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 issues. 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 everything just get worse until I couldn’t work at all anymore?

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, grab yourself a warm drink. I hope you find something helpful here.

Flashbacks: reliving memories

Before I identified my own C-PTSD, I thought flashbacks were like the climax of Ratatouille: a sudden teleportation back to a specific childhood memory. It turns out, they’re anything but specific, at least for me. There’s no cut to a dramatic re-enactment of the past, and there’s no clean break back to present-day reality. Pete Walker, a psychoanalyst with the condition himself, puts it in Complex PTSD that flashbacks are “intensely disturbing regressions [to] overwhelming feeling states” (145). For me, that means I’ll suddenly feel deeply scared, vulnerable, or anger, and I’ll need to figure out what’s going on. It’s rarely straightforward.

For example: one day, as some coworkers and I chatted over lunch, a coworker made 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.

The worst part of it all was, I could barely manage to string together a sentence to tell anybody what was going on. It was often this way. I remembered

A study conducted by the psychiatrist Bessel Van der Kolk came to mind,

That’s the conclusion of a 2002 study by the psychiatrist Bessel Van der Kolk, who scanned the brains of consenting PTSD patients while in a flashback. These scans held a pattern: the patients’ brains focussed their energy on detecting danger (activating the limbic system), and almost entirely undid the capacity to produce speech (deactivating Broca’s area) (The Body Keeps the Score, 43). So, my jaw refusing to move wasn’t just a tight muscle: some part of me knew that even if I could open up my mouth and try to speak, nothing would come out. Nothing good, anyways.

I knew I needed to leave and calm down alone. I made a quick, well-rehearsed excuse for myself from the lunchroom, “gotta get to work,” grabbed my laptop, and found an empty meeting room. I let my team know I’d be away from Slack and email for a while, too. Closing everything down and finally gave myself a sense of space.

In fact, the very parts of the brain that are responsible