The Workplace is Full of Triggers

Written by Valerie Ashley, MS, LPC

The workplace is full of triggers and when you are a trauma survivor your nervous system interprets these triggers as threats.

A “tone” from your manager, feedback harshly delivered, the feeling that you're being watched or left out — these aren't just uncomfortable workplace moments. For someone carrying a trauma history, they can be fully activating. Your heart rate goes up, your thinking brain goes blank, and your survival mode ignites — before you've even had a chance to process what was said.

Here's something I want more people to understand about what's actually happening when you space out in a meeting, are unable to answer an email for days, or leave every interaction with your boss completely drained.

Your body is not overreacting. It's doing exactly what it was built to do.

Polyvagal theory — developed by Dr. Stephen Porges — gives us a way to understand why. Our nervous systems are constantly scanning for safety, and they respond to what they find in fairly predictable ways. When you feel safe you feel connected, collaborative, and creative. When you sense danger? Your protective system mobilizes, you feel anxious, reactive, and on edge. When you sense a threat, you can't escape? You shut down. Disappear. Go quiet.

The part that matters for work is that your nervous system cannot tell the difference between a physically dangerous situation and a psychologically unsafe one. A manager who humiliates people in meetings, a culture where you're never quite sure where you stand, and chronic criticism with no recognition aren't just unpleasant — they are genuinely threatening.

So, if you have a trauma history and your workplace feels unsafe, you're not bringing dysfunction to work. You're bringing a nervous system that learned to survive — and it's still doing its job."

A few things I find myself returning to again and again when I'm thinking about trauma and the workplace include:

1. How you are spoken to by your manager is constant data that your nervous system processes before your brain even recognizes it heard something. This is why even a2. 3. technically neutral message delivered with impatience can land as danger to a trauma survivor. In other words, the content was fine, the tone was not.

2. A calm, grounded colleague or leader can literally help settle another person's nervous system. This is why psychological safety at work isn't a perk or a culture initiative. It is a biological requirement for the kind of thinking, collaborating, and creating we expect people to do all day.

3. What looks like a performance problem may be a nervous system problem. When someone goes quiet in meetings or seems checked out it can read as disengagement, low motivation, or a bad attitude. What it actually is is a nervous system so overwhelmed that the person has moved into dorsal vagal shutdown – shutdown mode.

I work at this intersection — where trauma history meets professional life — because these patterns show up constantly in workplaces, and almost no one has language for them. When people finally do, something shifts."