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

Back then, I didn’t know what was going on — my brain would randomly break over the smallest things. A comment on my code review would either trigger a wave of self-hatred that lasted hours; or I would fixate on the fear of getting fired and work long evenings of overtime; or freeze and lose touch with reality altogether.

I felt helpless. I had no idea what these symptoms were, let alone that they robbed me of hours of time at work. Even as I pursued talk therapy, mindfulness, and mental health programs at work, these symptoms just got worse. Was it inevitable? Would every employer I ever had give me the axe?

I still experience the 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 much 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 helpful here.

Flashbacks: reliving memories

For me, flashbacks aren’t what you see in the movies. There’s no cut to a dramatic re-enactment of the past, and there’s no clean break back to present-day realty. In Complex PTSD, Pete Walker, a psychoanalyst with the condition himself, describes flashbacks as “intensely disturbing regressions [to] overwhelming feeling-states” (145). For me, that means I’ll suddenly feel deeply scared, vulnerable, or angry, and I’ll need to figure out that I’m in a flashback. It’s rarely straightforward.

For example: one day, as some coworkers and I chatted over lunch, a coworker make a joke that to me was a bit of a jab, but nothing rude or offensive. Even so, I felt a tingly numbness settle into my face, shoulders, and legs. My arms and jaw refused to move. While my body froze, my brain whirred away, imagining a hundred abusive things my coworker might say to me. When I noticed my own panic was different from my coworkers’ calm as they enjoyed their lunch, I realized I was in a flashback.

Remembering the science of what happens during a flashback is a huge help to me. The Body Keeps the Score has been one such important source of insight, in which the psychiatrist Bessel Van der Kolk recalls his advances researching the neurology of trauma. In 2002, for instance, he leveraged brain scanning technology to understand which parts of the brain were activated while in a flashback. After scanning several consenting PTSD patients while in a flashback, the results surprised him. While the limbic system, responsible for detecting danger, was highly activated, the activation rate in Broca’s area, responsible for producing speech, plummeted (43). When I’m in a flashback, I have to accept that my ability to appropriately communicate to my coworkers is either impaired or cut off entirely, even when I’m feeling intensely scared.

Once I know that I’m in a flashback, then, I need to give myself the space to first process it alone. Often, that means letting my team know I’ll be away, quitting Slack and email, and find an empty meeting room at the office.

I process flashbacks a little bit differently each time. Sometimes I have an intuition about how to get through it. Other times, I scan through 13 Steps for Managing Flashbacks, a PDF resource taken from Complex PTSD, and work through whatever resonates with me. I find these steps most consistently helpful:

Tech never taught me any of these steps. If anything, it taught me the opposite. Both bosses and coworkers have told me to “get over it” or “get a tougher skin” when I tried to talk about my mental health. This advice subtly shamed me for the flashbacks I couldn’t control: why couldn’t I just “get over it” already?

Now, I walk in the opposite direction: giving myself time away from work to calm down and fully feel my experiences. Grieving takes time and energy out of my day, but rewards me with calmness, focus, and deeper self-awareness. After a year of this practice, flashbacks are easier to spot earlier on, and often take less time to resolve. What used to trigger me years ago now only annoys or frustrates me. “Getting a tougher skin”, it turned out, did not come from stoically numbing out the pain, but leaning into my sensitivity and feeling it.

The Critic: expecting perfection

My inner critic is my near-constant companion. Its perfectionism, shaming, and catastrophic thinking blends into the background of everyday life until I can recognize the critic again and see how much distress it’s causing me. While many people have an inner critic, it’s a little different for people with Complex PTSD. A mental health charity, Mind, lists a core symptom of C-PTSD a “feeling as if you are permanently damaged or worthless.” Dramatic stuff.

At the workplace, this warped sense of self manifests into a self-defeating perfectionism. For example: a couple months after I started a new job, I moved cities to be closer to work. My boss and I were scheduled to review my first project the next day, so I went into the office that evening to finish it off. To my dismay, I found several mistakes and flaws in the work. “They’re going to regret hiring me once they see the state of things, I know it!” I thought. “This whole thing’s a mess!”

I deleted everything and started fresh, recreating everything again with meticulous detail. Hours passed, and I still wasn’t done. I picked at my skin and slammed my fingers against the keyboard to punish myself. “How could I be this stupid?!” I thought. I continued to spiral until a concerned friend messaged me to take a break and calm down. It was late into the evening, and I had exhausted myself.

