Seriously? I'm still dealing with this?
Have you ever been triggered at work and found yourself thinking, Seriously? I’m still dealing with this?
You’ve done the work. You understand your patterns. You know what your triggers are. Maybe you’ve been to therapy, learned coping strategies, practiced setting boundaries, or gotten much better at recognizing when your nervous system is activated.
And then something happens at work.
Someone says something. A conflict erupts. A situation catches you completely off guard. And suddenly, all that growth can feel very far away.
Maybe the hardest part isn’t even that you were triggered.
It’s what you start telling yourself afterward.
I thought I was past this.
Why am I still reacting this way?
After everything I’ve done, shouldn’t I be better at this by now?
But what if getting triggered isn’t evidence that we haven’t healed?
What if we’ve been measuring our progress by the wrong thing?
A quick introduction, if we haven’t met
I’m Cyndi Bennett, a trauma-informed career coach and founder of the Resilient Career Academy. You’re listening to Issue #8 of The Resilient Career Newsletter, where we talk about how the after-effects of complex trauma can show up in our careers, and what we can do to keep them from determining what’s possible for us.
Today, I want to talk about what happens when we get triggered at work even after we’ve done a tremendous amount of healing. Because getting triggered doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve gone backward. Sometimes the progress is in what we’re able to do next, and in learning how to find our way back to ourselves when something knocks us off-center.
Getting triggered doesn't mean we've gone backward
When we’ve spent years doing the work to understand ourselves, it can be incredibly frustrating when something happens at work that still knocks us off-center. We may know our triggers, recognize our patterns, have strategies that help us regulate, and have gotten much better at setting boundaries and advocating for ourselves.
So when we find ourselves dysregulated again, it can feel like we’ve gone backward.
After all this work, why is this still happening to me?
But healing doesn’t necessarily mean we reach a point where nothing activates us anymore. We’re still going to encounter difficult people, unexpected situations, conflict, disappointment, rejection, uncertainty, and experiences that touch places in us that are tender.
The work we’ve done isn’t erased because something got through.
And recognizing what’s happening is important. The more aware we become of the situations, interactions, and experiences that tend to activate us, the easier it becomes to recognize our patterns when they show up at work.
Want help recognizing your workplace triggers?
I created a free tool called the Workplace Trigger Tracker Toolkit to help you notice what activates you at work, identify patterns in your responses, and build greater awareness around your triggers.
I’m beginning to think the evidence of healing may be less about whether we get triggered and more about what becomes possible once we recognize that we are.
I know this because it still happens to me.
When work gets ugly
Not long ago, I had a workplace interaction that completely knocked me off-center.
I won’t go into all the details of what happened here, because I’ve shared that story before. But a private text exchange turned into a very public workplace conflict, and my nervous system responded almost immediately.
And here’s the thing: I knew I was triggered.
I understood what was happening. I could recognize that my response was bigger than this one interaction. I knew that some of what I was feeling belonged to the situation in front of me, and some of it was connected to experiences that came long before it.
None of that knowledge made the dysregulation disappear.
I couldn’t think my way out of it. I couldn’t remind myself that I was a trauma-informed career coach and suddenly feel better. I couldn’t reach into my toolbox, pull out the “right” coping strategy, and make everything settle down.
Knowing we’re triggered and being able to regulate ourselves are not always the same thing.
So instead of trying to force myself to be OK, I started paying attention to what I needed.
And for me, in that moment, the first thing I needed was space.
What getting back to myself looked like
When the call ended, I was shocked. I remember sitting there thinking, What just happened?
I knew I was triggered, but knowing that didn’t immediately change how I felt. What I could do was begin creating some space around what had happened.
I declined an immediate request to meet with the person involved. I checked in with people I trusted who had witnessed the interaction, and one of them helped validate what I had experienced. I reached out to my manager, who encouraged me to take the rest of the afternoon off while he handled the situation.
None of those things regulated me immediately. But they gave me something I didn’t have in those first moments after the call: space.
And sometimes, space is where finding our way back begins.
We may not be able to stop our nervous system from reacting to something that feels threatening. We may not even know immediately which regulation strategy will help. But we can begin noticing what we need in that moment.
