TECH & PTSD: HOW I COPE DAY-TO-DAY

• Intro: core message, I’m early career, recently discovered I have PTSD, and it changed EVERYTHING for me.
• Ever since I started in tech, for a variety of reasons, I’ve had a miscellany of mental health problems I had no idea what to do with — and they just got worse with time
• Recently, I discovered something that really dramatically helped: understanding it through the lens of CPTSD, claiming that for myself.
• The tech world has made many strides towards inclusion of folks with mental health issues - but I find the conversation only goes surface-level re “mindfulness” and “anxiety”
• For anyone else grappling with trauma in their lives, and trying to create a career for themselves — this is the guide to daily coping practices I wish I had but nobody gave me.
• Body: if you have a traumatic history that leads to the development of PTSD (which is, btw, A LOT OF PEOPLE), here’s what you’re up against — and how I cope with it myself.
• Flashbacks: both literally revisiting of distinct memories, or potentially revisiting an old milieu of fear, dread, helplessness
• Triggers can be extremely innocuous and come from anywhere. Important to BOTH not blame the present-day trigger, as well as to not blame yourself for having a flashback “over nothing”
• I experience it like…
• Your brain is literally shutting down, language centres stopping. Hyper vigilant to detect any notes of previous danger
• To cope: I practice Pete Walker’s 13 steps… each time pulling out the elements that help me the most. Usually, that’s grieving or soothing
• Inner Critic Attacks: an internal environment of consistent self-criticism
• Even more pervasive than flashbacks, for me these take effort to detect
• I experience it like… workaholism, accelerating faster and faster, persistent self-blame
• You’re revering to an old logic that you believe kept you safe in old dangerous environments (Walker)
• To cope: I pull out elements from Walker’s inner critic counter-attacks.
• Outer Critic Attacks: a pervasive skepticism and distrust of others, assuming the worst
• Just as important to detect as Inner Critic — we have a responsibility to protect our relationships from the negativity of the outer critic
• I experience it like… jumping to the conclusion that my coworkers and team just want to get rid of me
• You’re reverting to a protective mechanism that keeps you safe from people you perceived as actually exploiting or hurting you
• To cope: take 24hrs between a trigger and bringing it up to someone to ensure I cool down
• Dissociation: distrust of reality to the extent your brain shuts down and detaches itself entirely
• For me, this is when all the other PTSD symptoms “fail to work”
• For me this is like… the world becomes engulfed in fog
• The brain is literally trying to save itself from further traumatic experiences by tricking itself into believing that what’s happening isn’t really happening
• To cope…
• CONCLUSION: PTSD presents huge challenges, but there are practical tools you can use to cope and still live your life - professionally and personally
• Become mindful of what these symptoms look like for you, how frequently they pop up, and when
• Invest in tools, resources, spaces, and relationships to help you cope
• Good news: practicing healthy daily coping IS the route to effective recovery! In my next article, I’ll dive more into why that is.

So, seven years ago, when I had my sights set on creating a career for myself in the tech industry, my mental health was getting really getting bad.

I didn’t know what was wrong with my brain back then — it almost seemed random. Something would go wrong at work: maybe comments on my code review, or a meeting wouldn’t go according to plan. And all of a sudden, my brain would spiral out of control. Sometimes, I would spend two, three, fours hours intensely working overtime. Or, my limbs and jaw would lock into place, and I would enter into a thick mental haze. Or, I would just get lost in loops of self-hating thoughts. At its worst, I would have to fight with myself for the right to live.

It, whatever it was, only seemed to get worse over time. Conventional therapy and self-help made it more manageable on a daily basis, but month over month, the crises would grow more intense and hard to manage.

I worked through a lot of modes of therapy that didn’t work until a close friend led me to the thing that did work: understanding my problems as Complex PTSD.

The tech industry is a fast-paced, and sometimes brutal space to enter into as you’re working through your mental health issues. Layoffs can trigger feelings of abandonment and desperation. The pursuit of high-quality work at fast speeds can push us into workaholism, or taking out the stress on those around us.