Healing from my exaggerated inner critic required me to understand its origins. Pete Walker theorizes in Complex PTSD that the inner critic is born out of a state of constant hyper-vigilance and overwhelm, where the child’s brain, “desperate to relieve the anxiety[,] can only think about the ways she is too much or not enough” (168). In turn, he claims, these children adopt thought patterns of self-deprecation, blame, and perfectionism. This key insight, that even my most extreme self-deprecating thoughts come from a desperation to relieve anxiety, allows me to extend compassion to the inner critic. If I can ask my critic what its afraid of, then I can usually find some way to calm it down without excessive work.

Dialoguing with the critic first requires pausing my work, which isn’t easy. I’ve likely already been pushing myself to do more than I can handle, all the while berating myself for not doing more. It can take upwards of an hour to slowly coax myself into slowing down, taking a breath, and eventually, opening a document on my computer to ask the critic what it’s feeling. I allow it to rant about everything I’m doing wrong and the danger it perceives we’re both in as a result. I often open the second PDF resource from Complex PTSD, Shrinking the Critic, which includes common inner critic attacks, and thought-substitution scripts to go alongside them. Countless times, reading this document has calmed me after hours of distress and fear. Especially while at work, I find myself returning to these counter-attacks over and over again, such as:

Healing my inner critic has forced me to reject the workaholism and hustle culture that podcasters, LinkedIn influencers, and myself have surrounded ourselves with. These spaces, I’ve found, are often guided by our inner critics, as we tell ourselves and each other that we perpetually need to work more to be good enough. I’ve learned the hard way that attempting this constant productivity validates my inner critic’s anxieties that I’m at imminent risk by not doing more, leading to spirals of self-deprecating thoughts.

Separating myself from the hustle culture my inner critic craves hasn’t been easy. When I was starting out, my perfectionism felt like my superpower, an inner drive to create higher quality work than I would otherwise. I pushed myself to the breaking point with every project, earning praise from my coworkers and bosses. Sure, I treated myself like garbage, but why did that matter as long as I got the results I wanted?

The reality was, my inner critic was never my superpower. Its perfectionism undermined my ability to receive constructive feedback. Its workaholism pushed me to take on new work when I knew I couldn’t execute on. Its time urgency deprived me of the ability to take a break to reset my focus. Indulging the inner critic only undermined the mental and emotional resources I needed to develop my career.

For both my professional development and personal wellbeing, I’ve learned to say “no” to the critic in a million different ways. I refuse my own urge to self-deprecate or apologize unnecessarily. I don’t accept extra projects that I know I can’t take on. I insist on taking breaks when I’m not ready to work. Setting these boundaries and asserting that I’m good enough already is rarely comfortable, but it’s allowed me to enjoy what I do again. For the first time in my career, I’ve actively sought out critical feedback on my work, and enjoyed what I’ve learned as a result. I am able to grow in my profession because I have shrunk my inner critic, and found in its absence a deep and unshaking belief in myself.

Dissociation: escaping reality

Dissociation is full of contradictions. It’s a mental state where you can still see, hear, and feel everything like always, yet none of it feels real. Everything’s distant and muted. You’re seeing the world through a mile-long telescope, hearing it through a grainy phone call, or touching it through a thick cover of plastic. In more scientific terms, psychiatrist Dr. Valerie Sinason writes in The Truth about Trauma and Dissociation that dissociation is a disconnection from a “sense of self, experience or history as a defence against stress” (70-71). When my C-PTSD was at its worst, this disconnection would happen suddenly and without warning. The worst part of it was: I didn’t even know what was happening.

As a junior software engineer, my code reviews would receive a lot of critiques from coworkers. One day in particular was especially bad, when I discovered one of my teammates had left around ninety comments on my code. My inner critic accused me of being lazy and stupid. I wrote code in response to the criticisms quickly, and released it, resolving all the comments at once. However, my code wasn’t well thought-out, only receiving more critiques and feedback. At the sight of the comment count of the pull request surpassing one hundred, my arms, neck, and hands froze up. I imagined my coworkers’ criticism morphing to harassment, abuse, or violence against me. My code was right in front of me, and I could clearly see my coworker’s comments coming in, but it felt like a dense wall of fog separated me from it. I panicked, but did not know what to do. The greater my distress, the more numb and detached I felt from reality. The episode lasted somewhere between one to two hours before I could finally move again.

