Please Mute Your Trauma: Workplace Trauma & the Human Side of Work
Welcome to Please Mute Your Trauma, a podcast about workplace trauma, dignity at work, toxic workplace culture, and what happens when organizations forget that employees are human.
Hosted by Tiffany Collins—a Navy veteran, HR professional, doctoral researcher, and recovering overthinker—this show explores the messy intersection of trauma, leadership, organizational culture, burnout, meaningful work, employee well-being, and the experiences people carry into the workplace.
Through humor, research, personal storytelling, and real-life workplace experiences, Tiffany examines the issues many organizations would rather rebrand than confront: organizational betrayal, emotional suppression, unhealthy leadership, workplace identity, belonging, retaliation, trust, and the pressure to remain productive while quietly falling apart.
Each episode asks difficult questions about the way people experience work:
What happens when professionalism requires employees to become smaller?
Why do people spend more energy surviving work than finding meaning in it?
What does dignity look like when someone is struggling, questioning authority, setting a boundary, or making a mistake?
And what would change if organizations stopped treating humanity as an inconvenience?
This podcast is for employees who have survived unhealthy workplaces, leaders who want to create more human-centered organizations, HR professionals questioning traditional workplace practices, and anyone who has ever replayed a meeting, questioned their worth after a performance review, or received a pizza party instead of meaningful support.
Because organizations do not have a people problem.
They have a humanity problem.
And work becomes meaningful when dignity is protected.
Please Mute Your Trauma: Workplace Trauma & the Human Side of Work
Latest Episodes
The 99.9% Problem: Amazon, Pregnancy Accommodations & Workplace Dignity
Amazon says it approved more than 99.9% of pregnancy-related accommodation requests over the past year.So why are former employees describing something very different?That number sent me down a research rabbit hole.I...
AI at Work: We Automated First. Now We Want Guardrails
AI was supposed to make work easier.So why are so many workers experiencing it as uncertainty, surveillance, job insecurity, restructuring, and the persistent question: Am I training my replacement?This episode started with...
Disney Changed the Deal: Employee Benefits, Health Insurance & the Cost of Cutting Coverage
Disney is changing its employee health insurance rules. Beginning in 2027, spouses and domestic partners who have access to medical coverage through their own employers will no longer be eligible for Disney’s medical plan.And yes, health...
Workplace Conflict Gone Wrong: The HR “Get-Along Shirt” Case Study
What happens when leadership makes a decision HR warned would go badly...and then HR inherits the fallout?In this real, anonymized workplace case study, Tiffany takes listeners inside a government agency where a long-planned retirement b...
When the People Who Know Stop Speaking: Boeing, Whistleblowers, and the Cost of Silence
What happens when the people who know the work best stop speaking up?In this episode of Please Mute Your Trauma, Tiffany takes a deeply personal look at Boeing, a company woven into her own family history and the Seattle communi...