For anybody like me, trying to break into tech, aiming to start a new career, or even just reckoning with their trauma… here’s what I wish I knew at the beginning of all this.

Coping: what you’re up against

You don’t have to be a war veteran or an abuse victim to have PTSD, although most people seem to think so. “It’s not like my problems are that bad”, my friends around me will often say. “Plenty of people have it worse than me, and they’re fine.” However, the work of past psychiatrists and therapists tell us otherwise: folks have been diagnosed as having PTSD from trauma experienced while surviving a natural disaster, witnessing a loved one getting injured, among many other potential traumas.

To be sure, discerning whether or not you have PTSD these days can be less than simple. I don’t even have the means to get a professional diagnosis of Complex PTSD, because it’s been removed from the DSM V, which psychological professionals use to formally assign diagnoses to patients.

In my case, I was never deployed in a war, and don’t have any trauma around abuse either. So, why do I have PTSD? And how do I know in my case it’s PTSD? Let’s start with “why”, then move to “what.”

The core of Complex PTSD: emotional neglect

There are many types of PTSD, all of them with broadly the same symptoms, but different causes. “Simple” or “Uncomplicated” PTSD responds to a small set of traumatic events, often experienced in adulthood. Legacy PTSD responds to traumas that are transmitted from one generation to the next, via epigenetics or cultural practices. Complex PTSD (CPTSD) has its own root cause: lacking a consistently safe, nurturing parental figure during childhood and adolescence.

In Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, psychotherapist Pete Walker establishes that for himself and his patients with CPTSD, the root of their issues is emotional neglect.

Emotional neglect is the lack of psychological nurturance, safety, and care for the child in their upbringing. Unlike “Simple” PTSD, it’s more defined by what did not happen in one’s childhood, rather than what did happen in their adult years. Many friends of mine who have Complex PTSD share this in common, that we lacked a space of psychological safety, or a reliably safe and nurturing caretaker we could rely upon in childhood or adolescence.

This may seem counter-intuitive. Why does not having a perception of safety as a child have the same impact as a veteran who survived a war, or a victim of physical abuse? Walker contends that, in fact, lacking a safe caretaker, and living in an environment of fear as a child, poses significant changes to a child’s psychological formation, which can stay long with us into adulthood.

So, over the course of years living as a vulnerable child without a reliable protector can cause the creation of an internal world of fear, skepticism, and criticism. Normal behaviour for anybody, such as expressing one’s needs or asking for help, can become markers of shame and incoming abandonment. Just like a war veteran or abuse victim may live in a constant vigilance of their traumatic memory happening again, these victims of emotional neglect live in a constant vigilance of the essential support of their life being taken away from them.

In short, we all cope with an extreme fear of the world and its inhabitants, and so the brain in turn adapts in extreme ways. This creates some of the core symptoms of PTSD that me and others face: flashbacks, dissociation, and the creation of an inner critic.

Flashbacks: reliving memories

For a long time, I thought flashbacks were like what you see in the movies, or books, where you are divorced from current reality, and forced to re-watch a tape of a previous memory. More often than not, though, in my current reality, they are a slow submersion back into the world of fear and dread.

Here’s what that’s actually like.

It always starts with something very small, which grows to become very big. One small thing like this happened last winter, when I had been telling my coworkers at the lunch table about me going vegetarian more. One coworker noticed the meat in my lunch (a choice out of hunger and temptation), and joked, “honestly, I don’t think you’re even vegetarian anymore.”

The other coworkers laughed at the table, and I laughed with them. But immediately, a sense of shock spread over my body. I responded, “that cuts deep,” in a tone of voice that engendered bitterness. What was going on with me? Why was I feeling this way, talking this way? The shock, especially in my face, shoulders, and legs faded in a kind of tingly numbness. The coworkers continue chatting, and I want to talk with them, but notice my jaw is more hesitant to move. My thoughts begin to blur together into a kind of frenetic haze. My hands and arms too, begin to slow and resist my instructions to move them. At that point, I realized I was in a flashback.

