coach and founder of the Resilient Career Academy. If you're navigating your career while honoring your healing journey, you are in the right [00:02:00] place.

I want to tell you a little story about what happened, and we're going to start from the end, and we're going to work our way backwards like a detective does when they're looking at a crime scene, right? We're going to start at what happened-- what's the result? And then we're going to work back. Alright?

But before we do that, let me provide you with some context. I work in technology, in a top five global financial institution. And I have been working for the same company for 25 years. And I have earned the Senior Vice President corporate title.

Even though that doesn't even get you a cup of coffee. But it matters for some people, right? I'm not telling you that to puff myself up or anything like that, but it makes a difference from a perspective. So that's why I wanted to share that with you because it matters to the story, not because it matters to me.

This [00:03:00] story this week is about what happens when someone with that title, Senior Vice President, in a very public setting, still get knocked out and they get knocked sideways. It can happen to anybody in the workplace. And so we're going to talk about that a little bit, but let me tell you a little bit about what happened.

This week, we were having a routine project call with our business partners, our vendors who are working with us on this project. And I had an unfortunate incident with one of my peers, a very public one. We were in this meeting where we were talking about some timeline constraints that we were having, trying to meet a deadline.

He had been sharing about why we need to go a certain way, and then he had paused, and so I started to interject to offer a solution about a potential option that we could explore [00:04:00] together as a group to see whether they were interested in that solution.

But when I started talking, my peer started talking over me, and so I paused because I thought, well, maybe I just interjected too soon. Because that happens when you're on a virtual call and there's a time lag and you don't hear each other, so that happens sometimes. So I just paused, but when I paused, he stopped talking.

So, there was a pause. So I started talking again. As soon as I started talking, he started talking over me. So I paused again and I thought, that's really weird. Why is he doing that? Then I paused again and he stopped talking. So then I started a third time and I started talking and he started talking over me and I said, "I would really appreciate it if you would stop talking over me and let me finish what I have to say."

And at that point, I was so frustrated and I was triggered. Because I felt [00:05:00] like he was rude and he tried to minimize my voice and I was triggered for sure. I texted him on the side, personally and privately, and I said, "shut the hell up". And at that point in time, another tech partner that was on the call, who I respect greatly said, "Hey guys, this is not professional, let's take this offline, which I'm like, okay.

But then, the other guy, who was already talking over me, announced to the call what I had said to him privately in text, " Cyndi, you can't tell me to shut the hell up, that's unprofessional." So, at that point, my other tech partner said, "Hey guys, that's enough. Let's end this meeting right now."

So we did. We ended the meeting, and I was so upset. I was so upset that this happened. I was like, what just happened? I didn't think I did anything wrong. Several people messaged me afterwards to check on me to see if I was all [00:06:00] right, and I was definitely not okay.

I was so upset and I talked to some people that were working closely with me, but I was not in a position to talk. I just couldn't talk. I was, crying and I was not in a position to talk. And so I started doing the things that I needed to do to get myself regulated. I stepped away from my desk. I went outside to get some fresh air to kind of refocus and recenter myself. But it was a while before I could calm down and get all the emotion out that just had happened.

After that I got calm enough to text my manager and say, "Hey, I'm having a moment. I need to talk to you." I'm laughing because this is how things happen when you're not sitting in the same location as your manager. I texted him, then I stepped away and then I came back and the person who I'd been working with, who I was on the phone with, who saw me crying, who also [00:07:00] works on my manager's floor, had gone to him, after I stepped away and said, Hey, you really need to talk to Cyndi, because this is what happened.

