Have you ever played the arcade game “whack-a-mole”?
I hadn’t thought about it in years until I found myself standing in front of one at a birthday party last month, mallet in hand, five years old again.
The arcade was loud, all bells and flashing lights, and I had exactly one job. Hit the mole.
I remember the satisfaction of that first solid thwack, the mallet connecting, the mole dropping out of sight, the small rush of “got it.”
For half a second I actually believed the game was mine.
Then another one popped up two holes over.
Then another, behind me almost, before I’d even turned.
I kept swinging, kept connecting, kept feeling that flicker of relief every time I landed a hit, and it never once added up to done.
The moles didn’t stop. They just moved.
That game is the closest thing I’ve found to what living with complex trauma at work can feel like.
You handle the thing that felt unmanageable in the meeting.
You finally set the boundary you’d been avoiding for months.
You get through the performance review without spiraling.
And just as you catch your breath, something else pops up.
A tone in an email.
A closed door.
A compliment that somehow still lands like a threat.
You’re not imagining it, and you’re not doing it wrong.
The moles keep moving because the game was never really about the moles.
Complex trauma doesn’t always look like what people expect.
It rarely shows up as a breakdown at your desk.
More often it shows up as the quiet, constant management of a threat that isn’t actually there anymore.
It shows up in your career specifically, in the meetings, the performance reviews, the promotions you didn’t ask for and the ones you didn’t believe you deserved.
10 Ways Complex Trauma Shows Up at Work
I've watched this play out in my own career and in the careers of the people I coach, and it tends to show up in a handful of recognizable patterns.
Some of these might feel familiar right away.
Others might take a minute to land.
Either way, seeing the pattern clearly is the first step to changing your relationship with it.
1. Replaying the meeting on a loop after it’s over
You leave the room, and the meeting doesn’t end. You replay every sentence, scan for the moment you said too much or too little, and build a case against yourself out of tone and timing. The meeting is over for everyone else. For you, it’s still running.
2. Explaining every decision before anyone asks
You send the report with three paragraphs of context nobody requested. You justify the deadline before anyone questions it. Somewhere along the way you learned that being caught unprepared was dangerous, so now you prepare a defense for things that were never under attack.
3. Bracing for feedback like it’s an attack
“Can we talk?” lands in your body before it lands in your inbox. Your chest tightens, your mind starts building worst-case scenarios, and by the time the actual conversation happens, you’re too braced to hear what’s really being said. Even good feedback gets filtered through a system that’s expecting harm.
4. Saying “yes” when your whole body says “no”
The extra project. The Saturday call. The task that isn’t yours to carry. You say “yes” before you’ve even asked yourself if you have the capacity, because somewhere along the way saying no started to feel unsafe rather than reasonable.
5. Waiting for the other shoe to drop after a win
The promotion comes through and instead of relief, you feel dread. Good news doesn’t register as safe, it registers as a countdown. Some part of you is convinced that things going well is just the quiet before something goes wrong.
6. Working twice as hard to feel half as safe
Competence has never felt like enough on its own. You overprepare, overdeliver, and stay late for a sense of security that never quite arrives, because the exhaustion was never really about the work. It was about trying to outrun the fear of being caught not good enough.
7. Going quiet in the room when it matters most
You have the answer. You have the idea. And in the moment it matters most, your voice disappears. Speaking up used to come with a cost somewhere in your history, and your body hasn’t gotten the memo that this room is different.
8. Reading every email twice for hidden meaning
A short reply from your manager and suddenly you’re searching for subtext. Was that period passive aggressive? Is “noted” bad? You’ve learned to scan for danger in tone, because at some point tone actually was the warning sign that something was coming.
9. Feeling like an imposter no promotion can fix
Title changes. Salary increases. None of it touches the quiet certainty that you’re one mistake away from being found out. Achievement doesn’t rewrite the story, because the story was never really about your competence in the first place.
10. Not knowing what you actually want, just what keeps you safe
Ask what kind of role you’re looking for, and you draw a blank. You know what to avoid. You know which environments feel dangerous and which managers feel safe enough. But wanting something for yourself, rather than just avoiding harm, can feel like a language you were never taught.
What comes next
None of this means something is wrong with you.
It means your history taught your body to work a certain way, and that system followed you into your career because it followed you everywhere.
I invite you to notice which of these ten showed up for you as you read. That noticing is where everything else starts.
Seeing the pattern clearly is only the beginning.
Changing your relationship with it tends to move through five stages, what I call The Resilient Career Advancement Framework:
Recognize the pattern, so you can catch it in real time instead of after the fact
Root out the cause, so you’re working with the source instead of just the symptom
Rebuild the response, one that fits who you are now rather than who you had to be back then
Rehearse it live, in real conversations, real rooms, real stakes
Reinforce for good, so it becomes how you move through your career, not something you have to relearn every time
This isn’t work most people do well on their own, and it isn’t work a single blog post can carry you through.
It goes further with support and people around you who understand exactly what this takes, which is why I built the Resilient Career Academy.
If you’re ready for that kind of support, I’d love to have you inside. You do not have to figure this out alone.