Maybe we need to step away before responding. Maybe we need a trusted person who can help us reality-check what just happened. Maybe we need to set a boundary, move our body, listen to music, sleep, or simply give ourselves permission not to figure everything out immediately.
The goal isn’t to perform regulation perfectly.
It’s to begin finding our way back to a place where we have access to choice again.
It took me almost 24 hours
It took me almost 24 hours to feel like myself again.
And for me, that was a win.
Not because 24 hours is some kind of benchmark for how quickly we should recover from being triggered. It isn’t. There have been times in my life when difficult experiences stayed with me much longer.
What made this different was that I could recognize what was happening while I was in it.
I knew I was dysregulated. I knew I needed space. I knew I didn’t have to resolve the situation immediately. And even though I couldn’t make the feelings disappear, I could make choices that supported me while I worked my way through them.
Eventually, I could feel the shift.
The intensity wasn’t the same. I could think more clearly. I could look at what had happened without feeling completely consumed by it. I had access to choices that hadn’t felt available to me in those first minutes after the call.
That experience changed how I think about healing.
What if our progress isn’t measured by how rarely we get triggered, or even by how quickly we recover?
What if part of our progress is simply becoming better at recognizing where we are and knowing how to help ourselves find our way back?
Recovery Doesn't Run on a Clock
Twenty-four hours was meaningful to me because I knew what it represented in my own journey. It wasn’t a deadline, and it certainly wasn’t a measure of how long it should take someone to recover from being triggered.
Sometimes we find our footing quickly. Other times, an experience hits something deeper and stays with us longer. We may have different levels of support available to us, different demands waiting for us, or simply less capacity on a particular day.
That’s why I don’t think the goal is to become faster and faster at regulating ourselves.
Faster isn’t always the definition of better.
When we start measuring our progress by how quickly we can get ourselves back to work, back into the meeting, back to being productive, or back to appearing OK, regulation can become another performance metric.
And I don’t want that for us.
Maybe the more useful question isn’t, How long did it take me to get over this?
Maybe it’s, What did I need to find my way back?
That question leaves room for our experience to be what it is, while also helping us become more aware of what supports us when we’re activated.
We can learn how to find our way back
For a long time, I think many of us have measured healing by what no longer happens.
We shouldn’t get triggered anymore. We shouldn’t react so strongly. That person shouldn’t still get to us. We should be able to handle situations that once knocked us off-center.
But what if there is another way to recognize our progress?
We can become more familiar with what activation feels like in our own bodies. We can learn to recognize the patterns that tend to show up when we feel threatened, dismissed, criticized, overwhelmed, or unsafe. And we can begin discovering what actually helps us when those patterns take over.
Over time, we build a relationship with ourselves that says: I recognize what’s happening. I know what I might need right now. And I don’t have to figure everything out while I’m here.
That doesn’t mean every trigger becomes easy to navigate. It doesn’t mean we always know exactly what to do. And it doesn’t mean something won’t occasionally knock us much farther off-center than we expected.
It means we don’t have to be as afraid of being knocked off-center.
Because we can learn how to find our way back.
And perhaps that’s a different kind of safety.
Learning how to find our way back is a skill. And like most skills, it's something we can learn and practice.
If you're ready to learn how to find your way back
Maybe you’ve gotten really good at recognizing when you’re triggered.
You know the racing thoughts, the tension in your body, the urge to shut down, defend yourself, overexplain, people-please, or get as far away from the situation as possible.
But recognizing what’s happening and knowing what to do with it can be two very different things.
Maybe that’s where you are right now.
You’re becoming more aware of your patterns. You’re beginning to understand why certain situations at work affect you the way they do. But when you’re actually in the middle of an activated moment, you still aren’t always sure how to support yourself through it.
That’s part of why I created Emotional Regulation in the Workplace.
It’s a self-paced six-week course designed specifically for trauma survivors who want to better understand what happens when they’re activated at work and develop practical strategies for navigating those moments.
Because the goal isn’t to become someone who never gets triggered.
It’s to become someone who increasingly understands what is happening, knows what they might need, and has more choices available for what happens next.
If you’re ready to build those skills, I’d love to support you.