I packed up my food and head, wished the coworkers a good afternoon, and brought everything into an empty room, with the door locked. I don’t want anybody, even my closest colleagues, to see me. Every human felt like a risk. I opened a new document on my computer, allowing the thoughts to spill out. I discovered that a part of me felt deeply panicked and hyperventilating, concerned that the coworker’s remark was a sign that I was being judged for doing something wrong, and a violent punishment would soon come my way. Feelings of anger quickly arose — nobody deserves to be threatened under extreme punishment! Soon after that, a feeling of calm returned. I had, after all, done this many times before.

So, what is going on here? Why did one innocuous joke transform into shock, haziness, and panic?

Bessel Van der Kolk, a psychiatrist with a long history of working with traumatized patients, records one such attempt at answering these questions in The Body Keeps the Score. During the 90’s, he conducted an experiment with eight patients with PTSD to record how flashbacks impact brain function. With their consent, Van der Kolk created a script capturing the sensory details of a traumatic memories, recorded it, and played it back to the patients while they were undergoing a brain scan. The results shocked him — while he was expecting the brain activity to look similarly to normal memory recall, the scans look more like someone actually living out the memory all over again:

So, then, it works like this: people with PTSD have brains naturally attuned and hypersensitive to signs of our traumatic past happening again. When we see anything that remotely looks like the fear, we are re-immersed in the traumatic memory, both in a mode of being highly emotionally activated, while also cut of from the language we need to describe it. More than once, I’ve smirked at just how unfair this feels — to both be drowning in negative emotion, but without the awareness or language to describe it to anybody else.

Our brains might be hijacked, but there are ways to cope and calm down during a flashback. Pete Walker has a

OH SHIT - INCLUDE PROACTIVE REPAREBTING AS PART IF THRUVING

This is often how it goes with the daily life of working with PTSD. A trigger occurs, and often without being aware of it, you’re re-immersed in a world of fear and dread.

However, this isn’t every case of coping with PTSD. More commonly for others, but less so for me, a traumatized response takes an entirely different approach: dissociating from reality altogether.

Inner & Outer Critic Attacks

Let’s consider the case of the child that’s been pushed into extreme situations, not able to access reliable support or care while they’re encountering feelings of fear and harm. What happens to their brain?

In popular culture, we’re very familiar with the idea of the “Inner Critic”, an internal figure that arbitrarily torments the critic’s host, berating and shaming them. While many people I know personally talk about having some kind of inner critic voice, victims of Complex PTSD have a very specific means by which they adapt and continue to develop an inner critic.

Pete Walker writes that folks with Complex PTSD develop inner critics specifically when “parents do not provide safe enough bonding.” In response, an inner critic develops as “the superego in overdrive desperately trying to win your parents’ approval. When perfectionist striving fails to win welcoming from your parents, the inner critic becomes increasingly hostile.” (167-168)

So, our inner critics develop in response to our needs not being met: when children can’t feel safe or nurtured, they have a tendency to blame that on themselves - and only moreso the longer it continues. For folks that have this continued lack of safety continue for years, the continuous habits of blame continue to escalate into a permanent Inner Critic.

Although it hasn’t been studied, I have a hunch this is related to

Dissociation: escaping reality

I’ll begin with a confession: I don’t experience dissociation nearly as often as many others with CPTSD. More often than not, my brain will try to push me into action by immersing itself into a flashback, criticizing ourselves, or sometimes even projecting our fear onto others. However, when all those things appear to fail, more often than not I’m going to move towards one other kind of response: dissociation.

For the uninitiated, dissociation is the process of subjectively exiting reality altogether, often under a perceived threat that’s unimaginably large, intense, or inescapable. Just like flashbacks, this can manifest in different ways for different people. On The Mighty, a community of people posting about health issues, contributor Mary F. writes that her dissociation “means that I am never truly ‘present.’ There is always a part of my brain that is shut down. Some days, this means I have no concept of time.”

For me, dissociation emerges especially when it feels like

as my domiunant mode of expeirencing CPTSD. More often than not, flashbacks are my poison of choice. But it wasn’t always like that.

I remember my first internship in software engineering

Thriving: the silver lining to this all