I wish I could have told myself that dissociation was not my own fault. When people with PTSD encounter dissociation, it’s not a choice, but the brain’s predisposition towards turning itself off. This was the conclusion of a 2004 study conducted by Dr. Ruth Lanius, who scanned the brains of both traumatized and untraumatized people while asking them to focus on themselves breathing. The results were statistically significant: having PTSD strongly correlated with at least five key areas of the brain being less activated. In The Body Keeps the Score, Van der Kolk describes the profound implications of this study:

Knowing that my brain is shutting down to defend itself informs how I cope with dissociation. I don’t berate myself, but try to find ways to gently re-introduce my brain back into contact with my body, my emotions, or the physical world. How exactly I recover is different for me each time, but often some variation of these three techniques help:

1. Awareness: I might focus on what my body is feeling, one part at a time. For example, if I’m dissociating out of an intense fear, I might draw my attention to how my shoulders are hunched upwards, and are aching from the tension. Noticing this can allow me to relax my shoulders, and regain a sense of calm.
2. Public spaces: if I can will my body to move (which isn’t a given), I might move to public space with other people present. For example, if I’m dissociating due to a belief that other people are unsafe and cruel, I might try taking a walk to the local cafe, where I can get a warm cup of tea, and notice other people contentedly working on their laptops. Noticing this can remind me that I can safely coexist with other people present.
3. Conversation: I might reach out to trusted friends, family, or coworkers to have a quick chat. For example, I might notice a colleague at the cafeteria getting a coffee, and ask them about their day. Learning about the perspective of other people is effective at getting out of my own head and into the world again.

I created these techniques for myself in work situations that disincentivized me from connecting with my body. The problem is usually communications: streams of code review comments as a software engineer; or waves of questions, calls, or meetings as a product manager. I often focus so much on keeping up with expectations that I disconnect from my own body. Sometimes, only a mild numbness kicks in. If a flashback or critic attack is also involved, however, those same work situations can push me into a full dissociation. The world seems exploitative and unsafe, and it feels like there’s no chance for me to survive.

Coping with dissociation has required me to change the expectations I have of myself at work. I note of when a Slack thread is getting overwhelming, and I give myself the space to pause and fully absorb what’s happening, or take a break. The same goes for overwhelming meetings, user interviews, or projects. Stopping, reflecting, and repairing my understanding of my workplace’s expectations is not only necessary to avoid dissociation, but it’s also deeply healing. My view of the world itself has undergone a profound shift: instead of a cruel and exploitative place, I’ve come to see that the world can also be a place of cooperation and kindness. The world, too, has a place for me in it.

Wrapping up: an unexpected asset

Working in tech has its challenges for people with C-PTSD like myself. Rapid communications, ambitious deadlines, and tech bro cultures can all become daily recurring triggers for my various symptoms. I have often had to cut against the grain of my companies’ work cultures to heal, grounding myself in the physical world, saying “no” to excessive work, and deeply connecting to my own feelings while in a flashback. Often, this healing comes at the expense of time I would rather spend working, creating a constant anxiety that I might underperform compared to my untraumatized peers.

Paradoxically, my work in tech has also been a unique opportunity to heal. My coworkers hardly bat an eye when I take time off for my mental health, and often encourage me to do so. Many companies I’ve worked for value self-care ahead of work, no questions asked. Speaking out about mental health problems is often encouraged, to the point that I feel safe even writing this article. I’m sincerely grateful for the many colleagues and supervisors that have given me grace, understanding, and encouragement, often more so than I’ve given myself. You know who you are.

I encounter flashbacks, critic attacks, and dissociation almost every day. Yet, each encounter with these symptoms is an opportunity. Flashbacks allow me to learn more about my past and extend myself compassion. Critic attacks force me to defend and advocate for myself. Dissociation pushes me to see the good in the world. As Pete Walker puts it in Complex PTSD:

I’m proud of how I’ve handled my C-PTSD. I have fought for myself every day, and have come out on the other side more resolved to be myself. My journey with this mental illness has also given me an eye for the emotional struggles of my peers, and my companies’ customers. When I talk to a customer, and see their distress at not being able to justify the ROI to their boss, or criticize themselves for making a mistake in a poorly designed UI, I naturally want to fight for them just like I’ve learned to fight for myself. The perspective I’ve gained treating C-PTSD is an asset I’ve never expected to take pride in, but I’m glad I can now.

If anything, that would be my message to myself from seven years ago: healing is not time spent to the detriment of your career, but an investment in it. Mental health isn’t a distraction from my work, but its foundation. If your journey is anything like mine, I hope you know that you aren’t alone in this. Let’s keep fighting for ourselves.