Give Yourself Time To Recover

Integrating the lessons of a toxic workplace is a process, not an event.

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I write Toxic Workplace Survival Guy because toxic workplaces make me angry. I want to help as many people as possible do as I did: survive long enough to emerge with my mental health, dignity and career intact, on my own terms. A big thank-you to all those who’ve become paid subscribers.

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Live Event: I’m delighted to share that I’ll be making my first live appearance as Toxic Workplace Survival Guy next month, at Love and Grief in the Shadow of Psychedelic Narcissism, an online event hosted by Dr Rosalind Watts’ Acer Integration community on Thursday, 23 May 19:00-21:30 BST. Tickets here.

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Survival Tool#18: Give Yourself Time to Recover

It’s hard to remember when we’re in the thick of it, but every toxic workplace ordeal will come to an end.

Whether we quit, get laid off, or are fired, there’ll come a moment when we walk out that door for the last time, and start something new.  

This transition brings challenges of its own.

Much will depend on whether we’re moving to a better job, or facing a period of employment uncertainty.

Either way, it’s important to recognise that recovering from our toxic workplace ordeal is a process — not an event.

It will take time to make sense of what happened, and appreciate the lessons we’ve learned.

This integration period isn’t necessarily easy.

But it can also be incredibly rich.

In nature, the transition zones between ecosystems teem with organisms — think of the edges where woodlands turn to fields, or saltwater mingles with fresh.

Similarly, as we cross the membrane that once confined us in a toxic workplace, we may find ourselves brimming with insights — both into the dynamics that were at play among our colleagues, and the nature of the wounds they touched within us.

Honour this process, and — if you can — give these new understandings the space and time they need to emerge.

It may take months or years for the seeds of wisdom we gathered during our toxic workplace ordeals to yield their harvest.

We may carry unresolved feelings of sadness, shame or anxiety for a long time after our official last day at work.

And we may feel an urge to revisit our experiences in conversation with friends or family years after they’d assumed we’d moved on.

Let’s accept that what we’re experiencing is a form of grief.

Everyone knows that other major life events — such as the end of a relationship, or a death — take time to grieve. Why should our toxic workplace ordeal be any different?

Because we aren’t grieving our toxic workplace as such.

We’re grieving the reality of how cynically other people can behave, and the mistakes we may have made.

We’re grieving the death of our naïve expectations of how the world should treat us.

And we’re grieving the lost innocence of the younger parts of ourselves.

The Choice

There’s nothing to judge or blame here.

Our toxic workplace exposed child parts that carry a deep and natural need for external validation, and suffer painful disappointment when that’s not available.

These younger parts will internalise such feelings, concluding “I’m not good enough,” or project anger outwards towards the authority figures who let us down.

We may have suffered deep disappointment that the colleagues or supervisors who we’d assumed would have supported us stood by as we were treated unfairly. (Survival Tool#4: Confide with Care).

And we may also fall into loops of self-blame — imagining that if we’d done things differently, then the outcome would have been different, forgetting that our experience was exactly as it had to be, not a molecule out of place.

We can’t power down these thought loops like a laptop.

We can’t pretend that what happened didn’t matter.

We can’t just forget it.

But we can make a choice.

Making Space

We can commit to becoming ultra-curious about what our toxic workplace ordeal touched in us — and continues to show us — if we take time to really allow ourselves to feel.