Seven years ago, when I started my career in tech, I didn’t know that I had PTSD.

Back then, I didn’t know what was going on — it seemed my brain would randomly break over the smallest things. Something like comments on my code review would trigger a wave of self-hatred, hijacking my thinking for hours. Or, I’d feel intensely paranoid and unsafe, working long evenings of overtime. Or, I’d freeze and lose touch with reality altogether.

I felt helpless. I had no idea what these symptoms were, let alone the fact that they robbed me of hours of my time at work. Even when I pursued talk therapy and mindfulness, and participated in my employers’ mental health workshops, these symptoms just got worse over time. Was I doomed to get fired from every job I ever had?

I still experience these same symptoms now, but I’ve learned to name them, understand the research behind them, and effectively cope with them — even at the workplace. That alone makes them infinitely easier to deal with.

So, this is the guide I desperately wanted seven years ago. This is how I cope with the symptoms of my Complex PTSD while I work in tech.

If you too grapple with PTSD while working: welcome! Grab yourself a warm drink. My experiences aren’t universal, but I hope you find something here helpful.

Flashbacks: reliving memories

For me, flashbacks aren’t like what you see in the movies. There’s no cut to a dramatic re-enactment of the past. And there’s no clean cut back to present-day reality.

In his book “Complex PTSD”, Pete Walker, a psychoanalyst with the condition himself, defines flashbacks as “intensely disturbing regressions… to… overwhelming feeling-states” (145). For me, that means that, I’ll suddenly feel deeply scared, vulnerable, or angry, and it’ll be up to me to figure out that I’m in a flashback.

Here’s what that’s like.

One day, as me and some coworkers chatted over lunch, one coworker made a joke that was a bit of a jab at me, but nothing rude or offensive. Even so, a tingly numbness quickly set into my face, shoulders, and legs. My arms froze up and refused to move, as well as my jaw. While my body froze, my brain whirred at the speed of light, imagining a hundred abusive things my coworker might say to me next. When I noticed how my own catastrophic thinking was different from my coworkers peacefully enjoying their lunch, I realized I was in a flashback.

Remembering the science of what’s happening here is a huge help to me. In 2002, psychiatrist Bessel Van der Kolk scanned the brains of consenting PTSD patients while in a flashback. He recalls his surprising findings in “The Body Keeps the Score”: there was both high activation in “the limbic area, or emotional brain”, accompanied by “a significant decrease in... Broca’s area… one of the speech centers of the brain.” So, when I understand that I’m in a flashback, I have to accept both that I’m feeling intensely emotional, and that I don’t have the language capacity to effectively communicate my experience to my coworkers.

So, once I know that I’m in a flashback, I first relocate somewhere I feel safe working through my intense feelings by myself. Often, an empty meeting room will do. If it feels especially heavy, I’ll let coworkers know I’ll be away for mental health needs. Quitting Slack and email helps too.

Working through the flashback is a bit different each time. I usually scan through Walker’s 13 Steps for Managing Flashbacks, and work through what resonates for me. Some of the items I find most helpful:

Sometimes this takes just a half hour, and other times, it consumes the whole day. This is presents a unique difficulty: when I’m often feeling the most afraid or insecure, I also have to trust that my coworkers will accept my sudden need for time off.

However, I’ve learned to welcome flashbacks as an everyday part of my working life. Each time I recognize a flashback and take time to soothe tand grieve into it, it becomes a little easier for the next time.

And always, a half-hour of work while grounded is more valuable than four hours of work flashed back.

The Critic: expecting perfection

My inner critic is my near-constant companion. Its perfectionism, shaming, and catastrophic thinking fades into the background of everyday life, appearing to be “normal” until I can finally recognize it again and see how much distress it’s caused me.

Walker writes that the inner critic is almost always “desperately trying to win… approval. When perfectionist striving fails… It festers into a virulent inner voice that increasingly manifests self-hate” (168). For me, my most intense inner critic attacks start with an attempt to “control” how others think of me, which then escalates into more and more intense bouts of self-deprecation.

Here’s what that’s like.

When I started a new role, my supervisor assigned me an ambitious new project. It excited me, and I wanted to show how good I was for the role right away. Around the same time, I moved cities to be closer to work, requiring me to take the day off work. Me and my boss were reviewing the project the next day, and it wasn’t done, so I decided to work later that evening. Soon, I found one issue that to fix, then another, and another, until I decided the whole thing needed to be scrapped and redone. They were going to regret hiring me if they saw the state of things, I was sure of it! The whole thing was a mess! I continued to hold myself to higher and higher standards for the project, working faster and faster, until a concerned friend messaged me to take a break and calm down.

While my inner critic drives me to make some extreme judgements and actions, I find it helpful to approach it from a place of compassion. Pete Walker writes that the inner critic often originates from children or adolescents who, stuck facing a string of dangerous situations, eventually attribute the danger’s source within themselves.

I used to think of the critic’s perfectionism as my superpower, pushing me to produce the highest quality work I could. Now, I can see how indulging my inner critic undermined my ability to create realistic expectations for myself and accept criticism. Any work I’ve produced while chasing perfectionism has tried to hide, avoid, or eliminate all of its possible flaws. Now, I understand that good work often elicits critical feedback, instead running away from it.