So he called me on my personal phone and talked to me. And I said, " I'm really sorry to put you in this position, this is what happened. I don't know what brought that up. And I told him what I did, I told him what I said, because I was taking responsibility for my behavior and my actions, and I was triggered. And that was wrong. That was not professional of me. So I owned it. And he's like, "Cyndi, you did not do anything wrong. He should not be doing that." I said, look, I'm not sure why he reacted that way, because I was just trying to offer a solution to them because we knew we had this constraint and I had done some research in the background over the last couple days and worked with a couple people to say, "Hey, what if we don't have to deliver it at this timeline? What if we can push it down the pipe and you [00:08:00] would still get what you needed?" And I said, "You know how we work, we listen to our business partners and we try to come up with solutions to help them, right? And he's like, "yeah, that's exactly how we work." He and I have worked together for a long time. I said, " He has not been listening to our business partners, he's been like a power monger. He's been saying, "No, we're going to tell them what to do." That's not how my boss operates. That's not how I operate either. He's like, "Look you did not do anything wrong, I will talk to him." He said, "Look, I know this is really hard, but why don't you just take some time, step away from your desk, go outside, get some fresh air, get yourself calmed down, take care of yourself, and if you need anything, call me. Even if it's on the weekend, you can call me." This is why I love my boss.

So I just let it go. I let him take care of it. I didn't know what was happening, but I started to recenter and refocus myself on getting myself regulated. Because when something happens like that and it's unexpected... I have not seen this behavior from him in the nine months [00:09:00] that I worked with him, so it really took me by surprise, first of all. And it was not expected. It came up like... poof. I was like, wow, did I do something wrong? What happened there?

Now I want to open the curtain for you and show you what was happening, because that's what was happening on the outside, right? But what was happening on the inside and inside in my trauma survivor heart and mind? Because this is where the rubber meets the road for a lot of you, right?

What's your knee jerk reaction when something happens in the workplace, as a trauma survivor, what is your knee jerk first response, first reaction out of the gate. What is it? Did I do something wrong? Was I at fault? Did I make that happen? Right? That's where we always go, right?

That happens when we've gone through some childhood trauma, because it's a trauma response. As children, [00:10:00] who are put in very difficult, sometimes impossible situations where we absolutely need to have attachment to our caregivers, but they're the ones who are hurting us or abusing us, we create these very adaptive and creative solutions to being able to handle that. And one of them is this magical thinking that we are in control of what happens, and therefore if we are in control of what happens, if it's our fault, we take responsibility for it. And if we're in control of what happens, we could change it. Because that's what we want to believe. We want to believe that we have control, that we can change it. If we accept responsibility for what happens, then we could change it and make it not happen. But again, that's magical thinking and it's not true.

That kind of thinking is habitual for us who have childhood trauma. That's [00:11:00] just it. We've practiced that solution over and over and over again, right? And it takes a lot of work to undo that thinking. But I've done the work, I've done a lot of work on that. And so I knew it wasn't my fault, right?

I didn't take responsibility for initiating this situation, because I didn't. But I did take responsibility for my action, how I reacted to it. And also I took responsibility for exposing my business partners, the people who I had created some very valued working relationships with, because sometimes they get caught up in the crossfire, right? Sometimes there's residual damage to relationships when you're exposing other people to those types of situations.

Afterwards, when I got calmed down, I started to reach out to them one by one via text to apologize and say, I'm really sorry that you had to witness that. [00:12:00] That was very unprofessional, and I apologize. So starting to repair... Which I didn't rupture it, but it was ruptured. There was some damage done by observing that... the secondary trauma of observing trauma.

I have worked so hard to establish those working relationships and if you're a trauma survivor in the workplace, you know how hard it is to establish working relationships with people in the workplace. It's not our strong point and it takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of time to continue to build those and maintain those relationships. And they're important in order to get things done in the workplace. You have to be able to trust one another. You have to be able to listen to one another, and collaborate with one another in order to get things done. So you're working together, you're building that working relationship, and that was really important to me.

And if you are a leader or if you work on a team, you understand the value of working relationships [00:13:00] in order to get things done in the workplace. And so, I started to reach out to them and I kept hearing over and over again, " It wasn't your fault. Are you okay? Don't worry about it, we're all human." There was a lot of grace there as I was reaching out and trying to repair.

And so I let it rest because I had done what I could do for that day, and I really still was not totally back and regulated. So again, I'm going outside. I'm sitting outside. I'm playing music. I'm doing things to occupy my mind and distract my mind from that loop that keeps going on. Like what exactly just happened? My mind's going over and over again.

We replay it over and over again from multiple different angles to see, did I do something wrong? Could I have done something differently, yada, yada, yada, right? That's what was happening.

