You’re Not Getting Promoted Because of Childhood Trauma

3 vestiges of a traumatic upbringing that are undermining your performance and professionalism

While most of my, now 14, therapists have assured me that I did not have any childhood trauma, I somehow turned out to have almost all the indicators studies tend to find in adult abuse survivors dealt lots of ACEs — depression, DV, substance use disorder, all the good stuff!! It is probably because I also have the gift of being a wilt-prone orchid and not a hearty thriving dandelion.

But whether this applies to me or not, I’m sharing because it may apply to you — and can hopefully help you as you climb the career ladder toward ultimate happiness!

Black and White Thinking

Why You Do It: When you grow up around abuse or uncertainty, the brain learns to categorize situations and people into broad categories (e.g., “safe” or “not safe”) and quickly! This helps protect children from abuse, as they can quickly and correctly gauge difficult situations. However, it wires the brain for a tendency toward dichotomous thinking that doesn’t reflect the real world.

Why It’s Impacting Work: Black-and-white thinking can:

• Limit creativity and innovation (thinking in the gray and outside the box)
• Cause rush-to-judgment in ways that are unhelpful on the job (rather than the quick decisiveness that is needed from good leaders)
• Foster “splitting” of coworkers — seeing people in extremes (all good, all bad). These unrealistic views of people can make teamwork, assuming best intent, managing, and being managed difficult (giving up easily, preferring to work alone or not on a certain project vs. with someone with whom you have differences)
• Cause unprofessional or simply unhelpful reactions to feedback (e.g., taking it all personally, dismissing it all as other people’s fault, thinking you need to change everything about what you’re doing)

Tips:

• Take a breath before answering
• See if you’re assuming something about a person vs. what are the facts of a situation? (e.g., the fact is he forgot your allergies when ordering lunch…that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about your well-being as a person)
• In brainstorming/problem solving, write down a list of all the possibilities so you can try to take a more objective look whether you’re avoiding gray areas. Share with a trusted person and see if they feel like you’re exploring more than the extremes.
• Be honest. Say, “I can struggle with black and white thinking with these types of situations, please help me think of ideas more in the gray areas if you feel it’s going that way,” or whatever makes sense in a 1-on-1 or even group work situation.

Overexplaining

Why You Do It: Overexplaining can be a trauma response to being gaslighted as a child. You might have been used to:

• Not being believed, or told the opposite of what you felt/saw (“You’re not cold” or “We weren’t fighting yesterday). You could have gotten in a habit of providing long, elaborate explanations with lots of detail to try to boost credibility
• Your words being used against you later/coming back to bite you/twisted/nitpicked, so you doubly over-clarify everything to CYA (cover your a**)
• Feeling responsible for other’s reactions. So you want to justify, justify, justify to cover any version of negative responses they might have to what you’re saying

And many more reasons! Please share yours in the comments if you feel comfortable.

Why It’s Impacting Work: Even if you have an issue with this, you’ve probably also been on the other side of it, right!? You want to yell, “I get it!!” or it becomes difficult to move forward with the conversation you need to have in your limited time. Overexplainers can even unintentionally make people feel condescended to. In a workplace, where your job often consists of making decisions and telling others why you made or are going to make them, I don’t need to overly explain why this tendency can get problematic!

Tips:

• Wait for someone to ask a follow-up question before giving more information. Don’t assume that silence/crickets = no one is following, especially in virtual settings.
• Speaking: Practice, so you can be as precise as possible. Or write down some bullet points. The least amount of words, the better.
• Writing: Don’t send that first email draft. Maybe move the last paragraph up to the top and delete the rest.
• “No” is a complete sentence.
• If you told the truth as clearly as you could, there’s nothing more to say.

People Pleasing

Why You Do It: A lot of people grow up to be people-pleasers, even if they don’t realize it. This coping strategy is as common as fight, flight, freeze, sometimes referred to as the 4th F, fawn…fawning over someone as a tactic to diffuse conflict (e.g., why a woman might act super nice to a man she’s scared of). According to Healthline, “It’s a maladaptive way of creating safety in our connections with others by mirroring their imagined expectations and desires.”

Why It’s Impacting Work: Where to begin? It’s harder to set boundaries (for work-life balance, not taking on someone else’s work, etc.). Again, it can stifle creativity and innovation if you hold back due to perceptions that that’s what others want. “Mindreading” could actually cause you to do a task incorrectly versus if you had just “bothered” the person and asked for more details in the first place. Maybe you simply haven’t asked for that promotion yet because you don’t want to rock the boat.

This tendency can also cause a person to be in denial about how burnt out they are, prolonging and deepening burnout, which makes them more of a risk to the company than if they knew how to take care of themselves.

Tips: Just having some awareness of this should help with minor self-sabotaging around the workplace. However, if you truly want to stop being a people pleaser (as much as possible), in my experience at least, that is a multiyear journey involving buddies, books, and a new belief system. There are tons of resources out there if you look around, and give yourself permission to work on this trait that is not as selfless as we think it is!

Finally, I think certain kinds of trauma can lead to unhealthy perfectionism, but I had a whole ‘nother blog’s-worth to say about that.

Good Luck!

Now, I can’t promise that you WILL get promoted the second you tackle your childhood coping mechanisms that have become maladaptive in adulthood. However, it certainly will make you a more open, flexible, creative, adaptable worker, which is the kind I hear they’re looking for this century, as other types can be replaced with robots. Fingers crossed for you!