There’s a moment a lot of us know.

You walk into a meeting — composed, prepared, professional. And then something shifts. A colleague talks over you. A leader takes credit for your idea. Someone flips the script and suddenly you’re the problem. And before you even know what’s happening, you’re not fully in that room anymore.

You’re six years old. You’re back at the dinner table. You’re on the playground. You’re in a room where the rules only applied to you — never to the person in charge.

If that lands anywhere in your body, this post is for you.

In Episode 51 of Your Trauma-Wise Career Guide, I had the honor of sitting down with my dear friend, sister, and mentor, Kimberly Weeks — narcissistic abuse recovery coach, co-founder of the Global Trauma Institute, and someone who has walked her own profound road through narcissistic abuse, recovery, and calling. We talked about what narcissism actually looks like at work, why it feels so familiar to trauma survivors, and what it means to navigate those dynamics with wisdom and care for yourself.

Why the Workplace Feels Like Childhood (And Why That’s Not Weakness)

One of the most validating things Kimberly said early in our conversation was this: what plays out at work is often the same script we lived in our families.

The colleague who takes credit for your work. The manager who holds everyone accountable except themselves. The team culture where certain people are golden and others become the scapegoat. The moment you get triggered in a meeting and suddenly you’re not responding as a professional — you’re reacting as a child who learned that strategy in order to survive.

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a nervous system doing what it was trained to do.

As Kimberly put it, the people-pleasing you did with a parent, the hypervigilance you developed watching for the next eruption, the patterns of shrinking or overcompensating — they were adaptive. They got you through something hard. And now, they’re showing up in the boardroom, in team meetings, in your relationship with authority figures. Still running the same program, even in a very different environment.

I’ve lived this myself — more times than I could count, and one recent time I shared pretty vulnerably on this episode. The details of that are woven throughout the conversation, but the short version is: I got blindsided by a shift in a colleague’s behavior, and when things blew up in a meeting, my nervous system didn’t respond with polished professionalism. It responded with survival. And then came the shame, the spiraling, the “what did I do wrong?” — which, as Kimberly named so precisely, is often the first thing trauma survivors ask themselves.

The Superpower and the Blind Spot

Here’s something I want you to hear, especially if you’ve ever felt like your trauma responses are a liability at work.

Your nervous system is actually a sophisticated threat-detection system. Trauma survivors often have a finely tuned capacity to sense danger, read rooms, notice shifts in people’s behavior, and see trouble brewing before it arrives. That’s not paranoia. That’s neuroception doing its job.

Kimberly and I talked about this as a genuine professional strength — one that supports risk management, pattern recognition, and relational awareness in ways that many people spend years trying to develop.

The challenge is capacity. When we’re stretched thin, running on empty, or just trying to keep up with life, we lose the margin we need to stay connected to what our bodies are telling us. The signals are still there — that uneasy feeling about a colleague, the subtle shift in dynamics after a promotion, the repeated experience of being left off an email chain — but we don’t have the space to process them before they accumulate.

And then something erupts.

One of the things Kimberly said that really stuck with me is that intentional daily embodiment practices — even small ones, like not touching your phone for the first half hour of the day, or journaling before bed — create the nervous system margin we need to actually hear those signals. Not because we need to be perfect or zen. But because wisdom in the workplace requires enough stillness to notice what’s happening inside us before it comes out sideways.

What Narcissistic Behavior Actually Looks Like at Work

A lot of the people I work with have experienced narcissistic dynamics in the workplace but didn’t have language for what they were navigating. Kimberly broke this down in a way I found really clarifying.