Now, of course, when your mind gets into that sort of situation, it makes it really difficult to sleep. Because your mind is not at rest. It's just continuing to [00:14:00] play this scene over and over again. You're seeing it from different angles and you're looking at every option. And look, that's part of what a trauma survivor does. That's part of what it means to have a nervous system that is informed by trauma. Because we're going to learn and we're going to make darn sure that never happens to us again. Right?

That's all part of autonomic nervous system. Okay, that happens automatically. You don't even have to try to do that, right? You don't have to work at it. It just happens. Because it's your safety protocol. It's the thing that keeps you safe, so that next time, oh, we've had this experience, we need to figure out why didn't we see it coming down the first place. And what were the signs that we missed? All the things, right? So it's really intended to keep us safe.

My mind is doing that. My mind is trying to keep me safe. My mind is trying to figure out the solution and how can we recognize that so I don't get bit by that again in the future. I wasn't spiraling. I [00:15:00] want to be clear, I wasn't spiraling into a shame storm. I was not. Because I had recognized, I didn't do that, I did not initiate, that was not my fault. I took responsibility for how I reacted to it, but I did not initiate that.

And so for me, was I humiliated in front of my business partners? Did I feel humiliated? Yeah. Did I feel embarrassed? Yeah. Did I feel a lot of different things. Did I feel all that stuff? Yeah, I did. I felt all that stuff, but I didn't feel shamed because I didn't initiate it.

But my mind was still spinning, right? I'm still spinning and I'm going through all of my tools. I'm going through all of my strategies and one of the things that helps me a lot when my mind is spinning like that, because, you know, at the end of the day, you get that shoulda, coulda, woulda thinking that goes on and it keeps you up. And not getting enough sleep as a trauma survivor is dysregulating in and of itself. If you do not get sleep, you can not be [00:16:00] regulated. So I know how important sleep is.

I had already done the journaling. I had already dumped what I could dump. But as I was laying in bed, it was still cycling. I'm like, okay, I need to get up. I get up, I go into the guest room, I sit in the rocking chair. That also helps, when you're rocking and you're creating that soothing movement, putting on songs.

And I put on music, but also I love this show called Britain's Got Talent because it's all these folks who have a dream and they want to be on the big stage, and they go out there and they do this great audition and they just break out. So that is something that is a pause for me. It stops the cycle of thinking. It gets me focused on somebody else, so it's a distraction also, but then, because there's music that's involved in it, it activates another part of your brain that is not your frontal cortex. So there's something very soothing about music that helps you soothe and bring your nervous system [00:17:00] down.

And so I would highly recommend doing some experiments with music. And how does that work for you and what does it do in your body when you play some music when you're dysregulated. Does it calm you down? What type of music will calm you down? What type of music will energize you if you're hypo aroused? Maybe you need some peppy music to uptick your affect. So music can have an effect in that way.

And so that's what I've done. So about 1230 ish, I think it was, I finally got to the point where I was like, okay, I think we're quiet enough now that we can go to sleep. I let myself sleep in because you need that extra rest and I did not need to be dysregulated the next day.

So when I logged in for the day, because I work remotely, I work at my house. I had received several communications or text messages from my business partners, from others that I had contact with, even some who weren't even on that meeting. [00:18:00] They had heard what had happened and they were checking in on me, checking to see if I was okay. I'm sorry that happened to you. And it really did something to me. It meant the world to me. They cared. They were showing that they cared. They reached out to me because they valued our relationship and that meant the world to me.

I went to my first meeting of the day was a daily standup meeting with my project management partners, and my intent was to apologize to them because they were on the call, for what had transpired and all the things. And they wouldn't let me. They would not let me apologize. " Cyndi, you did nothing wrong, you were treated badly on that call."

They affirmed for me what I thought, but I wasn't sure either. There was this still this doubt of did I do something. But they affirmed to me, that that is not what happened. That this is what [00:19:00] happened, that what I thought happened, did happen. That I was treated badly and unprofessionally on the call.

It really was so helpful for me to have that outside perspective, to align with truth. Because we're always going to maybe doubt our perception, because that's what happens to us as trauma survivors. Did we really see what we thought we saw? Especially when you've lived a very long time under a narcissist who will gaslight your experiences over and over and over again. So that's muscle memory coming back. You'll just doubt your experiences. Did I really see? Did that really happen that way? So having that outside perspective of people who observed that whole situation and verified, for me truth, was so helpful for me. Because then I was like, okay, good, I didn't do that. I did not initiate that. I did not blow that up at [00:20:00] all. I was just doing what I usually do as a business partner, and that really meant a lot to me.