Once I recognize the inner critic’s at play at my work, the first task is almost always to stop whatever I’m doing, so I can dialogue with the inner critic instead of following its orders. It’s hard, especially when the critic is telling me I’m not doing enough already. Pausing often requires significant focus and concentration.

Taking a pause allows me to feel what I’m actually feeling, and how my inner critic is lashing out at me. I often flip to Walker’s Shrinking the Critic resource, which includes a number of common inner critic attacks, and thought-substitution scripts that go alongside them. Time and time again, reading these “counter-attacks” to common cycles of self-criticism has jolted me back to reality, and made me feel like myself again. Some sections I frequently return to:

Working in tech, recovering from the inner critic has pushed me to reject the “hustle culture” mentality we’re often surrounded with. I’ve learned the hard way that attempting to be constantly productive almost always provokes further attacks from my inner critic, convinced that I’m further and further away from ever doing enough.

Instead, healing has required me to say no countless times to additional projects or impulses to self-deprecate. Asserting that I’m good enough already, even when I don’t feel it, is always uncomfortable. It’s worth it, though, to be able to relax, open yourself to feedback, and grow even further as a result.

Dissociation: escaping reality

Before I ever had the language to name or describe it, dissociation was the most disturbing of my symptoms. Dr. Valerie Sinason, a psychiatrist specialized in traumatic illness, defines dissociation as “a mental state in which people feel disconnected from their sense of self, experience or history as a defence against stress” (”The Truth about Trauma and Dissociation”, 70-71). For me, dissociation is almost always a disconnect from my experiences, as the world around me seems to become gripped in a fog.

Here’s what it’s like, at least for me.

As a junior software engineer, my code reviews would often receive a stream of comments of what to improve or correct. Often, I would reply to each immediately and release a new version of my code to review, erasing the first wave of comments. However, this would often have a snowball effect where my hastily written code would only have more problems, bringing on more comments. As these cycles quickened and quickened, eventually my body refused to do anything more, and froze up. My arms, neck, and hands would refuse to move. On top of this, it felt as if a thick fog had descended all around me. While I was physically able to see the laptop and desk in front of me, none of it feel real. I could only faintly feel my body. Where was I? What was happening?

It turns out, dissociation is the brain literally turning itself off. Just like his flashback study, Bessel Van der Kolk conducted brain scans of traumatized people, this time while instructing them to think of nothing in particular. He compared this to the brain scans of untraumatized people doing the same thing. While the control group’s scans showed the brain was still let up, actively sensing and thinking about the body, the scans of the traumatized patients were eerily blank — meaning, they were feeling almost absolutely nothing. Van der Kolk concluded that traumatized people neurologically disconnected from their own self-awareness:

This helps me to contextualize what’s going on while I’m dissociating: my brain is literally refusing to feel anything. The only way I know how cope with my dissociation, then, is to gently re-introduce my brain to what I’m actually experiencing. It’s always a little different for me each time, but these three things tend to work best for me:

1. Attempting to become aware of my body, one small part a time, or what Van der Kolk calls this “notic[ing] the physical sensations beneath the emotions” (132?/440). For example, if I’m dissociating because of an intense fear, noticing that I’m feeling this fear in my shoulders opens up the possibility to physically relax my shoulders, and regain a sense of agency.
2. If moving is an option, taking a break to relocate to to a safe public space. Taking time to relocate to a cafeteria with friendly coworkers, or even a cafe or library, has worked wonders for me to feel like external reality can be safe and approachable again.
3. Reaching out to friends, family, or supportive coworkers for a quick chat. I’ve found that even a little bit of small talk, joking, or just learning about somebody else’s day is effective at “getting me out of my own head.” Even with an audio-only call, I often find myself able to move and interact with the world again.

Dissociation isn’t always necessarily a bad thing: Sinason notes that we’re all constantly on a spectrum of dissociation. However, for me, the far end of dissociation is rarely helpful, and often signifies the need to re-engage with my stressful situation without overwhelming myself.

Since my time in software engineering, I’ve also learned that dissociation is a sign that I need to set a boundary on how much work I’m pressuring myself to do, how much information I’m reading at a time, or how much feedback to take into consideration. Healing has taken the form of me saying no to the impulse to react, instead starting my days at work learning to be mindful of what I’m feeling, physically and emotionally. This too, is always uncomfortable, but gets easier over time.

Conclusion: small improvements compound

The picture I’m painting might look a little grim. Because I have C-PTSD, I have to cope with flashbacks, critic attacks, and dissociation on a near-everyday basis. Yikes.

That’s not the whole picture, though. These symptoms are disruptive, but I have agency to chose how I cope with them.

With every flashback, I can extend myself compassion and understanding. With every critic attack, I can refute the “hustle culture” myths I’ve received in the past. With each dissociation episode, I can learn more about how to connect with my own body and mind, even when it’s hard.

Each time I chose good coping strategies, everything gets a little easier for me the next time. As Walker puts it:

This is the result of long-term recovery, and I’ve already seen a lot of improvement since I’ve learned C-PTSD-specific coping tools. I need less time to contend with flashbacks, deprecate myself less, and am able to catch myself dissociating earlier on.

There’s much more to learn, though. In a follow-up article, I plan to explore the many helpful tools I’ve found for PTSD recovery that go beyond just coping with everyday symptoms.

Until then, if your situation is anything like mine: I hope you are well, and you’re finding your own way through these symptoms. You’re good enough as you are already.