At its core, narcissistic behavior in the workplace tends to involve:

Entitlement and grandiosity — a belief that the rules apply to everyone else, but not to them
Exploitation — attaching to high performers and taking credit for their work
Lack of empathy — a striking inability to acknowledge your humanity, your circumstances, or the impact of their behavior on you
Projection — when things go wrong, it’s always your fault; when things go right, it’s always their achievement
Role assignments — just like in family systems, narcissistic workplace cultures often produce golden children, scapegoats, lost children, and enablers, all orbiting around the person at the center

What makes this particularly disorienting for trauma survivors is that it mirrors something we already know. Kimberly described it beautifully: when a colleague’s mask slips after months of seemingly normal interactions, the disorientation is real. It’s the Scooby-Doo moment — wait, who is this person? And that disorientation pulls on stored memory. On the child who also didn’t see it coming.

When You Still Have to Work With Them

This is the part of the conversation I know so many of you needed to hear. What do you do when you can’t just leave? When you need the job, need the income, and are navigating a colleague or leader who is showing narcissistic traits?

Kimberly offered something called gray rocking — and it was deeply validating to hear named, because it’s what I’d been doing instinctively and feeling guilty about.

Gray rocking means becoming uninteresting. Giving them the minimum that the work requires. Responding to emails with what’s necessary and nothing more. Not offering your energy, your engagement, your enthusiasm, or your emotional availability. It’s not vindictive. It’s protective.

As Kimberly said: your presence is an agreement with someone’s behavior. Your absence is you saying that’s not okay.

We also talked about a concept I want you to sit with: distance is wisdom, not defeat. When someone is unwilling to take responsibility for how they’ve treated you, pulling back isn’t retreat. It’s good stewardship of your own personhood. And sometimes that means putting things in writing, stepping back from unnecessary meetings, or — when the cost to your body and your life has become too high — planning a thoughtful exit.

Rupture, Repair, and Reclaiming What “Professional” Actually Means

One of the most powerful threads in this conversation was about repair — and what it actually requires.

Kimberly was clear: repair requires someone owning their part. Not a vague, mutual “we both had a moment.” A real acknowledgment of what they did and the impact it had. You cannot repair with someone who won’t do that. And repair, she reminded me, does not mean reconciliation. It can simply mean: I acknowledge what happened, and I’m clear about what I will and won’t participate in going forward.

And then Kimberly said something that stopped me completely:

Professionalism — as we’ve defined it — often just means being a perfect robot. When we say we “didn’t show up professionally,” we’re really saying we weren’t perfect. But being professional should include your humanity.

I felt that in my whole body. How much of what we’ve called “unprofessional” is really just... being human? And how much of what’s truly unprofessional — doing harm to others and refusing to own it — gets excused because it comes from the right title or position?

I think it’s time we reclaim that word.

You Have Choices

If you take nothing else from this conversation, I want you to take this:

You are not stuck. Even when your nervous system is telling you that you are. Even when you feel frozen, flooded, or like that small version of yourself just hijacked your adult body in a meeting.

When you can slow down enough — when you can name what’s happening, acknowledge it without judgment, and let your frontal cortex come back online — you have choices. They might feel uncomfortable. Acting on them might require you to move through real discomfort. But the movement itself is the healing. Every time you choose differently, you’re building a new pathway. Cutting trail, one step at a time.

About Kimberly Weeks

Kimberly Weeks is a narcissistic abuse recovery coach, co-founder of the Global Trauma Institute, and founder of Stand Firm, a community supporting women through narcissistic abuse recovery. She teaches the Narcissistic Abuse Practitioner course and the Certified Trauma Care Practitioner course through the Global Trauma Institute.

You can find her at thenarcissisticabusecoach.com or on Instagram @iamkimberlyweeks.

If this conversation opened something up for you, I’d love to support you in taking it further. Whether you’re navigating a difficult workplace situation right now or beginning to connect the dots between your history and your career patterns, that’s exactly the kind of work we do inside the Resilient Career Academy — and I’d be honored to talk with you about it.

You can explore resources and book a discovery call at cyndibennettconsulting.com/resources.

Resilient Career Academy

When Work Feels Like Childhood: Recognizing…