Throughout the morning, more check-ins came and my grief over what happened in that meeting turned into gratitude, because I had so many people who really, genuinely cared for me and wanted to make sure that I was okay, that they valued our relationship as much as I valued the relationship. And that meant the world to me. It was such a boost for me emotionally. It was really an unexpected and beautiful experience, and something that I desperately needed at that time.

I have a counterpart on the business side, we're peers and we do the same job, but from other side. So she's in the business side on the tech side. She is in my age range, [00:21:00] if you will. So we're senior, Senior Vice Presidents, if you will. And also, both of us are working on establishing career coaching businesses after we retire. So we have a lot in common. We've talked personally before, and just chatted about, where we wanted to go, where we were headed, and the difference between our approach and what we were doing from a career coaching perspective. And so she reached out to me and said, "Look, I really want to have a one-on-one with you just to make sure you're okay." And I was like, okay, because I mean, who's going to turn down a free coaching session, especially when you're still a little wobbly. So she set up that call for later on the day.

I wasn't in a really good space to have a coaching call for my coaching business at that point, so I canceled it. And I was like, look, I can just do the minimum right now. I'm just going to stay focused on the work. I'm going to do the minimum. I'm not going to interact with him at [00:22:00] all.

Oh, by the way, one thing I forgot to tell you was that right after we ended the call, my peer tried to schedule this meeting to talk with all the male leaders and me, and summoned me to this call. Let's get on the same page sort of meeting, and I declined four times. He kept sending it. And I was like , "OK, here's what you don't understand, you don't get to summon me, and right now you don't get to talk to me. So I set a clear boundary for him saying, back up, I'm not talking to you right now. I think that's important. I forgot about saying that in the beginning, but I think it's super important that you set boundaries to protect yourself. And when you're not in a good space, then it's not a good time to really be having that conversation. Which is pretty powerful for me because I'm not really that great at sound setting boundaries yet. I mean, it's a work in progress, but you know, this was a win, so I'm going to take it, right? So I did that for myself and I'm like, yay, I'm [00:23:00] excited.

So the next step in that process though is you have to be able to separate the past from the present. And here's why it's really important, because I know from taking my own inventory that I had several triggers that were activated in that scenario. Several of them... not having a voice was one, being humiliated in front of other people, and not being heard. Those are my top three triggers, being invisible is also another one. So I knew that I was triggered for sure, and I knew that that triggering had resulted in that private text. Now, good news for me is I didn't make that public, which is a step in the right direction, not still where I want it to be right now, but, you know, giving myself a lot of grace to say, okay, this wasn't as bad as you think it is. Your reaction wasn't as bad as you thought it was, but how do we make [00:24:00] it better? How can we make that better? And that's sort of the learning process.

But the first critical step is to separate, is to create this separation between past and present in a situation at work. Because all of those experiences in the past, while they're valid and the emotions are still there, and very intense by the way, because there's a lot of records in my database around those three triggers. Many, many, many, many that have not yet been worked through in in therapy. And that's what you do when you have all those triggers, you take them to therapy, and you work through them, so that you can minimize the intensity of the experience when it comes to those. When those triggers are hit, if you only have a couple records in your database, you can overcome that and you continue to move forward. But when you have all of that, all of those records in your database about that experience, it makes a situation, seem bigger [00:25:00] than it actually is. It seemed really big to me, because I had all those records in my database and it was multiple triggers at one time. That's not a good recipe for success.

I knew that and I was like, okay. And you have to name them, like, I know that this happened, this happened, this happened. I know that those were all three triggers, but that happened in the past. This is part of this and this is part of this, and you have to kind of separate and contain.

So that past stuff, that stuff that erupted, I had to put that back in the " work on in therapy" box. Yes, I acknowledge that happened, those things are valid, and guess what, we're going to work on those. We're going to put them in the box and we're going to get to them in therapy, but not right now. That's not part of this.

And so once I separated, it was a little bit more manageable and I had more energy. So I was more within my window of tolerance so that I can see things. My frontal cortex had come back online. I was able to [00:26:00] focus, and I was able to see things a little bit more clearly because that weight of all of that past stuff was not on me. Hopefully that makes sense to you.

After that, I had a lot more emotional capacity to continue on with this process. Again, we're just working through, how to get yourself regulated once you've been dysregulated or when something ugly happens in the workplace.

So this is the process I'm demonstrating and I'm walking through this with you., In order to separate that and to minimize that, you have to contain it. And now you're looking at this, okay, now what else do I need to do? All that other stuff does not make this manageable. When you put your past in the past and leave your past in the past, that's what makes it more manageable. Because you have the skills to deal with the present. You absolutely have the skills to deal with the present, but not when it's overwhelmed by past.

As I got walking through this process, something shifted in me. I could feel it. I was more regulated. My [00:27:00] focus turned, not with blame or shame, but with genuine curiosity toward my coworker. What was happening for him? Because I had not seen that behavior in him in the nine months that we've worked together. I have not seen any of that. He's not been anything but respectful, professional, and aspirational. And I was just really surprised that he reacted that way. So I started to get a little bit curious like what was happening for him that he reacted that way.

With curiosity comes compassion. The only way that you can have compassion is if you start with curiosity, because otherwise I'm starting here with pain and I can't see past that. So as I started getting curious about what was happening for him, that he reacted so big, in such a big way, what was happening for him, [00:28:00] right? And that's a different place to be in. It feels different, doesn't it?

When you're looking at somebody else and you're going, "Hmm, what was happening for that person in that moment?" It's different. It feels different. I realized that something my nervous system had noticed and I had dismissed, was that something had shifted in the past couple of months for him.

And I was like, oh, see those little, you know, did your mama ever tell you to listen to that little voice in your head, right? I have a lot of those little voices in my head. That little voice that says, Hmm, what's that about? What's that about? Notice this and that. When you just see it out of context, it doesn't seem like much. So you just say, yeah, well, it's interesting, but, it's fine right? Now you can see the whole, you can say, [00:29:00] see all the flags. And when you have that perspective, that fuller perspective, instead of this microscopic perspective, you can see now all the flags in context. And so that helps you say, "Hmm, that this was not a me issue, this was a him issue, and something's happening for him and I'm curious about what that is.

In the next several episodes, I'm going to start walking you through the rupture and repair process, because guess what? It's coming. We have to repair because we have to work together. And it takes two. And we'll see how that goes. I'm not promising you anything. I know I'm willing to repair the rupture, if he is, but we'll see how that goes, because I don't know. But I can walk you through what a rupture repair looks like in the workplace, which is what I want to do. And then the next part is around leadership and the abuse of power, because a lot of us have experienced abuse of [00:30:00] power from people and it can be very triggering. And leadership is not the same thing as abuse of power. True leadership is not the same thing as power. It's how you use power to help other people. And so we're going to talk about that, but we're going to get to it probably in a couple next sessions.

But for now, I just wanted to focus on what stage one is. I've been talking to you about all of the steps that I took. In this process, when something blows up, there's three things that happen. One is, you got to get yourself regulated. Two is: you got to come to terms with, the rupture and repair process. And three is: what are the things that you can learn from it. How can you improve? In order to help you do that, and in order to help me do that, I've created a tool and it's called the Workplace Trigger Tracker, and it's free. You can get on my website and you can go to cyndibennettconsulting.com/resources [00:31:00] and you can get it for free. It's a matrix that gives you a way that can create awareness about what your triggers are in the workplace, what are your specific triggers in specific situations in the workplace. And, by the way, it's a working list. It is never, ever final because you're going to be in different situations and it's going to bring up different triggers or maybe in different situations brings up the same triggers, and then you're just adding.

It's just a tool to help create an awareness of where your triggers are, what the intensity of those triggers are. So what that means is if there's a lot of intensity, you have a lot of records in your database. So that's all that means it's just to create an awareness of, wow, this was pretty intense, so there's like a lot there that needs to be dealt with.

But it also gives you opportunity for you to create what those coping strategies are to help you get regulated quicker. Because unfortunately for trauma survivors, we're never going to [00:32:00] eliminate triggers in the workplace. We just won't, it's our nervous system protecting us. But what we can do is we can recover quicker and we can reduce the intensity by taking those triggers to therapy and working through them. And you're basically taking the air out of the balloon, so there's not as much intensity, there's not as much pressure there. You can do that by going to therapy, and I've done a lot of that already. There's still more left to do, obviously, but I just want to let you know that we're never going to get rid of that. So I don't want you to beat yourself up, number one. And I don't want you to have a wrong belief, that what's wrong with me, I can't get rid of these triggers. It's just not going to happen. So the best we are going to be able to do is we're going to be able to reduce the intensity of those triggers and we're going to be able to recover faster.

That's what that tool is for. And I use the tool. Listen, this is not something that I'm just sending it out to everybody else and then I'm not using it all. [00:33:00] I use it myself. I did the work ahead of time, I knew when I was going through it, ooh, these are three of my really big triggers that I have, and so I knew I was triggered, and I also knew what I needed to do to get regulated. So when you do that work ahead of time, you can prepare for when these things come up so you can recover quicker.

I was back to being regulated before 24 hours. That's a big deal. That's a really big deal. Honestly, it took me a week to get regulated in the past or more. But less than 24 hours, that's pretty good. And mostly regulated within a couple hours, but fully regulated by the morning of the next day. So I think that's a win in my book, that's a win.

And so when you move through that, now, I didn't move through that perfectly. I did not show up the way I wanted to show up as a leader, and I'm going to work on that. I'm going to put that on [00:34:00] my development list, and I'm going to say, Hey, let's look at that. Let's look at the trigger tracker again. Let's see what happened. Is there anything that I could do differently that could help to stop that "Shut the hell up" response. And so you're continuing to work on that and to continuing with your creativity to come up with and try out solutions that might work and make it better. So that's what you're doing.

So you're revisiting those things and you're revisiting what is on your trigger tracker, and you're trying to make improvements in that.

This was a really big deal. It really took a lot out of me. It was not pleasant. But also this happens a lot in the workplace, so I wanted you to have a front row seat to my experience of it and to give you the opportunity to see what I've been saying in action, like in the application. Let me give you [00:35:00] an example. Let me walk you through with me. While I am walking through it, I'm demonstrating to you how this works.

And it works. It works. it's not something I will "do as I say, not as I do". I don't believe in that. It is something that I use all the time, that I know works because it's worked for me and it's worked for countless others. I just wanted to give you that front row seat to say, Hey, this happens. Blowups happen in the workplace. Things get ugly in the workplace all the time. Sometimes we cause 'em, sometimes we're the recipient of them, but they happen all the time.

How do you respond to it? How do you show your resilience as a trauma survivor and get back up? And get focused and move forward. How do you do that? This is what this episode's about.

So if you want to get that Workplace trigger tracker, go over to my website, cyndibennettconsulting.com/resources, [00:36:00] and you can get your free workplace Trigger Tracker on there. It's free, totally free. Use it. Let me know what you think about it.

You can modify it. It's just a template and you can modify it for what suits you best. Some of you who have DID or multiplicity and you have multiple parts that have multiple triggers, feel free to modify it. I have to do the same thing. So just keep that in mind. It works, and you can make it work for you however you need it to work. So get the tool. It's free, it will help you.

And let me know here in the comments, was this helpful for you? What was helpful for you? What else did you want me to speak about? And what are some of the things that are still challenging for you and how to repair a rupture? Let me know what things were helpful for you. Let me know what you [00:37:00] still want me to maybe cover, or if you have any questions, please put them in the comments below. I really love hearing from you.

It just really helps to fuel my fire as I continue to move forward and it encourages me that I'm encouraging you. And so I just want to thank you so much for tuning in to Your Trauma-Wise Career Guide. This is episode 50 and I hope you enjoyed it. I look forward to seeing you next time. Take gentle care.

You're not walking this path alone. Every step you take toward a trauma wise career is an act of courage, and I'm here cheering you on. If today's episode resonated with you, share it with another survivor who needs to hear this message. Together we're rewriting the rules of career success. Keep rising, keep healing, keep building.